“A woman can do what she likes”: Rossinian love in L'Italiana in Algeri

Introduction and description of problem

Few would be surprised by the topic of love and opera, and no opera explored the idea more explicitly than Mozart and Da Ponte's The School for Lovers (La scuola degli amanti), better known as Così fan tutte (hereafter Così). Gioachino Rossini, most famous for his comedies, would be far less associated with such a theme. Rossini's most obvious connection to Mozart is their two “Figaro” operas, Le nozze di Figaro and Il barbiere di Siviglia (hereafter Il barbiere). But while Così is replete with love duets, there is no formal duet between Almaviva and Rosina in Il barbiere, save for the lesson scene surrounding Rosina's aria “Contro il cor.” There, Almaviva is disguised as Lindoro, who is disguised as Don Basilio's assistant, his true identity unknown to her. In fact, this is their first meeting, their previous “relationship” consisting of Almaviva spying her out strolling one day and his not so successful serenade. Nor is there a duet between the lovers in L’Italiana in Algeri (hereafter L’Italiana); in fact, Rossini removed the existing one. Rossini's most famous love duets (at least in his Italian operas) are likely the two in Semiramide between the queen and her son, Arsace, not the sort of love duet we were probably thinking of. There is something puzzling about Rossini and love.

The purpose of this study is to explain Rossini's seemingly puzzling approach to love using L’Italiana, Rossini's first great comic success. It can tell us a good deal about Rossini and his music on the verge of his spectacular operatic career.

Many disciplinary approaches are possible; for example, the literary method of Cesare Questa who traces the subject of L’Italiana back to Greek fables is one outstanding example ¹ (Questa, 1997 [1979]). Then there is the common musicological one, the detached Rossini who hides behind a mask of irony, the victim of bad librettos. There is no better, more official source for this than the thoughts of Alberto Zedda, whose role in the Rossini Renaissance was second to none. ² His article written for the Rossini Opera Festival, under the intriguing title “De amore” (“Concerning love”), begins where this article does as well, proposing that L’Italiana is about love. There are other points that Zedda makes which because his authority was so great have become accepted truisms. Some can be disputed. Two assertions in particular, fundamental and mutually reinforcing, deserve to be quoted in full:

This is true of L’Italiana in Algeri, the most extravagant among the operas coined by Rossini's high spirits, the comicality of which continually takes on the aspect of the comique absolu, having nothing to do with realism. (Zedda, 2013: 40)

Baudelaire also associates the two comic types with specific cultures. The absolute or innocent comic is quintessentially Italian: “Joyful, noisy, and forgetful Italy abounds in innocent comedy. It is in the heart of Italy, at the height of the southern carnival, in the midst of the turbulent Corso …” (Baudelaire, 1868: 379). ⁷ Realism, at least for Baudelaire, is therefore culturally defined. The musicologist Richard Taruskin has suggested that realism (in music) is merely whatever artifice or convention happens to be accepted by a given audience (Taruskin, 2005: 35–36). Opera buffa would be a good example. Rossini was always attuned to his audience and to local tradition, especially strong in pre-Risorgimento Italy. If Naples banned recitativo secco then so did Rossini, but if Milan continued its use then he complied. This too is a cultural realism which in 1813 Italy varied from place to place, and where an opera that premiered in Milan could be rejected by the audience in Venice and vice versa, just because it was “foreign.” ⁸ This idea of cultural realism is consonant with Baudelaire's definition of the absolute comic, which, since it is grasped intuitively, is capable of being acquired by all, though presumably better by a knowledgeable group and which in a social sense at the time might even be described as bourgeois.

Clearly Zedda's intention was to praise Rossini's comic genius, but his analytical world is so narrow that it leads him to a series of well-known truisms: the low opinion of librettists and librettos, Rossini's detachment and irony, the near impossibility to determine what Rossini really thought because he hid behind a mask (Ponnelle, 1989: 42–44). ⁹ The most problematic idea of all is his reference to realism. It is clear enough that Zedda's term “imagined reality” refers to the libretto, to the vile matter of the poetry that is transformed by the elegant lightness and crackling rhythm of Rossini's music. It is a fictitious reality, banal, a wasteland that Rossini somehow magically alchemized. In the end, all Zedda is left with is the music, which as a conductor and musicologist is likely where he wanted to be, especially since as comique absolu the opera is impossible to analyze. But an inquiry about Rossinian love could not possibly be conducted on such a basis. It turns out that the greatest problem of all is the realism that Zedda claims has nothing to do with the music, because it can refer to almost anything chosen, artistic or not. ¹⁰

The task at hand, then, is to bring Rossini down from Olympus, to contextualize L’Italiana in a complex and disassociated time in Italian history, so that we can better understand the opera, the composer, and Italian culture. This study uses a historical method, admittedly also a single disciplinary perspective but one that can better shift focus among multiple contexts within which Rossini and his librettist worked. Those contexts can be explanations, and they provide the basis of this study. L’Italiana premiered on May 22, 1813, and the most obvious and broadest context is the political one of 1813, at the very end of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era just as the Restoration was coming into focus. Reducing scope, there is the context of opera buffa as an artistic genre and the peculiarity of the performance history of Angelo Anelli's (1761–1820, the house poet at La Scala, Milan) libretto, which was set to music by two composers within five years. The context of Algiers, Barbary piracy, centuries long and especially inimical to Italy, whose war against Christians was soon to be ended by the intervention of the United States and by the French colonization of Algeria in 1830. The social revolution of cicisbeism, and its impact on noble women's lives, while in its last gasps, was still a staple in opera plots. Then there is Mozart, Rossini's favorite composer, who hovered over his creative life and who he evoked in L’Italiana in an especially obvious and strategic way. Finally, the most elusive context of all is Rossini himself, always reluctant to reveal much about himself and his art. Describing each context, so different, and how they relate to each other in the midst of such historical flux, is challenging but it is the most viable method to surmount the tendencies to detach Olympian Rossini from his own time, to reduce him to an enigma or a victim of bad librettos, and to dismiss his comic works as frothy diversions that cannot bear serious analysis, all of which is the inevitable consequence of Zedda's invocation of Baudelaire.

