Idreno

For any bel canto singer, Semiramide is synonymous with elegance, majesty and grandeur. Though, dramatically speaking, the character of Idreno is not particularly well endowed, it gives me great satisfaction to play him because he has two very pleasing, though difficult, arias.
Semiramide represents the synthesis of Rossini's art and lays the foundations of the opera we are to hear from now on. It is the formal, musical basis for the future Romantic opera. We can hear, and sense, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and others. Though it might be argued that each of Rossini's operas has a style of its own, Semiramide emerges as the most Rossinian, along with Tancredi, Zelmira and La Donna del Lago.
The version of Idreno that will be seen in Barcelona, revised by Alberto Zedda and Philip Gosset, is the complete original version composed by Rossini, without the cuts introduced by tradition on account of the difficulty of performing it.
"Ah dov’é, dov’é il cimento", the first aria, is a grand, epic piece. The singer must play special attention to the line, because it contains phrases which are as endless as they are beautiful. The register is particularly high, with a D in the cadence and countless Cs, after the style of "A mes amis" from La Fille du Régiment. Though I recognize the difficulty of Donizetti's work, it is technically within my reach. On the other hand, when singing this first tenor aria in Semiramide, I have to concentrate especially hard on the technical aspects, which are remarkably challenging. It could in fact, in my view, be described as one of those "impossible" passages in the history of opera, from which few singers emerge with flying colours.
It could be said that we appreciate Idreno nowadays thanks to these two arias. In Semiramide, if the tenor were not there, there would still be an opera, but Rossini undoubtedly composed these two incredible arias at the request of the star singer of the day, who was not content solely to join in the ensembles. However, Idreno has all Rossini's qualities as an opera seria composer. He is very difficult, vocally speaking, more so indeed than the opera buffa roles. The fact is that, in his serious works, the composer from Pesaro was capable of pushing his singers to their utmost vocal limits.
Despite these enormous difficulties, the tenor in Semiramide has plenty of time to get ready for the arias. That is why I enjoy playing the part so much: you're rested and then you have to roll out the big guns. The pieces are pure spectacle, vocal fireworks.
Rossini is the composer who brings the best out of my voice. When I sing Rossini, I feel that my voice is as natural as it can be. In some ways it's different when I sing Bellini or Donizetti. Neither better nor worse. My voice works differently, I have to release it and let it go.
My singing is lighter when I sing Rossini, more controlled, with greater coloratura. I find it very satisfying to feel that my voice is in a lighter state after singing lyrical operas. When it loses this lightness, I'll no longer be able to sing operas by the composer from Pesaro.
I know Semiramide and the character of Idreno well, but Barcelona will be my stage debut in the role. I have sung it twice before: in the Konzerthaus in Vienna, alongside Edita Gruberova, and in Lima, where I made my debut, with Daniella Barcellona, under the baton of Ricardo Frizza. In the Catalan capital, I will be sharing the bill with the same team.
I have wonderful memories of the performances of Maria Stuarda in Barcelona and am greatly looking forward to making my stage debut at the Liceu and continuing my relationship with this theatre, with which I have already reached an agreement for La Cenerentola and La Fille du Régiment.

Juan Diego Flórez
Tenor

The Context

Accepting the invitation of the Teatro La Fenice of Venice for the opera that would be his last Italian opera, Rossini put behind him whatever experiments he might have made in Naples, such as, to quote just a few examples, eliminating the Overture, partly doing away with set pieces, or the stretching out of the framework from two to three acts. All these things had cropped up in different ways in his opera serie destined for the San Carlo, each of them very different from the other, but all of them –from Otello to Maometto II– showing the same desire to try new and unfamiliar paths. Semiramide, on the contrary, restores Rossini’s favourite architectural framework, the one he had never strayed from in his comic operas. Here we are again, therefore, with two acts, the first of which is more ample than the second, plenty of space is devoted to the first act Finale, the principal vocal parts are entrusted to the two voices of a soprano and a contralto en travesti, arias and duets are precisely balanced and, at the end, after a scene that takes place in the dark before the dénouement, the second act finale is concise, almost aphoristic. He was, therefore, conducting a job of restoration, as I pointed out a long time ago. But one must be clear about what one means by such a term, as also by the term ‘neo-classical’, which is also highly pertinent. Restoration, when it is desired and set out as a manifesto, is the exaltation of a model, an archetype, a dream, a Utopia. Rather than picking up a practice again exactly as one had left it, one re-invents a model, one fixes it in an unchangeable composition, or what one hopes, at least, will prove so. If in Rossini’s mind there existed (and there did exist) an ideal form of opera, Semiramide must represent it, must constitute its absolute manifestation.
