Servadio, a prolific U.K.–based writer on music and art, has had access to a new trove of personal letters to paint a much fuller picture than usual of Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), ebullient (at first) composer of such works as The Barber of Seville
and William Tell. She shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, he had a poor and unhappy childhood, so that his early enormous productivity was, as much as anything, a way to help himself and his family rise above poverty. By the age of 30, working at white heat, Rossini had written most of the music we recognize; for nearly 40 years thereafter, though rich and famous—he was mobbed wherever he went in Vienna, Paris and London—he put down his pen. Servadio shows him suffering from a combination of deep depression and neurasthenic illness of a type then unfamiliar to doctors. After his opera singer wife died, Rossini married one of his mistresses, the beautiful Parisian courtesan Olympe Pelissier, who devotedly nursed him for the rest of his life. The personal details in Servadio's account are fascinating, but even more so are her observations on the composer's role in 19th-century music. As one of the few who could, and did, meet both Beethoven and Wagner as an equal, Rossini spanned the period that saw music evolve from a high craft to the center of Romantic tumult. Beethoven, perhaps unkindly, urged him to stick to the opera buffa
at which he excelled, though Servadio reminds us that some of his greatest and little-known works, like Moses in Egypt
and Lady of the Lake, were in fact profoundly serious and moving. This is a deeply rewarding book, written with real personality and much scholarship. (May)