This then is the task of the next four sections following the plot summary, the first of which is on the genre, opera buffa and its role in Italian music, and which might be called internal realism, that is internal to the work as opera. Then there is the broader and external context of the Mediterranean world, the Barbary coast, and slavery. Following is the performance history of the libretto, the librettist, and not one but two settings of the poetry. Finally, there is the connection to a uniquely Italian social phenomenon, cicisbeism, and its impact in empowering women through their greater freedom to have contact with the world outside the home, and which connects us to Isabella, the opera's main character.

L’Italiana in Algeri: Plot summary ¹¹

The opera begins with Elvira, the wife of the Bey of Algiers, together with her servant Zulma, lamenting that her husband no longer loves her. The Bey, Mustafà, enters pronouncing that any display of female power or arrogance is in vain in his realm and by his command. ¹² Bored by his harem, he directs his pirate captain, Haly, to capture an Italian woman for him within six days or be impaled. Mustafà calls Italian women “hammers of many cicisbei” (martello a tanti cicisbei), and they excite him.

Mustafà plans to free Lindoro, an Italian slave, and marry him off to Elvira. Lindoro is in despair for the loss of his love Isabella and is forced by Mustafà to accept his offer. Meanwhile, Isabella and her companion Taddeo are captured by Haly's pirates. She first laments her capture but then recovers her courage and sings of her ability to tame men. Everyone is struck by her beauty and convinced that she is the perfect gift for Mustafà. Isabella and Taddeo argue but reconcile and promise to stick together in their captivity.

Immediately upon arriving at court, from her first gaze of Mustafà, she knows that she can handle him. He immediately falls in love with her. When Taddeo enters, he is condemned to be impaled until Isabella identifies him as her “uncle.” Isabella chides Mustafà for wanting to discard his wife, which infuriates him and sends everyone into an ensemble of complete chaos. As the act concludes, everyone is already noticing that love is turning Mustafà, the self-proclaimed scourge of women, into an ass.

In Act Two, Mustafà courts Isabella by creating Taddeo Kaimakan, or Lieutenant-Protector of Muslims. Once again threatened with impalement, he accepts the honor. Isabella, dressed in Turkish style, sings how she is making herself beautiful for whom she adores, without naming anyone. Both Lindoro and Taddeo are angered by her presumed infidelity while Mustafà exults, convinced that it is he she loves. Mustafà tells Taddeo that when he sneezes it is the signal to withdraw and to leave him alone to seduce Isabella. Taddeo refuses to go along with this, which causes more consternation and another ensemble. Isabella attempts once again to reconcile Mustafà and Elvira, infuriating him, and everyone is thrown into great confusion.

Lindoro and Taddeo assuage Mustafà telling him that he is being inducted into the order of the Pappataci. Their code is to eat, drink, sleep, and ignore their wives making love to other men. Meanwhile, Isabella is executing a plan to free the Italian slaves, seize a ship, and return with Lindoro to Italy. She sings, urging her fellow Italians to think of their country, to accept their duty, and to honor Italy. While Mustafà is being initiated into the order of the Pappataci, the Italians get the guards drunk so that by the time Mustafà realizes that he has been duped, no one answers his call for help. Taddeo decides to join Isabella and Lindoro. Mustafà swears off Italian women as too clever and takes back Elvira. The opera concludes with praise for the Italian girl in Algiers, who teaches lovers and who can do whatever she likes to anyone.

Opera buffa

The whole history of 18th-century Italian opera could be written in terms of the shifting relationship between opera seria and opera buffa. When the mixing of tragic and comic elements found in 17th-century Venetian opera was expunged, serious and comic operas became clearly demarcated. Many theaters produced only one kind and some composers specialized in only one genre. Rossini only wrote opera seria for San Carlo in Naples, the one exception, written for another theater, was La Gazzetta in 1816. Over the course of the 18th century, two things occurred. At first, opera seria and opera buffa developed in opposite directions. As opera seria reformed itself along classical lines and classical subjects, had a reduced number of characters, made da capo and exit arias standard procedure, assigned starring roles to castrati, and required happy endings, opera buffa emphasized contemporary subjects, ensembles, the basso buffo and patter arias, and more emphasis on comic talent and less on stratospheric coloratura. The castrati were excluded from buffa, replaced with lower voices. By the last quarter of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, the opposite trend began to occur as each genre increasingly borrowed from the other; for example, fewer da capo arias and more ensembles in opera seria. Rossini played an important role in this process. Translated into these musical forms, the strict distinction that Baudelaire makes between types of comedies does not apply well to this process of intermixing. Of course, by the time he had written De l’essence du rire, opera had changed yet again, virtually eliminating comic opera altogether.

L’Italiana fits these patterns by developing in two contrary directions, and it continued to expand the basic characteristics of opera buffa. A comparison with Il barbiere di Siviglia (hereafter Il barbiere) can clarify. The structure of Il barbiere is actually quite conventional, especially Act One. It is organized around a series of arias separated by recitativo secco for each of the five main characters. In this it resembles opera seria. The genius of Il barbiere lies in the excellence of those arias, Figaro's “Largo al factotum” being perhaps the most famous operatic aria ever written, and the extraordinary through-composed part of Act One, from Almaviva's entry disguised as a drunken soldier to the end of the act. Certain character types from commedia dell’arte, such as the feisty young woman and the foolish old man seeking to marry her, can be detected in Rosina and Bartolo respectively. In these things, Il barbiere is the more classic opera buffa.