To realize this undertaking a suitable subject was necessary. Rossi found it in Voltaire, whose Sémiramis constitutes the basis of the libretto, but with variants and additions that go far beyond the great French writer’s intentions. The distant, fable-like quality of the heroine and of the story, the incestuous implications of the relationship between mother and son that can be found, the religious and oracular atmosphere, the Oedipus like plunging into darkness, all these are elements that Voltaire offers to Rossini, who, however, develops them. On his own initiative, moreover, Rossini adds the coherent solution to the tragic assumption. Before the curtain goes up Nino is murdered by Assur with the complicity of Semiramide, who inherits his throne. Their guilt arouses the wrath of the gods, who demand a sacrificial victim. The apparition of Nino’s ghost (however absurd this must have seemed to Voltaire in the age of enlightenment) awakens Semiramide’s consciousness of her own guilt and the horror of her position. The discovery that Arsace –whom she loves and whom she has planned to marry and make king– is in fact her son, verifies and clinches the second part of her destiny: Arsace will reign, not as her husband but as the son of Nino, and he may do so only after the guilt has been expiated and Assyria freed from the weight of it. The Finale of Rossini’s opera is perfect and absolutely consistent. Semiramide knows that there must be a victim and that the victim can be none other than herself. She also knows that the priest whose duty will be to strike down the victim can be none other than her son Arsace, to whom the will of Nino and the gods has entrusted the act of vengeance and who has received the sword destined to be its instrument from the Magi in the great initiation scene (N. 9 of the opera, «Coro, Scena e Aria Arsace»). Lastly, Semiramide knows that she must expiate a second sin, that of an incestuous love, however innocently she fell prey to it. Therefore, in the symbolic obscurity of the dungeon, in the great scene in the dark, Arsace believes that he is killing Assur. But Semiramide thrusts herself between them, offering herself, as she knows she must, to the sword. The horror of involuntary matricide has to be got over. That horror –«orrore»– would be the obstacle to be overcome Arsace had learned at the moment of his investiture and by his reading of the letter delivered to him by Oroe and containing the last message of the dying Nino.
But in Semiramide this short seal of approval, all of a piece with the tragic assumption, was judged to be out of place by sensitive Romantics, who would have found a scene of mourning for the dead mother more proper. Furthermore not even Voltaire had dared to show Arsace’s slaying of his mother onstage. In his play the dungeon scene is narrated only, and only after having discovered that Assur, whom he believes he has killed, is in fact still alive, does Arsace realise that he has struck down his own mother. The queen, moreover, has time and opportunity to utter words of repentance and pardon. At this point Oroe brings the tragedy to its close with an exhortation to reigning monarchs, reminding them that "les crimes secrets ont les dieux pour témoins". A generic conclusion not compatible with the needs of opera, and punctually rejected by Rossini. The tomb scene as elaborated by Rossini is, whatever may be said or have been said, a masterpiece. The sense of bewilderment in the dark (representing the darkness of the spirit or the mind) comes to a first climax in the delirium of Assur, a masterly passage looking forward to, and indeed showing the way to other immortal "mad scenes" of Romantic Italian opera. The loss of identity in the trio is caused by each of them having to discover his own true role in the light of the solution imposed by the gods. On this canvas Rossini paints yet another of his greatest creations. His contemporaries could not but have appreciated this climax of the tragedy. However, in the Paris performances of 1825 and 1826 it was already necessary to descend to some compromises. Stricken with her death blow, Semiramide does not die immediately but has time to sing, with her son, a pathetic recitative furnished by Rossini and quite close to Voltaire’s original text. This was followed not by a chorus of rejoicing, but by a chorus of horror, the music of which, however, has not been preserved. For the 1860 edition, however, as we have explained, Méry invented a further apparition of the ghost, who invites Ninia to strike and, therefore, guides the avenging hand. This kind of partial rejection of the original Finale was preserved as late as some of the performances in the nineteen-sixties. With a tiny cut and a tiny change, Arsace effectively struck down the perfidious Assur, as he had planned. This made short shrift of the will of the gods, but the chorus exulting over the death of the "baddie" seemed perfectly consistent at this point. In conclusion, the Romantic drama of the individual threatened to squeeze itself into the severe lines of classical tragedy and its objective "alienation". All this was the result of a lack of understanding which, if it affected the words, did not fail to involve the music even more fatally.
