Italian Opera as an Industry From the moment the first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637, opera has been a media industry in Italy. By the early nineteenth century, virtually every Italian city and many Italian towns as well had their own opera theaters; in the case of larger cities, multiple opera houses. Like movie theaters in the first half of the twentieth century – before the advent of television – opera houses in nineteenth century Italy were not just entertainment venues but secular houses of worship, where people of virtually every class gathered to experience and cheer the musical/dramatic gospel and worship the great celebrities of their day: singers and opera composers. For nineteenth century Italian opera houses and twentieth century movie theaters alike, turnover was the key. An opera (or a movie) would run for a week, by which time those who had wanted to see it had seen it. (When I was growing up in Willingboro, NJ, we had a single theater, part of the Fox chain; new movies opened every Wednesday.) What “turnover” meant for nineteenth century Italian opera was a constant demand for new operas, which […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Rossini
We mark the premiere performance, on February 20, 1816 – 207 years ago today – of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera masterwork, The Barber of Seville, at Rome’s famed Teatro Argentina. The Natural Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29 (bummer of a birthday!), 1792 in the Italian city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He died of colorectal cancer on November 13, 1868, in his villa in Passy, which today is located in Paris’ chic, 16th arrondisement. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839) and Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827). Rossini’s father Giuseppe was a professional trumpet and horn player, and as such was Gioachino’s first music teacher. (The adult Rossini liked to say that: “Sono figlio di corna,” “I am the son of a horn!”) “Son of a horn” he might have been, but when it came to his real musical education, it was as the son of an opera singer. Rossini’s mother Anna was, at the time of his birth in 1792, a seamstress by trade. But changes in Italian society allowed her to make a second career as a professional singer. According to Rossini’s biographer Richard Osborne (Rossini; Oxford University Press): “Italian Society began to […]
Continue ReadingIt’s All About Branding Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the use of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as a call sign for a BBC radio show called London Calling Europe, a propaganda/information show broadcast from London into Nazi-occupied Europe. It was an inspired bit of both cultural larceny and branding: using the music of a German-born composer to represent dot-dot-dot-dash: the Morse Code for the letter “V” as in victory over Germany! “Branding.” It’s a newish term, defined as “the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.” We are told that there are four essential steps in “branding”: 1. Determine your target audience. 2. Position your product and business. 3. Define your company’s personality. 4. Choose a logo and slogan. In the case of the BBC program London Calling Europe, one, the target audience was the population of occupied Europe. Two, the BBC positioned itself as the singular purveyor of unsullied information available to that population. Three, the show defined itself as the voice of truth. Four, its slogan was “London calling Europe” and its audio “logos” were Jeremiah Clark’s Trumpet Voluntary and the opening four notes of […]
Continue Reading149 years ago today, the opera composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini died in Paris at the age of 76. One of the most famous and respected artists of his time, he remains no less so today. It is my humble opinion that anyone who does not like Rossini’s music is a crank and a humbug, someone averse to melodic brilliance, sparkle, and wit. A momentary divergence. In his book Outliers (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), the English-born journalist Malcolm Gladwell formulated his “10,000 hour rule”, which claims that all that’s required to become a world-class practitioner in any field is 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice”. With all due respect, we can only conclude that Mr. Gladwell has deliberately practiced making absurd statements for well over 10,000 hours, so utterly daft is his “rule.” Listen: when I was twenty, I was (as I remain) 5’7” in height and weighed 165 pounds (I can only wish that that were still the case!). I was strong, fast, and had good hand-eye coordination. I also had a vertical jump of about six inches, so no amount of time and practice was going to make me a high-jump champion or a ballet dancer; no how, no […]
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