On the other hand, L’Italiana stands on the edges of the buffa tradition through the concertato d’azione, the most radical attack on serious opera. It weakened the action-reflection pattern, typical of the recitativo/aria construction found in 18th- and early 19th-century opera seria. Claudio Toscani described the term as:

a consequence of the realism that informs the story and characters, who are brought into continuous action. The point of maximum adherence of the music to the dramatic action is reached in the “concertati d’azione” preferably (but not necessarily) placed at the end of the act, which coincides with an important juncture in the dramatic story: several characters meet and sing simultaneously on stage, different musical sections follow one another seamlessly, and the action is fast-paced and animated. (Toscani, 2014, emphasis mine). ¹³

The importance of the concertato d’azione is established almost immediately in L’Italiana. “The importance of this new feature, which was hugely enjoyed by the public, lies in the fact that here, for the first time in opera, action not just sentiment was being set to music” (Weiss and Budden, 1992). The introductory chorus of eunuchs laments that women are born to suffer while Elvira, Mustafà's wife, reveals that her husband no longer loves her. Mustafà, the Bey of Algiers, enters, introducing himself as the scourge of women, and the music erupts into a “concertato d’azione.” Nobody mastered this action-technique better than Gioachino Rossini. If the arias were classic in Il barbiere, it is the ensembles that propel the action of L’Italiana. The second act is anchored by the great quintet “Ti presento di mia man” and the trio “Pappataci! Che mai sento!” each nearly 10 minutes long, the first topped off with a classic Rossini crescendo. There are no suspensions of time as in the first act finale of Il barbiere “Resta ed immobile.” L’Italiana is all constant often frenetic movement.

It might therefore be concluded that L’Italiana was more innovative in style and structure than Il barbiere and more socially subversive. For while Figaro is a bourgeois figure who propels the plot, so too is Isabella, and a woman to boot, who dominates and controls everyone far more than Figaro does. She not only emasculates Mustafà, the potentate of Algiers, she also liberates his Italian slaves. At the end, Isabella sings the aria “Pensa alla patria,” a serious subject and with a style that takes on dramatic and virtuosic qualities associated with opera seria. In the aria, she quite literally expels laughter when she scolds Taddeo for giggling at her invocation of Italian courage and valor.

Isabella's shift into the realm of patriotic opera is neither a contradiction nor merely dropped into the libretto, so much as a fulfillment of a response to Haly when he asks them from where they come: Taddeo responds “both from Livorno” (Di Livorno ambedue). Haly asks: “Italians?” Taddeo answers “We understand each other” (Ci s’intende), but Isabella adds “and I am proud of it” (E me ne vanto). Rossini's parody of opera seria is traceable to the 18th century. When Charles Burney toured Italy in 1770, he attended an oratorio in Rome written in operatic style that he found “indecent” (Burney, 2005 [1771]: 364). In 1820, Rossini composed a Messa di Gloria for his San Carlo troupe that was thoroughly operatic, horrifying a German listener who complained of the music's complete decadence and disgraceful contempt, but which delighted the Neapolitans (Gossett, 1992). If the wall separating sacred and secular music was coming down, the one separating opera seria from opera buffa was all the more easily scaled. In fact, it was codified in a new genre, opera semiseria, Rossini's La gazza ladra (1817) being one of the first examples (Budden, 1992). Even Rossini's Cenerentola contained the pathos that marked the new genre. It turns out that L’Italiana is in fact capable of being analyzed, first of all as an opera buffa that was highly innovative.

Performance history: Opera buffa and contemporary Italian society

I do not know how to recount the crew's convulsive rioting without reliving the horror. There were still eighteen individuals left on the xebec [a mediterranean sailing ship]. Three of them were women whose screams pierced the air, and among others there were also two co-proprietors of the cargo, who were inevitably afraid [of losing] their sole capital and berated themselves for having thoughtlessly risked fatherland, fortune, and liberty. Everyone ran about the ship, frantic and bewildered, not able to bear the thought of the imminent horrors of slavery. (Klarer, 2022: 343) ¹⁴

Algiers was technically part of the Ottoman Empire, submitting to the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) in 1542, but it was never actually conquered by the Ottomans, indeed from the seventh century Islamic north Africa was always on the periphery of the main Islamic empire. Two convenient dates are 1492 and 1830. In the first, Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs of Aragon and Castile, respectively, conquered the last Muslim state of Granada, forcing Muslims to convert to Christianity or enslaving them. This concluded nearly 800 years of the Reconquista or reconquest of Spain from Muslim rule. It neither began nor ended war between Christians and Muslims, but it did enflame those tensions which continued for another 300 years. The year 1830, following the successful barbary wars, marked the conquest of Algiers by France, its first African colony, and the end of Barbary piracy. In Rossini's time, Algiers was a de facto independent and renegade state, with little arable land, unconnected to an imperial economy, open to the sea that was divided between Islam and Christendom, and the center of Mediterranean piracy. Unlike American slavery, there was not a great demand for agricultural labor. More fortunate slaves performed domestic duties, some slaves were rented out, the least fortunate were condemned to the galleys. There was enormous demand for them; an estimated 80,000 galley slaves fought at the battle of Lepanto (1571). Algiers existed in a world divided into two hostile civilizations. Demographic data is unreliable, but credible estimates suggest that around 25% of the population in Algiers were European slaves (Davis, 2003: 103).