Highly praised by its contemporaries, kept in the repertoire, for all the difficulties of the vocal parts, for quite a long period, Semiramide would soon be accused of hedonism, of over-extravagant florid writing and so many other musical crimes.
The problem of opera seria remains the crux of the matter for the modern exegesis of Rossini, or, if I may say so, to decipher the "modernity of Rossini", a composer who, despite the popular image of him perpetrated for at least a century and a half, was not primarily a writer of comic operas. To these he dedicated himself above all at the outset of his career. Then he left them to theatres or towns of secondary importance and, in fact, already gave up writing them when he was 25 years old, immediately after achieving, in La Cenerentola, a grandiose exploit in the genre. With four masterpieces (L’Italiana in Algeri, Il Turco in Italia, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola) produced in less than four years he had wrought up to their highest pitch all the possibilities inherent in the buffo category, endowing them with a pitiless view of the world and its future prospects that left him no access to any other possibility than to exercise his talents on completely different lines (such as the self-parody of Il viaggio a Reims or the suggestive French comedy of Le Comte Ory). In the middle years of his precocious career, the leading composer of the day, the "Napoleon of music", made a bid for the conquest of the world, or, it might perhaps be better to say, tried to consolidate the conquest that he had so easily achieved, tackling the crux of opera seria. In the days of his adolescence, serious opera was plunged into crisis. The conventionally correct serving up of familiar stories taken from Roman or even more ancient history, when they were not from the Bible, by now seemed and sounded to have very little to do with the times of tumultuous change that Italy and the whole of Europe were living through. About ten years before Rossini was born, Mozart had concluded his career with a re-arrangement of Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito, which, apotheosizing royalty and sound government, tried to propound a message that in only a few months’ time the Revolution would render vain and useless. It is scarcely surprising that, in spite of a libretto revised by Mazzolà and music of great beauty, Mozart’s last opera should have been cut off from any chance of a wide circulation. Already, the opere semiserie written in those years showed where the musical theatre of the future would be heading, that is, towards drama stemming from the feelings of the individual, from private rather than public matters, stressing the pathetic and sentimental side, everything, in other words, that Romanticism would stand for. But to this inclination towards pathos Rossini was constitutionally alien. Even when he tackled the drama of the individual with unusual enthusiasm for him, as he did in Maometto II (Anna’s private drama in this specific case), it was framed in the collective drama, or rather in the pattern taken from classical tragedy in which the motivations of an individual person enter into conflict with the convenience of the state, or with rules imposed from above by the gods, by the polis, by caste. Just like Amenaide in Tancredi or Desdemona in Otello, Anna is torn between her heart’s desires and obedience to restrictions imposed by a father who represents fatherland, state, collective will. However Rossini may have tried, in however many different ways, to break fresh ground in his serious operas, his theatre, with few exceptions, had never been drama, but always tragedy. For this reason operas of his of sublime musical quality, like Ermione or Maometto II, did not enjoy a widespread circulation even at the time when Rossini’s music dominated the repertoire of theatres everywhere with no fear of rivalry; for this reason his other Italian opere serie, once Donizetti and Bellini had thrown open the door to "raisons du cœur", quickly disappeared from the stage. Rossini’s musical theatre had a vocation for the classical that the new generation could not share. However, the classical when outside its own period becomes neo-classical. It was no coincidence that Rossini’s serious operas should flourish and win appreciation at the particular time when, after Napoleon, they were trying to reconstruct order according to the old ideas and with all the nostalgia for a past that had gone for ever. Restoration, therefore. And Rossini’s opera seria was yet another job of restoration, neo-classical indeed and fixed in an infallible architectural form, despite all its experimental openings. But that particular moment of history would be of short duration and Rossini must soon have realized this. Already the disturbances in Naples in 1820-21, however ephemeral their practical results, mined into its ideal and practical foundations. It is no coincidence that the first symptoms of Rossini’s creative crisis should have exploded at the time of Maometto II, an opera born in troubled times and with the aim of reconciling onstage all the new ideas that seemed to be being brandished outside. In fact, after this grandiose masterpiece Rossini would find it difficult to continue in his experimental researches into the genre of opera seria. As we have said above, with his last Italian opera Rossini wanted to produce and fix on paper and on the stage the model, that which was concealed in the most secret depths of his mind, that which nobody had succeeded in producing before him. This is why Semiramide is an opera-monstre. This is why, whatever opinion critics may vouchsafe in the future, Semiramide has always been and will always be the opera most beloved of the "Rossinians" (a category that really exists in the empyrean of opera). The epiphany of that miraculous balance, if it amazed Europe and rekindled nostalgia when the Marchisio sisters "re-exhumed" it, has amazed us again during the past thirty years. It is not by chance that amongst all Rossini’s serious operas, Semiramide is the one that has enjoyed the most revivals in recent years, as Semiramide, a world of ideal beauty had been fixed there in marble, justifying the length of the set pieces, the richness and luxurious brilliance of the vocal parts, the abundance of melodies and musical invention, does not look back to a real past, but a presumed one and, therefore, more than any other opera of the composer’s, it feeds upon Utopia and perhaps only this. For the so desired Paradise lost is not really lost at all, but represents the fruit of an exquisite operation of the mind that re-invents it, exploiting all the best that tradition has to offer, but transcending everything, amplifying everything, carrying everything to the extreme limits of cohesion. For this reason Semiramide could not and cannot be any other than the last opera (of the Italian career of its composer, of a particularly important historical moment, but also of an entire civilization).

Bruno Cagli
president and Sovrintendente of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia

Consciousness of genius

I myself had occasion to conduct performances of this revival in Genoa and Turin with Katia Ricciarelli and Lucia Valentini Terrani, with Lella Cuberli and Martine Dupuy. It was then that I realized how absurd the cuts were, cuts that I had had to tolerate because there was no other usable orchestral material available. Not only had da capos been cut: whole arias of Idreno were missing, as were extended orchestral introductions, choral numbers, including a Chorus with an important solo part for Oroe; the splendid accompanied recitatives, models that would inspire Rossini’s successors to write so many examples of the scena that in their operas would mark the end of set forms and the contested alternating of secco recitative and set piece, had been reduced to shapeless and mutilated fragments.
Semiramide belongs to the vein of Rossini’s operas that we can describe as Apollonian, of perfect classical beauty, born out of the stylized geometry of Tancredi, in which the traditional structures of the forma chiusa –tripartite arias, with a da capo to be ornamented and a middle section with supporting singers or chorus; duets, with repetition of parallel periods– largely outnumber the freely-developed ensembles. The structure of these arias and duets is stretched out to gigantic proportions which conspire to create a golden monument filled up with inspired and weighty music: to introduce cuts is to severely damage the whole.
The critical edition used in these performances in Pesaro unites the experiences of my first efforts and the recent contributions of Philip Gossett. The publication is completed by a reconstruction of the band part used for the original performances of Semiramide in Venice, made by Gossett from the original parts. Rossini, like all the operatic composers of his day, did not bother to define any precise orchestration for the band, limiting himself to drawing up a sketchy outline on one stave only of the full score, with a few additional hints, leaving each theatre free to use whatever instruments it had at its disposal. There is one problem regarding the staging of this opera: at the time when Rossini was composing his operas the bass voice was not divided into the categories with which we are familiar today. Bass roles were summarily divided into two types, the basso nobile or basso cantante, and the basso buffo or basso caricato. The baritone still did not exist as such, relegated to tessituras that we should now generically term bass-baritone and that invariably ranged from the highest notes of the upper register to the deepest notes of the lower, with few shades of difference between one role and another. When in the same opera two basses appear side by side, more usually in the opere buffe (Don Magnifico-Dandini; Selim-Don Geronio; Mustafà-Taddeo…), but also in the serious and the semi-serious operas (Mosè-Faraone; Fernando-Podestà...), the two characters appear quite interchangeable from the vocal point of view, even though one might prefer a lower voice for one and a more baritonal one for the other. Analyzing the roles in Semiramide and keeping in mind the weight of tradition that always influences our choices in performers, it is easy to see the appeal of Assur for the powerful and flexible voice of the Verdi baritone, of which we can unequivocably hear a pre-echo in the gigantic Scena e Aria of the second act, one of the opera’s strongest points, which anticipates the mad scenes of Nabucco and Macbeth. On the contrary, the role of Oroe, a typical high priest upon whom devolves the duty of maintaining the balance of power, having the gods on his side, insistently recalls the basso profondo roles of Zaccaria, Ramfis, Oroveso and so many Grand Inquisitors of the operatic stage. The work awaiting the philologist and the musicologist on the autograph of Semiramide is less arduous and complex than in other operas because Rossini wrote out the score meticulously, furnishing many interpretation signs, with very few corrections and second thoughts. All the same, it is not always clear from the manuscript if a certain part is destined for the flute or the piccolo and whether these instruments should be playing separately or together. In Rossini’s day only two players were assigned to flute and piccolo, passing from one instrument to the other. Seeing that in the modern orchestra the players engaged for these instruments are at least three (for rarely is the first flute contracted also for the piccolo), today it might seem convenient to double the flute part in those numbers with a weighty orchestration. The percussion part came under the general heading of Gran Cassa (big drum) and needs the conductor’s guidance to divide it up into parts for drums, cymbals and triangle.
