Classical Music | Mezzo-Soprano

Recorded on 08/15/2011, uploaded on 09/29/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Gioachino Rossini ended his highly successful career at the age of thirty-eight with the production of Guillaume Tell in 1829, his thirty-eighth opera. Once retired, Rossini indulged in his great love for food. He was a well-known gourmand and became an excellent amateur chef himself. Yet, during these years, Rossini never fully gave up composing and lost none of the proficiency in his craft. For the next thirty-nine years of his life, he composed small pieces intended for private performances, usually in the drawing room of his estate in Passy. Many of these were essentially salon music, albeit tempered with Rossini’s skill, and ranged from compositions for solo voice, to piano solos and chamber music. The aging composer collected 150 of these pieces into fourteen albums to which he gave the self-deprecating and ironic title Péchés des vieillesse (“Sins of Old Age”).

Among the Péchés des vieillesse is the song cycle La regata Veneziana, based on three poems by Count Carlo Pepoli in the Venetian dialect. The Count was an amateur poet and a frequent guest of Rossini’s. Indeed, the composer was already familiar with Pepoli’s texts. Many years earlier, he set a number of the Count’s poems in his Les soirées musicales. The three poems used here tell of a young woman, Anzoleta, who watches and cheers on her lover, Momolo, in a Venetian regatta, or gondola race. In the final song, Anzoleta dopo la regata (“Anzoleta after the race”), Anzoleta rewards her lover, Momolo, with kisses for winning the gondola race and boasts that all of Venice is talking about him. A lilting tune in the piano opens the song with festivity. Over a waltz-like accompaniment, the voice enters with a flirtatious melody and seductive chromatic appoggiaturas as Anzoleta offers her victorious Momolo kiss after kiss. The music then becomes more declamatory and shifts suddenly away from the tonic of F major through the keys of A minor and D-flat major during Anzoleta’s boast of Momolo’s victory and fame. She returns to her coquettish melody in the final stanza as she offers him yet another kiss, but concludes the song triumphantly as she declares Momolo the greatest of all gondoliers.        Joseph DuBose

(poem by Piave)

Courtesy of the Steans Institute

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.