Rossini

It is the easiest thing in the world to listen to Mozart, and the hardest thing to hear him.  We are too overwhelmed by the force of the music, by remembered extra-musical poignancies, to sit back and watch each note as it goes by.  One of the best ways to achieve this state of comprehending watchfulness is to listen not to Mozart, but to Rossini.

After a performance of Figaro, the Hapsburg emperor remarked to Mozart that there were too many notes: there are never too many notes in Rossini.  Or too few.  Rossini always gives just as many as are needed, and usually exactly the number we are expecting.  He never writes above his audience as Mozart certainly did - nor does he patronise them.  Being irremediably bourgeois himself, and quite happy with that state, his music can speak with perfect ease to its bourgeois audience.

His means are perfectly at one with his ends. The chord progressions could hardly be more unexceptionable - or more regular.  He is never afraid of tonic-dominant.  Nor does this simplicity attain a painful serenity or sardonic wryness as it does with Mozart; when Rossini writes tonic-dominant it means that and no more.  First impressions are not only correct, they are the only impressions.

It is the same with his melodies.  Their lines are perfectly straightforward, easy-to-remember - and yet rarely truly memorable.  When he writes a simple tune with repeated notes or arpeggios, they remain repeated notes and arpeggios.  They do not become, as in Mozart, invested with a burden of relentlessness or ineluctability.

When a crescendo begins, we know at once that it is a Rossini crescendo, and we know where it is going.  We hear the rocking ostinatos in the bass, or the fixed figuration in the treble; we feel the harmonic pulse quicken and simplify - the paradigm of the opera finale itself.  And just as Rossini never lets us down with a bump - no Haydn joker he - in one of his motoric orchestral tuttis, so the overall structure of the opera always reflects the safe, certain course its plot charts.  Rossini's operas are ultimately always comforting: we know that good will prevail, that all's well in the world.

With Mozart we do not: Don Giovanni may be dragged off to hell, but the final moralisation rings very hollow - what we have seen in the previous acts does not suggest that good triumphs so easily.  In Così, the moral issue is even more unclear; who is more sinned against or sinning?  Are we too perhaps all the same? And in the Magic Flute, we seem to be Beyond Good and Evil, in some world of childlike appearance and godlike import, where everything is totally more than it seems - quite the opposite of the manifest Rossinian world.

We can value Rossini for this light he sheds on Mozart, just as we stare gratefully at the moon and its light reflecting the too-bright sun.  We can see Rossini for his not-Mozartness.  But if this were all, Rossini's music would be a kind of pale negative.  That it is not is testimony to its abiding energy, good humour and humanity.
 
(19.12.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - In Mozart’s Garden

Index