The number of passages that are repeated identically and the unusual breadth of the da capos in this opera make even more essential the introduction of cadenzas, fioriture and variations. Since variations have a pre-eminently expressive function, their formulation should conform to the style adopted by present-day singers and reflect their taste and artistic sensitivity rather than that of their forbears.
From the musicologist’s point of view the most interesting discovery has concerned the heroine’s famous entrance aria, «Bel raggio lusinghier», of which it is possible to reconstruct the manuscript of a first version with no cabaletta and with a different ending. In his introduction to the critical edition, Gossett supports my old theory that it was his wife Isabella Colbran, for whom the role was composed, who persuaded him to add the brilliant cabaletta, considering that the Andante Grazioso by itself was scarcely adequate to her fame as prima donna assoluta. A different, and yet credible theory has been put forward by Reto Müller suggesting that the reduced version may have been requested by Colbran herself, who was well aware of the worn condition of her voice, now on its last legs. Rossini perhaps first granted her request, but then changed his mind when, in the process of composing the opera, one massive number followed another, and in comparison with these the first version of the cavatina must have appeared totally inadequate. This thesis is supported by the fact that Rossini, contrary to all precedent, makes Semiramide already appear onstage in the Introduzione, almost as if wanting to lessen the unfortunate impression that might have been made later on by an entrance aria of reduced dimensions.
Today «Bel raggio lusinghier» has become a favourite bravura piece of sopranos of every kind, which has led to many misleading impressions about the role of Semiramide: this is by no means a coloratura role, but a classic example of the ideal florid dramatic soprano (soprano drammatico d’agilità) required by so many leading roles in Rossini’s opere serie, especially those composed for Isabella Colbran in his brilliantly creative Neapolitan period. The true difficulty in the concluding cabaletta does not lie in having to sing it as brilliantly as possible, but, on the contrary, in controlling the speed of the virtuoso passages to make them expressive and imbue them with an erotic quality rich in promise and hope. In this aria Semiramide drops the external appearance of the cruel, power-thirsty queen and takes on all the fragility of the woman in love, the same tone that she will adopt in the wonderful duet in the second act, «Giorno d’orrore!… e di contento», when in the figure of her hoped-for husband she at last recognizes her long-lost and bitterly missed son, stolen from her and restored to her at the very moment when he learns that she had been an accomplice to the murder of his father. The mingling of love and hatred leading up to this meeting, the radical contrast between orrore and contento (horror and contentment), give birth to one of Rossini’s most touching and genial numbers which alone would suffice to give the measure of the significance of his theatrical aesthetic.