Foremost among the Europeans were Italian slaves. Italy was among “the most thoroughly ravaged areas in the Mediterranean basin, lying on the frontier of the two battling empires,” with a very long coastline (Davis, 2003: 140). Algiers, corsairs, kidnapping, and ransom were certainly familiar to Rossini's audience, especially to a Venetian one, so heavily identified with the Mediterranean Sea. By the 18th century, the corsairs preferred ransom to slave labor and Italy developed some unique responses (Davis, 2003: 177). One of the most interesting was the development of freed-slave processions. In 1764, 91 slaves paraded around Venice. The freed slaves sang psalms, carried banners and crucifixes, were sometimes clothed in rags, other times in special uniforms, attended Mass, and received blessings, while a band played music “alla turca.” These were acts celebrating their freedom, while purifying and reintegrating the freed slaves into the Christian community (Davis, 2003: 181–184). The psycho-civic effects of the constant fear of capture and enslavement experienced by coastal communities was real, and it was remarkable that Algiers could serve as the basis for an opera buffa. Despite Caronni's terrifying experience, Italians were still able to use humor to deal with an ongoing threat.

Anelli's libretto (Anelli, 2016 [2003]) was not only embedded in the context of historic and recent maritime violence against Italians; it was also a story derived from or at least inspired by recent and specific real-life events. Besides Caronni's experience, there really was an “Italiana.” In 1805 a young Milanese woman, Antonietta Frapolli, was kidnapped off the coast of Sardinia and taken to the court of Mustapha-ibn-Ibrahim, Dey of Algiers, where she was kept in several harems before being released a few years later (Fisher, 2000: 25). ¹⁵ There really was a Mustafà: Mustapha Pasha (1798–1805). He succeeded his uncle and ruled over a corrupt and violent society, engaged in both piracy and a war with neighboring Tunis. First there was a pogrom against the Jews, some of whom had become rich and influential merchants supporting Mustapha. Two months later in August 1805, he was assassinated by rebellious janissaries (Panzac, 2005: 235–236, 293–294).

Algiers and the court of Mustafà in the opera is corrupt. When Mustafà announces his desire to marry an Italian girl, Haly, the corsair captain, reminds him that Islamic law does not permit such a “pasticcio” or mixed marriage (Ma di Maometto la legge non permette un tal pasticcio). Mustafà responds that there is no law except his whim (Altra legge io non ho, che il mio capriccio). He scoffs at Islamic law, rendering Algiers outside of the law and civilized society. Since there was no unified Italian state, Italians were especially vulnerable to corsairs, abductions, and ransom demands, so when Isabella humiliates Mustafà, defeats the corsairs, and frees the Italian slaves, this was a fantasy of revenge, a world turned upside down, a female warrior who waged war, armed not with weapons but with love and beauty. It was exaggerated for comic effect and no doubt enjoyed by the Venetian audience who had been fighting the Turks for 400 years. This was the world of early Novecento opera buffa, presenting a parody of a serious and cruel subject, while honing new musical approaches which were in every way real.

Performance history: One libretto and two composers

Rossini's setting of Anelli's libretto was not the first; that fell to Luigi Mosca (1775–1824), the brother of the more famous Giuseppe Mosca, when his L’Italiana premiered on August 16, 1808 at La Scala in Milan. Mosca was Neapolitan and spent most of his life there; nearly all of his 18 operas premiered in the city. L’Italiana was a success and ran for 35 performances, yet there is no record of his opera ever being revived. This made it ideal for poaching (Carnini, 2012). The inability of Rossini's La pietra del paragone to fill the seats of the theater and Carlo Coccia's failure to deliver a new opera on time forced the desperate director of the Teatro San Benedetto, the impresario Giovanni Gallo, to commission Rossini to set Anelli's text only five years after its Milan premier. Rossini reportedly finished it in less than a month. ¹⁶ Such was the often-chaotic nature of the Italian opera world at the turn of the 19th century.

Zedda's harsh words for L’Italiana's libretto are a typical judgment by modern musicologists who denounce the sheer incompetence of Ottocento librettists. Andrea Tottola, one of the official librettists for the San Carlo theater in Naples and Rossini's most frequent collaborator, is a case in point. He was derided in his day by the epigram “There was an author of a libretto, named Tottola / he was no eagle, but rather a bat” (Commons, 2004). Within this bleak perspective, Anelli stands as one of the more respected librettists in his day. ¹⁷

Angelo Anelli (1761–1820) was born outside of Brescia, where he taught Italian and Latin. In 1796, he received a degree in civil and canon law from the University of Padua and taught law for a while. In 1802, he was awarded the chair of forensic eloquence (eloquenza pratica forense) in Milan, a position that Foscolo also sought and the source of lifelong enmity between the two. Late in life, he returned to law and became the chair of judicial procedure at the University of Pavia. Like Mozart, he was a mason. Anelli spent most of his life in the theater, writing more than 40 librettos, first in Venice and then at La Scala, Milan from 1799 to 1817. He was well educated, accomplished, and thoroughly engaged not only in the cultural life of northern Italy but also in its political life (Bonomi, 2015; Bustico, 1921; Capasso, 1961). A Francophile, he was active in the Cisalpine republic (1797–1802), imprisoned twice, joined a French artillery regiment, and served as secretary to the Bonapartist general Charles Pierre Augereau. He wrote a sonnet, La calamità d’Italia, in 1798, ironically long attributed to his foe Foscolo: ¹⁸

The Calamity of Italy

Strong and bitter words. Anelli specialized in comic opera and was especially noted as a satirist. There can be no satire without serious discontent with contemporary structures, rules, or behavior and it is not difficult to connect Anelli to the political reality of his time. Stendhal had particularly high praise for Anelli's talent and courage in criticizing the high and mighty:

I have finally discovered an Italian who has a touch of original genius … This unknown genius is the lawyer Anelli, from Desenzano. There is something of Bancourt, Gozzi, and a little of Shakespeare in his style. The French, especially those molded by La Harpe, would find only the lowest buffoonery. Such is the excess of our black vanity … No ordinary Frenchman will ever understand Anelli's talent; it is the comic muse running broadsides against the most suspicious monarchy. Did he not have the audacity to mock, under Buonaparte, the nullity of the Italian senate? That is the whole secret of the long scenes of Papatacci in L’Italiana in Algeri. (Stendhal, 1854: 347–348) ²⁰

