When Rossini wrote the piece the orchestra will perform on Saturday (“L’Italiana in Algeri,” which includes “Overture to the Italian Girl in Algiers”), he had been writing stage works for only three years.Still, he was hardly a beginner since, in those three years, 10 of his operas had already been staged.
The last of them, his “Tancredi” (an opera seria after Voltaire) was given at Venice’s Teatro la Fenice in Feb. 1813, and in May the same city’s Teatro San Benedetto unveiled “L’Italiana in Algeri.”
Both were immensely successful at their premieres and they became Rossini’s first operas to gain international acclaim.
“L’Italiana in Algeri” would be the first composer’s operas to receive a production in Germany (in Munich in 1816) and in France (in Paris in 1817).
That piece is based on a libretto by Angelo Anelli that had already been set as an opera in 1808 by Luigi Mosca, but it was Rossini’s version that hit the mark.
Like Tancredi, it offered one aria that was destined for a life on the A-list: “Cruda sorte! Amor tirrano!,” which is sung by Isabella, the “Italian Woman” of the title, near the beginning of the opera.
This is a typical opera buffa plot, though one that today may make audiences uncomfortable because of its cultural assumptions and portrayals.
The novelist, Henri Boyle, who published an admiring biography of Rossini in 1824, loved “L’Italiana in Algeri,” but complained about its “Overture.”
“The overture of ‘L’Italiana” is charming, but it is too frivolous,” he wrote, “and that, indeed, is a great fault!”
Others disagree, however.
“It’s a thoroughly delightful opening for a preposterous comedy,” a modern-day critic countered, “full of delicious wind solos and Rossini’s signature crescendos, in which broadening orchestral textures are wed to increasing volume.”