In comparison with her sister operas Semiramide is inordinately overgrown in size: the first act consumes 140 minutes of music in comparison with an average, in Rossini’s other operas, of between 70 to 90; the second lasts 120 minutes rather than a more usual 50 to 70. An architectural outline of such grand proportions cannot be accidental, considering also that the structure of the opera does not differ from the canons of a convention that Rossini himself established as an archetype. The first act consists of seven numbers –Overture, Introduzione, Aria di Arsace, Duetto Arsace-Assur, Aria di Idreno, Aria di Semiramide, Duetto Semiramide-Arsace, Finale primo– whereas the second act has six –Duetto Semiramide-Assur, Coro and Aria di Arsace, Aria di Idreno, Duetto Semiramide-Arsace, Aria di Assur, Finale Secondo– more or less the same number of pieces into which his previous operas are divided, from Tancredi to Il barbiere di Siviglia, from Mosè in Egitto to Maometto II. In comparison with many of his operas here we note, above all, a total lack of trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, opportunities for lavish musical frescoes. It is not, therefore, by the insertion of a larger number of pieces that the opera has been swollen to such unusually grandiose proportions, but rather that each single element composing the score has been enlarged –the orchestral and choral introduction to the aria; the central section joining the two stanzas of the cabaletta; the concluding cadential sequences; the accompanied recitatives– all developed with such skill and such a high level of inspiration that we never get the impression of listening to ossified formulas.
The Overture to Semiramide is integrated into the opera, a practice he had abandoned in the operas he wrote in Naples, where, favoured by the cultural liveliness of the city, he allowed himself the rare luxury of experimenting. However, we are not dealing here with yet another brilliant instrumental composition ready to change its title and genre according to theatrical usage: the main themes of this Overture will return during the course of the opera, underlining its significance. The famous Chorale of solo horns and bassoons appearing in the opening Andantino will be used again for the vow of loyalty to Semiramide, the high spot of the first finale; the palpitating violin motif in the Allegro will open the long finale to Act Two, a prelude to the final catharsis that will take place after a pitiful prayer of Semiramide’s and an etherial Trio for the principals, suspended in a corner of paradise but shortly to be plunged into the darkness of ruin and hell. Apart from the three already mentioned ensembles featuring supernatural interventions –the Introduzione and the two finales– the corpus of this singular opera is completed by only arias (six) and duets (four). The chorus has an important role, with more elaborate choral writing than usual, even though it is restricted to commenting on the action rather than participating in it.
Since the first advance symptoms of the crisis that would force Rossini into silence show themselves in just this period when he was composing Semiramide, we should not exclude the possibility that with this opera, the last he would write for an Italian theatre, he meant to take his leave of the world of music leaving behind him an exhaustive testament to his controversial status as a composer. In his music the past lives on in his unconditional adhesion to the poetic practice of the affects, set in mannered structural formulas and expressed in the adoption of vocal writing that defies any realistic logic, enhanced by the choice of performers en travesti; the future, already discernible in instrumental writing that looked to what was going on in Northern Europe and that established a dialogue between voice and orchestra without any precedent in the Italian tradition, anticipates features that would be pleasing to the sensitivity of the post-Romantics by resorting to metaphorical and ambiguous images, plunged into an intelligent play of amused irony and disenchanted folly.
Rossini’s subsequent and unexpected career in Paris, which placed him in contact with the humus that would feed such leading lights of "the Music of the Future" as Wagner and Berlioz, reanimated his will to get back into the arena, developing his other rich compositional vein, the Dionysian one that he had already experimented with in the brightly-lit forge of Naples. Every feature of the musical lexicon has been reconsidered: his harmony, now that he had abandoned the disarming simplicity of the perfect cadence, has developed into producing unexpected modulations; his instrumental phrases inspire touching emotions; his rhythm has acquired powerfully epic scansions, his structures have fuzzed the outlines of the set pieces of old. Only the vocal line has been unable or unwilling to abandon the Elysian Fields of bel canto, to renounce the heady intoxication of virtuosity, or to turn instead to seductive melody.
With Guillaume Tell Rossini was able to prove to himself and to the world that his creative vein had not dried up in the least and that his genius was also capable of torching the passions beloved of the Romantics, but at the same time he had to realize that his beloved bel canto as practised by the virtuoso castrati of old would never be able to cross the boundary separating abstraction from reality. Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi distance themselves from a vocal writing full of little notes to allow room for a broader style of singing that places more importance on expression and suits the new taste for explicit feelings; Rossini makes his vocal lines ever more ficta and vertiginous hoping to inspire emotions by the sparks struck from an ever more reckless technique. Just as he had done with Semiramide, in Guillaume Tell he forges an opera that well surpasses the normal time limits, enlarging the structures to almost unbearable proportions and so launching a new signal, very much resembling a last will and testament, indicating his decision to quit the stage. Equally distant from both past and future, Rossini moves to one side awaiting a world in which the classifications of his contemporaries will no longer make any sense: such labels as "conservative" and "revolutionary" have no meaning for a composer who caused Italian music to make an enormous leap forward, re-inserting into the great European tradition a musical language that had ground to a halt in a bog of tiresomely banal formulas.