While the essentials of Anelli's libretto remained intact, the version that Rossini set to music had undergone considerable revisions, deletions, and additions, with the aid of an anonymous librettist. It would be a fair assumption that the revisions not only suited Rossini but that he played an important role in creating them, since it was Rossini who received the emergency commission and since both men were freer to manipulate a work that was not their own, with its poet in Milan and composer in Naples (Biblioteca digitale, 2019). ²¹

Many of Rossini's revisions were minor yet had significant cumulative impact. For example, he tends to suppress brief conversations between minor characters. So, Elvira comments to Haly at the beginning of Act Two on Mustafà's change, and he responds with surprise and laughter. “Haly, what do you think? Would you have / ever thought that Mustafà could undergo / such a complete and so sudden change?” Haly: “It surprises me, and it makes me laugh.” ²² These tidbits offer insights into minor characters’ actions, here Haly's ability to laugh behind Mustafà's back despite the Bey's threats of impalement. Their elision, though, streamlines the action without appreciably affecting the story.

A few examples of Rossini's larger revisions will suffice. The first is the elimination of an extensive scene, a recitative, and the aria “O povero Taddeo!” In the first, Taddeo expresses his concern for Isabella's well-being, then he berates himself for following Isabella on their ill-fated cruise. In the aria, he reveals that Isabella has professed her love and friendship for him, though he suspects very subtly that she may have manipulated him. Taddeo's scene is presented without context; he appears even before the pirates and Isabella do. More logically, Rossini begins with a brief chorus of pirates proclaiming their joy at the booty collected, especially the pretty girls, whereupon Isabella appears and sings the aria “Cruda sorte.” The overall effect of the revision is the loss of some useful information about Taddeo's relationship with Isabella and Taddeo's genuine concern for her. In Rossini's version, Taddeo enters shouting for mercy and is a much more contemptible figure. In the end, Taddeo's importance is diminished and Isabella's is enhanced, altogether more logical since she is the eponymous “Italian girl.” Rossini's work has fewer words and more music, that is, Rossini is content to use his music in place of Anelli's and Mosca's words. As the director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle put it, to “encourage concentration on the one element which gives a Rossini opera its unity, the music” (Ponnelle, 1989).

Another example of Rossini sharpening the dramatic action follows Isabella's and Taddeo's duet, when Mosca uses six mostly brief scenes to get to Isabella's first meeting with Mustafà. These are brief recitatives, discussions between Elvira, Zulma, and Lindoro on the subject of marriage, when Mustafà enters telling Lindoro that he needs to take Elvira back with him to Italy. Elvira pleads the order while Haly enters with news of Isabella's capture. This triggers Mustafà's aria “Star soggetti a un sesso imbelle.” Following some more very brief dialogue between Elvira and Zulma, Lindoro sings a cavatina, “Bella, da voi lontano.” Rossini cuts these scenes to four, eliminating the first scene, substituting the briefer “Già insolito ardore nel petto” for Mosca's aria, and eliminating Lindoro's aria. The result is again a much simplified and efficient transition from the capture of Isabella and Taddeo to the grand reception room in Mustafà's palace.

The other radical revision is the elimination of the Isabella/Lindoro duet in Act Two, resulting in a love interest without the lovers ever singing much to or with each other. Just as Isabella is ushered into Mustafà's court, Lindoro, Elvira, and Zulma enter to say goodbye as they are about to board a ship for Italy. Isabella and Lindoro recognize each other in amazement expressed in a few disjointed words (Oh ciel!, Che miro!, “Sogno?”, “Deliro?”, “Quest’è Isabella!, “Quest’è Lindoro!,” Io gelo, Io palpito). Everyone else is stupefied and the music moves directly to the stretta of the Act One finale, with its onomatopoeia of sounds of “tac, tà, kra-kra, and bum-bum.” This was a grand concerto d’azione and a groundbreaking opera buffa finale. Once again information about a character, here Lindoro, is sacrificed, words are reduced, and action is accelerated, all managed by the music.

Just about all of Rossini's libretto revisions were meant to reduce the number of words, to quicken the action, and to enhance Isabella's role, in order to emphasize her independence and promote her dominance in the opera. Rossini's compositional method was to show up in Rome or Milan, choose a topic with his librettist, and compose as quickly as he received the poet's verses. There were no letters sent, only bits and pieces of text exchanged, with little to reveal the nature of the partnership between poet and composer. The unique situation of L’Italiana, with its two versions, reveals Rossini's keen interest in the dramaturgy and does not support the old anecdotes of his lazy willingness to set nearly any text placed before him.

Isabella's independence is connected to two contexts. The first is the conflict between Western and Islamic cultures. Mustafà repeatedly misunderstands Italian culture, claiming that in Italy women rule over men, and he challenges Italian women to come to Algiers where he can teach them who is boss. ²³ It is true that Isabella is exceptional and she takes aim at the Algerians’ barbarous customs (costumi barbari) as Mustafà plans to get rid of his wife and marry Isabella. She vows to change them (Io vi faro cangiar) and to persuade Mustafà to remain with Elvira. The second context is a domestic, Italian phenomenon, cicisbeism.

Cicisbeism and the liberation of Italian women

Cicisbeism is the most important context for placing Isabella within Italian social reality. It was an Enlightenment-inspired social movement whose elements could be found throughout Europe, but which developed much more deeply and lengthily in Italy than in any other country.

The phenomenon was associated with the nobility where it was connected to the practice of preserving the family wealth by limiting marriage to the first-born male, which produced younger sons, bachelors, who made up the ranks of the cicisbei. The cicisbeo, or cavalier servente, attended to his lady throughout the day, from her toilette and meals, to evening theater performances, masked balls, Carnival, card games and the like. This relationship was formed generally with the assent of her husband. In essence it was a triangular relationship and an official one, often codified before marriage. It gave other men access to a married woman.

