Rossini in Restoration Paris

The Sound of Modern Life

Benjamin Walton author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:17th Feb '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Rossini in Restoration Paris cover

A study of the hugely successful operas of Gioachino Rossini in 1820s Paris.

Best known for light-hearted works such as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious works after moving to Paris in 1924. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book portrays a composer whose powerful music resonated with the experience of contemporary life.Best remembered for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting a traditional account of Rossini's life and works, Benjamin Walton traces instead the shifting patterns of Rossinian criticism from before the composer's arrival in Paris to the end of the 1820s, outlining a type of musical history that uses immersion in a narrow time period as a way to reconceive the relationships between opera and the wider currents of life outside the opera house. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book argues for a composer whose music resonated with the experience of contemporary life, and was integrally bound up in the struggle to define French romanticism at the time.

Review of the hardback: 'Rossini in Restoration Paris is an excellent essay in historical and stylistic defamiliarzation, with contemporary evidence, solid musical analysis, insightful observations and an evocative writing style blending to create a Restoration resplendent in its contradictions.' Nineteenth-Century Music Review

ISBN: 9780521172370

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 540g

366 pages