Alberto Zedda
co-editor the critical edition of Semiramide, musicologist and orchestra director

Voice and vocality

Rossini wrote this opera for Venice in 1823, just before he left Italy in search of a greater fortune than Italian operatic impresarios could provide. In recent times Paris and London had become suitable places for presenting the latest Italian productions and Rossini decided on a change of air. He had just married his "muse", the soprano Isabella Colbran (or Colbrand) who, though of German origin, had been born and raised in Madrid and had triumphed all over Italy. She was now approaching maturity and was not far from retirement, but the fact that Rossini entrusted her with the main role in Semiramide means that, in spite of everything, "La Colbran" could still produce a fairly big impact, as indeed she did in Venice and Vienna.
For some time now Rossini, in his creations, had resumed his defence of the ornamented –one might almost say hyper-ornamented- singing proper to the 18th century, the late galant style, the last emanation of a Baroque age that had not yet waned. The return to this style was primarily a refuge from the growing waves of Romantic and revolutionary sentiment which were heralding their approach but had not yet fully broken out. Rossini was determined to defend the style he considered inviolable and in Semiramide he demands an exhibition of singing so florid that you feel you are witnessing the almost "pathological" growth of a life form on the verge of extinction. This is true, not only of the protagonist of the work, Semiramide –who has to sing endless vocal "roulades" and phrases overflowing with grace notes– but also of Arsace, the lover (in principle) of two of the royal ladies in the drama. Arsace has the voice of a mezzosoprano di coloratura for the simple reason that there were practically no castrati left on the market to sing at the premiere. This frenzy of ornamentation also affects the bass, Assur, a role Rossini gave to the very famous virtuoso Filippo Galli. Though only 40 years old, Galli had been pursuing a brilliant Rossinian career for almost fifteen years, singing basso buffo roles in L’italiana in Algeri, Il turco in Italia, La cenerentola, and so on. Part of his career had been spent at the Teatre de la Santa Creu in Barcelona (1818-1819), where he was to return at the height of his fame, in 1838-1839.
The draft plot for the opera, which was taken from Voltaire, included another lover, the Indian king Idreno. For this secondary but nonetheless quite important figure, Rossini resorted to the typical light tenor, to whom he also gave some decorative phrases and a few of those high notes which, at the time, were sung in a falsetto voice. The remaining characters, as we will see, were excluded from the deluge of embellishments devised by the composer.
1. The role of Semiramide. Opera, as is well known, was an extremely hierarchical genre at this period and revolved officially round the prima donna. This role belongs to Semiramide (not surprisingly, since she was played by the composer's new wife). The queen in the opera finds herself in a political predicament (she wants to replace her villainous ally, the bass Assur, and marry Arsace, who will turn out to be her son). The high spot in her star role is the work's most famous aria, "Bel raggio lusinghier", which she is supposed to sing in the refreshing atmosphere of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, her capital. It is a very complete aria which follows the usual pattern: recitative, aria and double cabaletta. A recent doctoral thesis on Colbran, presented in Bologna by Marc Heilbron, compares her voice –notwithstanding the obvious differences– with that of Montserrat Caballé, who has sung this part many times (at the Liceu in 1985-86 and a few years earlier at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence with Marilyn Horne, who made an extraordinary Arsace). This gives us some idea of the high standard demanded by a role which, in addition to the aforementioned aria, includes no less than three outstanding duets: two with Arsace, in which the contrast between the voices is stressed -even more sharply in the second than in the first- by a great contest of embellishments, and another quite complex duet with the bass. She also has a short aria virtually at the end –a prayer in front of Nino's tomb-, which, instead of a cabaletta, is followed by a curious brief but attractive trio with Arsace and Assur.