Cicisbeism was broadly connected to two Enlightenment ideas. The first was sociability; women were freed from the home and family, allowed access to the public sphere, to meet strangers in theaters, scientific meetings, academies, Masonic lodges, and the like. The second idea was conversazione, the creation of habitual relations that granted women the freedom to participate in all aspects of meeting and engagement with the world. With women open to the world, the cicisbeo became the indispensable accessory, the guarantor of this new freedom, providing security of movement and what became the social prestige of being a liberated aristocratic woman. It was a controlled and rational freedom, though still one that challenged traditional gender roles. The practice of cicisbeism was widespread, attracting men of considerable station, but it also drew critical scorn expressed in a number of published works. ²⁴

The chronology of cicisbeism has its origins in the 1690s, its rapid development and apogee in the mid-18th century, with an equally rapid decline beginning in the last quarter of the 18th century, producing a mixed period that extended into the 19th century. Stendhal dated the end of cicisbeism to 1809, a year after the premier of Mosca's and Anelli's L’Italiana (Bizzocchi, 2014: 226). Bizzocchi attributes the demise of the cicisbei to Rousseau and the publication of his Julie, or the New Heloise and Emile, or on Education in 1761 and 1762, respectively. Rousseau's redefinition of private and family morality, passionate love, domestic intimacy, and affectionate care of children doomed cicisbeism, deemed incompatible with these ends (Bizzocchi, 2014: 218). Women were now asked to act like their ancient Spartan and Roman forebears and for husbands to not tolerate a third man in their marriage. Leaders of the Risorgimento believed that a moral revolution was necessary if Italy was to unify, and in this way a social movement became a political one. By the time that Anelli wrote his libretto, the term had been reduced to a caricature meaning a weak man who allowed his women too many liberties rendering himself a fool. The Risorgimento proclaimed the need for heroic women (and men) who loved both family and country. It led to the final demise of cicisbeism but not yet its elimination from a long line of opera plots. ²⁵

Anelli used his concept of the cicisbeo five times in the libretto, the first by Mustafà at the beginning of the opera, where he refers to Italian women as “hammers of cicisbei” (Martello a tanti cicisbei). As a foreigner, Mustafà misunderstands completely the role of the cicisbeo in Italian society. Far from being crushed by their lady, the cicisbeo was the lady's servant and protector (cavalier servente), the mechanism for her social freedom. He uses the term again in Mosca's aria “Star soggetti a un sesso imbelle” as cognate with “babbeo” (fool, dolt), boasting that he is well aware how to make women do what he wants, the direct opposite of Isabella's claim in her aria. Taddeo uses the term three times; he does not misunderstand its meaning so much as reduce it to an incomplete caricature of the cicisbeo as fool. He probably represents Anelli's view of cicisbeism. Taddeo fears being treated as this version of the term, and despite his protests he generally does indeed play the fool. If the nuances of cicisbeism had been lost by 1813, one important idea had been retained and even exaggerated by Rossini's revisions. That was the independence of women and their inflated ability to tame men (Isabella uses the term “domar”).

Angelo Anelli, the politically aware Francophile, agitator, and republican, who in his sonnet referred to his own castration and condemnation to the sultana's harem on account of the calamitous humiliation of a powerless Italy, used the concept of cicisbeism to define female liberation, the rule of Mustafà to depict despotism, the attack of Muslim corsairs to illustrate Italian weakness, and the reform ideals of opera buffa to imbue his libretto with plenty of concertati d’azioni, to express mass confusion, all to craft the central conflict between Isabella and Mustafà in L’Italiana. These were all references to the social and political realities of the day, his libretto a comedy as satire, but most of all, especially after the Rossini revisions, it was about Isabella and love.

Love in L’Italiana in Algeri

All love emanates from Isabella. Given its protean nature, as it interacts it devolves into various types of love that define each character. Therefore, Isabella exhibits aspects of everyone's love type, so it is nearly impossible to discuss them without reference to Isabella as well. Each character's love type will be identified. In addition, Anelli has quite the talent to reveal a good deal about characters through their first spoken words. So, for each character there is identification by name, by type of love, and by key words spoken.

Isabella. Type: Sensual love. Key words: “Cruda sorte! Amor tiranno!” Love and fate are two of the most essential forces that determine what Isabella says and does, and both are rooted in a sensuality, in a gratification of the senses; a preoccupation with appetites. ²⁶ The main source of Isabella's love is found in cicisbeism and therefore in conversazione; she is “la donna cicisbea.” Bizzocchi defines cicisbei as follows:

As a character in an opera buffa, all of these attributes are not only present but exaggerated. Isabella is certainly active and emancipated, traveling around the Mediterranean in search of Lindoro, challenging the Bey's authority, and fomenting revolt. Moreover, in keeping with opera buffa tradition, these attributes limited to the nobility in the 18th century are transferred to Isabella, a bourgeois figure.

The word “sorte” appears four times in the libretto, in every case spoken by Isabella. Her first words are “cruda sorte” (cruel fate), then in the duet with Taddeo “Ai capricci della sorte” (capricious fate), and just before “Pensa alla patria” “volubil sorte” (unstable fate). She claims to have been mistreated by fate (maltrattata della sorte) in order to win Mustafà's sympathy. Fate is circumscribing and its remedy is freedom, and Isabella certainly acts freely but hers is not quite a classic, Enlightenment intellectual freedom so much as a social one. While certainly not unintelligent, her power is derived from her physical attraction which allows her to play an outsized social role. She possesses a strong will, undaunted by cruel fate; she stares it down and concludes that what will be will be (sarà quel che sarà) because she can control her own fate. In the end, her relationship to the Enlightenment program is not so close; her relationship to nature is close but her relationship to reason is not so much.

