Rossini

I am a great fan of the composer Rossini so when I found this film on YouTube I just had to watch it even though there were no subtitles.

I would recommend that any fan of Rossini makes a point of watching this. The film mainly covers his early life and works but eventually he makes it to Vienna where amongs other things he visits Beethoven. That scene, taking place in darkened rooms, with torrential rain falling outside, and with low candle level lighting, was one of the high spots for me due to its high atmospheric direction and distinct change of pace and style to the rest of th film. It is directed and shot in an 'antique' style which reminded me very strongly of Abel Gance's Napoleon. It seemed heavily influenced by silent film methodology.

The main body of the film covers the period from 'Barber' in Rome through to 'Otello' to 'Mose in Egitto' in Naples. The king of Naples is played by a rather excellent actor who gives a really convincing performance laced with humour and mood.

The actor playing Rossini himself is expremely convincing and during the course of the film adopted many dress styles and poses shown in the portraits of him during that period that survive; including the one with the jaunty tassleded cap worn sideways on his head.

I only wish I could find access to a copy bearing English sub-titles.

There are many interesting things about this delightful biopic of the most delightful of Italian composers, played by Nino Besozzi, whose likeness with the composer is strikingly fortunate. His future wife and main primadonna Isabella Colbran, singing most of his female leading parts, is played by Paola Barboni, who also is just about perfect. There are various other prominent characters, the king is splendid, and also Paganini shows a great likeness to reality. There are marvellous theatre scenes from his major operas, both behind stage and among the turbulent audience; but perhaps the most remarkable matter about this film is that it was made in the middle of the war in the most difficult year 1942, of which you notice nothing in the film - it is clinically free from fascism or any politics. Rossini remains the most flippantly spiritual of composers, he became the richest of them all and was a tremendous success all the way - until his primadonna and wife lost her voice and he lost his zest completely, also after his mother's death. After his last opera "William Tell" he was practically silent for almost 40 years until his death, with only very few extra compositions (like "Stabat Mater" and "Messe Solennelle"), which show however that he was still a supreme master - he called his last masterworks his "sins of old age".

Most of the film shows Naples and Rome, but towards the end Rossini also celebrates triumphs in Vienna, where (after his most exuberant overture) he meets Beethoven, in which moment the film turns solemn. For the first time there is other music than Rossini's, and its the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony, which is played in full, giving the Beethoven scene a haunting character, especially as the weather is rainy and bleak. Then we move to Paris, where Isabella loses her voice, and the film ends almost like a Requiem. It's a great film, a splendid homage to the composer, allowing in full music to justly play the leading part.

"Rossini" is an appealing biography of the great Italian operatic composer of "The Barber of Seville," "Mose'", "L'italiana in Algeri," "William Tell" and many more great works, so many of them marked by a vivacious sense of comedy and some spitfire vocal passages. This movie restricts itself to the years 1815 through 1829, the early years of his success throughout Europe.

The composer, in this wartime Italian production, was played by Nino Besozzi, a prolific performer in the Italian fascist cinema. He does a creditable job particularly with the film's many lighter moments. Although a bit schematic in the treatment of the composer's life and loves, we forgive it all because of a great number of excerpts from his works. They include "The Barber of Seville" and the story of its premiere and the partisans of Paisiello's version who tried to interfere with its performance, the chorus from "Mose," and the happy ending that the composer had imposed upon him by an impresario, so that Otello does not kill his wife, as in Shakespeare, but sings a therapeutic duet with her instead. Paola Barboni plays the soprano who will become the future wife of Rossini.

Some of the best moments in the movie are provided by Armando Falconi as bubbly enthusiast King Ferdinand I of Naples and Camillo Pilotto as the impresario. The bass Tancredi Passero does a fabulous rendition of the "La calunnia" aria from "Barber," and I found very affecting the melancholy encounter between the roaringly successful Rossini and the now-deaf Beethoven in which the German composer rues his own fate while praising the Italian's comic gift. It is a powerful and mysteriously haunting sequence. When this movie opened in New York in 1948, it was at the Cinema Dante, variously known over the years as the Cinema Verdi, the Princess Theatre, and the Little CineMet. It was located about a block from the old Metropolitan Opera House.