2. Arsace. In the normal operatic hierarchy, rivalry should have arisen between the prima donna and the primo castrato but since this was no longer possible, it was the mezzo-soprano, officially termed the seconda donna, who took on the second, crucially important role. Though Arsace should not eclipse the soprano, Rossini "emptied his bag" of vocal embellishments into this role as well and, if the complete version of the opera is performed, he attains great prominence from his very first appearance on stage: "Eccomi alfine in Babilonia", a long recitative with orchestral accompaniment which serves to "warm up the voice" and introduces his solo aria "Ah, quel giorno ognor rammento" and its cabaletta "Oh come da quel dì", two veritable monuments to Rossini's treatment of the mezzo voice.
As though this entrance were not enough, a few moments later the singer finds herself in a duet with Assur, which again consists in a long accompanied recitative and the duet proper, "Bella imago degli dei". There is also the tremendous cabaletta of the duet "Va, va superbo", one of the great numbers in the opera, in which we see her clash with the villain.
Soon after, in the second part of Act I, Arsace has his first duet with Semiramide: an accompanied recitative and a duet, "Serbami ognor sì fido – A te sacrai, regina", which culminates in the virtuosic double cabaletta, "Alle più calde immagini". The mezzo's enormous task in the first act is completed by her -relatively modest- part in the final ensemble. In the second act, after a long rest, she has another aria, "In sì barbara sciagura", which leads into a spectacular central part, with Oroe and the chorus, including moving episodes in which the hero speaks of his mother. Finally there is the concluding cabaletta with the chorus, in which the singer has to climb to some impressive high notes. As though that were not enough, she has to face yet another major scene: her recitative and duet with Semiramide, "Ebben…a te, ferisci", and a lengthy cabaletta which very skilfully highlights the contrast between the two voices by means of passages sung in thirds (a device Bellini would make famous in his Norma some years later but which already had a long tradition dating back to Pergolesi and his Stabat Mater a hundred years earlier). Arsace also takes part in the trio with Semiramide and Assur that completes this incredible role for mezzosoprano di coloratura, which is virtually unparalleled in the history of opera.
3. Assur. This role, as mentioned earlier, was written for Filippo Galli, who had displayed a great talent for ornamented singing, both as a basso buffo and in "serious" roles such as the leading part in Maometto II, which he premiered in 1820. When the "Rossini renaissance" led Semiramide to resurface in the 1960s, the basses who regularly sang in European opera houses had great difficulty doing justice to a role so far-removed from the usual responsibilities of a Romantic operatic bass. When Samuel Ramey took it over in 1980 (in Aix-en-Provence), the personage acquired a new look and now the situation has improved. The part has many hidden hazards, such as the two duets already referred to: the first with Arsace (Act I) and the second with Semiramide. But that is not all: Assur, who plays an important part in the action, also has a recitative and a complicated, "tearful" aria lasting nearly fifteen minutes (including a vigorous cabaletta) with the chorus of satraps in the one-but-last scene of the opera. The death scene includes a trio and his important role concludes with a few brief phrases.
4. Idreno. The tenor of the opera is the official lover of the almost non-existent Azema. There would be nothing particularly brilliant about this role were it not for the fact that the Liceu, on this occasion, has given it to the remarkable Juan Diego Flórez. Idreno, as a secondary but important character, has two arias, both demanding great vocal fireworks which, in days gone by, were produced with high notes in falsetto. Nowadays this is never done, and consequently the singing is falsified, as one may painfully observe in many recordings. Flórez will at least provide us with the justification of his manly timbre and elegant interpretation, which will endow Idreno with a prominence he lacks, since his two arias are very far apart: one in the first act and another in the second. He plays a merely decorative part in the ensemble at the end of the first act.
5. Oroe. Oroe is the high priest who has preserved the documents which substantiate the tale of Arsace and the assassination of his father Nino. It is a purely incidental "second bass" role, without any arias. The same is true of the other, even less important characters: Mitrane, Semiramide's guard, who hardly says anything, and Nino's Ghost, who sings nothing important. Finally there is the curious role of Azema, a soprano who, though three characters in the opera are in love with her, has only one recitative with Idreno and a small part in an ensemble. In some recordings (such as the famous 1966 recording by Bonynge), her already slight presence was "cut down" even further. Rossini could have expanded the role, but probably preferred not to because the opera was long enough already and also, perhaps, because love duets were never his strong point, as he demonstrated in nearly all the operas he wrote.

Roger Alier
titular professor of the History of Music at the University of Barcelona, music critic for La Vanguardia