Isabella's love is sensual, often erotic, both as a subject and an object. She is always described by her beauty (beltà), often in somewhat crude terms and objectified. As soon as she is discovered by Haly and his pirates, they proclaim her a tasty morsal for the Bey (È un boccon per Mustafà). Mustafà's first words upon seeing her are “What a piece, good enough for a sultan” (Oh che pezzo da sultano!). When Haly announces her entrance, everyone's reaction is “What rare beauty” (Oh che rara beltà). It is one of Rossini's acts of ingenious wit that he sets the words acapella, evoking old-style sacred music, a classic example of Rossinian genre intermixing. Isabella herself is happy to use sensual language. Her aria “Cruda sorte” is in three parts. In the first, in opera seria style (cantabile/andante), she sings of her suffering (amor tiranno), horror, terror, and grief (orror, terror, affanno) as punishment for her faithful devotion to Lindoro. Interrupted by the chorus, “È un boccon per Mustafà” (tempo di mezzo, allegro), she recovers her confidence, to face her capture without fear and with courage (cabaletta/allegro). The last part is a declaration of her view of the sexes. Her language is sexist, all men are the same, all vulnerable to the languid glance, the tiny sigh, as she invokes the idea of “vaga femina.” All men seek happiness in women, a vague but powerful force. Boccaccio wrote that women are “vaga” as dogs chase sticks. ²⁷ It is the nature of things. Bizzocchi cites a Spanish source confirming that the relationship between the sexes is elemental:

Sexist and feminist, women know how to tame and domesticate men (So a domar uomini come si fa); it comes naturally.

When she sings “Per lui che adoro,” Isabella performs as “la donna cicisbea.” The cicisbeo's day began when he entered the house of his lady and observed her toilette. This was potentially one of the most erotic moments they shared, or at least so the critics claimed. One of these was Giuseppe Antonio Costantino who in his Lettere critiche giocose, morali, scientifiche, erudite imagined the toilette in highly erotic and objectional terms:

Then holding the mirror for her while she arranges her hair; and in the meantime, she will serve as a mirror for you … But it is impossible not to notice certain indecencies; that jeweled flower is not right; you need to give her a hand. That ribbon on her chest is too high; it should show her real neckline; and if it touches her skin, it's an accident; you need to pretend you touched wood. The bodice is not tight enough; you need to help the lady's maid, and while she tightens the cord, you must tighten the lady's waist with your hands. On another occasion, this would be an embrace, but in this case it is purely indifferent officiousness. The shoe is not cut enough; the gentleman acts as a cobbler; one knee on the ground; the other touches the lady's leg; he leans his waist on her thigh, squeezes between her hip and his elbow, and that is how the desire is sated. (Costantini, 1751: 222–223) ²⁸

As she prepares her toilette, she beseeches the “mother of Love” to make her more beautiful (Più bella rendemi / Madre d’amor). The one who tames, domesticates, is now the source of pleasure. “You know how I love him / how I long to please him” (Tu sai se l’amo, / Piacergli io bramo), and no one is more deeply affected than Mustafà, whose response to Isabella's seduction is the collapse of his resistance (Io non resisto più: questa Isabella / è un incanto).

Given the pronounced eroticism of “Per lui che adoro,” the aria “Pensa alla patria” is a surprising shift, producing a whole new vocabulary and showing a new side to Isabella's personality, not erotic but dutiful and honoring (patria, dovere, onore). While proud to be an Italian when first introduced to Haly, the experience of slavery deepened pride into patriotism, or love of country. This side of Isabella is certainly the product of Anelli's mind, an adaptation of his patriotic sonnet, while the notably apolitical Rossini turned the aria into a spectacular bel canto vehicle. As Ponelle suggested, Rossini speaks with music not words. In Taddeo's laughter at Isabella's ardor, you can hear the bitterness of Anelli's La calamità d’Italia and the failure of the Italian republics. Having a woman lead an armed force of Italian slaves against a vain despot, to freedom, and for the homeland, was one of the most radical ideas in the libretto. It goes well beyond Bizzocchi's point of the need for Italian women to spur men to unite the motherland. Censors perceived well the threat and required revisions or the deletion of the aria in Naples and Rome (Gossett, 1989: 40).

For all of her sensuality, boldness, and independence, what might be called her method or delivery, the actual nature of Isabella's love is rather traditional. She rebuffs the advances of the Bey, practices romantic love for Lindoro, and supports conjugal love in her efforts to make Mustafà take back his wife Elvira. All the women in L’Italiana are virtuous. Elvira, brutally dismissed, still loves Mustafà, and Zulma is her constant faithful servant. In the context of 1813, Isabella's most radical love is political, the love for a united Italy. In this she is a new, 19th-century figure. All of the male characters are flawed. Mustafà is jealous and haughty, Taddeo is cowardly, Lindoro is ineffectual, and Haly is both violent and subservient.

Mustafà. Type: Sensual love. Key words: “Delle donne l’arroganza.” This is his declaration of war on the arrogance of women. Even though the antagonistic relationship between Isabella and Mustafà is the most fundamental in the opera, they share a sensualism, and Mustafà's is certainly a cruder version. If Isabella is sexist and feminist, Mustafà is sexist and misogynist, a mirror image. They balance each other. What separates them is their status, tyrannical voluptuary versus exploited slave; his is political power, hers are her innate and developed personal qualities (another Enlightenment idea). They share not only similar sensual attitudes but common goals as well. He shares her view of women's physical charms and admits their effect in him: “More fickle than a leaf / my heart goes from desire to desire / of women, trampling / on flattery and beauty” (Più volubil d'una foglia / va il mio cor di voglia in voglia / delle donne calpestando / le lusinghe e la beltà). His fickleness is a traditional “feminine” trait, part of the reversal of gender roles, Isabella taking on “male” leadership, even martial qualities. ²⁹ Mustafà the hedonist confides in Haly that not one of his slaves can please him (Per passar bene un'ora io non ritrovo / una fra le mie schiave / che mi possa piacer). His solution for his boredom is to tell Haly to get him an Italian woman whose very liveliness will be his own undoing (Tu mi dovresti trovar un’italiana. Ho una gran voglia d’aver una di quelle signorine, che dan martello a tanti cicisbei). Mustafà is sufficiently self-aware that he tries not to appear too eager, but he can’t fully control his emotions, the victim of his own passions. He is so blinded that he fails to see even the Italians’ plot to escape at the end of the opera. Like Isabella, Mustafà thinks in universal gender terms. When Haly tells him that he has found his Italian girl, Mustafà proclaims that he will enjoy her while teaching all men how to humble women (Con questa signorina / me la voglio goder, e agli uomin tutti / oggi insegnar io voglio / di queste belle a calpestar l'orgoglio). With the physical pleasure that women offer comes the delight in chastening them. He does not understand that what he finds so attractive about Italian women are the very things that will humiliate him. Ultimately, love deprives Mustafà of his ability to reason well. In all, he is an anti-Enlightenment, anti-Western figure, considerably orientalized.

Lindoro. Type: Romantic love. Key words: “Languir per una bella.” Here, Anelli's first words tell all: to languish; another translation might be to lie listlessly. Lindoro sings beautifully and follows Isabella's orders well, but otherwise there is not much to say because there is not much that he does. Of course, he is linked romantically to Isabella, but dropping Mosca's duet reduced his role and undermined their relationship. He does lead the initiation of Mustafà into the Pappataci. Is there any basis for thinking that languid Lindoro and hyperactive Isabella would ever have a lasting relationship? ³⁰

Taddeo. Type: Contractual love. Key words: “Misericordia … aiuto … compassione …” Taddeo is the most underrated and surprising character. He is universally scorned as a loser, defeated by his rival Lindoro, a hanger on, a cicisbeo, regularly humiliated by Isabella. He is constantly referred to as “babbeo,” or dolt. His love is contractual because it always seems linked to something else, for example his fuzzy relationship with Isabella while searching for Lindoro. Their decision to stay together in captivity, as “niece and uncle,” is a strategy. His appointment as Kaimakan is part of Mustafà's tactic for courting Isabella. The offer of the Pappataci to Mustafà is a sort of love/gift exchange, albeit a duplicitous one. ³¹ Twice Taddeo uses the term “meriti,” that he is honored as Kaimakan through the merits of his “niece.” This is another reference by Anelli to his sonnet “La calamità d’Italia,” for neither in Algiers nor in Cisalpine Italy did merit receive reward; instead it was the product of favoritism. Taddeo's greatest vice is his self-pity. He is also self-deluded, thinking that Isabella is plotting against the Bey just for him. Gossett calls him a “stock buffo,” by which he means that he sings patter. Yes, there is much that is conventional about Taddeo but also some surprises. He has multiple identities: he calls himself Isabella's companion, she calls him her uncle, and he is made Kaimakan, or governor. ³² He is the one who uses the term cicisbeo the most, and while he is under her thumb he is fully aware of his situation. If Isabella is an Italian patriot, Taddeo is a pre-Risorgimento figure lacking love of country.

Taddeo is in his own way the most Enlightenment figure. Yes, Isabella is the most free, but she rarely liberates herself from the physical. Taddeo is confronted with three quandaries. He argues with Isabella but opts to make up with her because together they have a better chance of surviving capture by the pirates. When he is offered the honor of Kaimakan, Anelli and Rossini depict his thought process: “what a crossroads this is” (che bivio è questo!), “Here we need to do some calculation” (Qua bisogna far un conto), and he runs through the pros and cons of acceptance or rejection. He uses his reason. Finally, as Isabella and Lindoro are about to sail away, he needs to decide what to do.

Alas! What shall I do? Stay or go?

If I stay, I’ll be impaled; if I go, I will play the part of lampione.

Lindoro, Isabella: I am here with good intentions,

I’ll put up with anything, I don’t know what else to say. ³³

The most surprising character of all is Haly, the leader of the pirates and Mustafà's henchman. He goes around impaling people, yet he is a philosopher. Haly. Type: Philosophical love. Key words: “Le femmine d’Italia.” A minor character who sings an “aria del sorbetto” probably not written by Rossini, yet Anelli constructed in him the most coherent comment in the opera. In the recitative, Haly says that Mustafà for all his pride has lost his head. He wanted an Italian girl, got what he asked for, and now he should learn his lesson. Then in the aria he offers a completely rational summary of who Italian women are: confident and shrewd, they know better than anyone the art of lovemaking, and they have refined the talent of gallantry (read cicisbeism). He does not put all this in personal, individual terms but through deduction he constructs an axiom about all Italian women, così fan tutte, from his observation of Isabella. He is the one character without any real link to Isabella, which gives him the necessary distance to draw objective, philosophical conclusions.

Finally, Elvira and by extension Zulma. Type: Marital love. Key words: “Io sarò sciocca e matta … ma l’amo ancor!” (I know that I am foolish and crazy, but I still love him). Elvira is the very model of the loving and subservient wife. She is scolded by Isabella, who compares her to a lamb putting herself into the wolf's mouth, but she also tries to get Mustafà to take his wife back. The women, sometimes joined by Lindoro or Haly, use a whole different vocabulary to describe Isabella. For the men it is always about Isabella's seductive physical beauty, “beltà.” The women refer instead to character: shrewd (scaltra), calm (disinvoltura), candid (franca). They perceive Isabella as an intelligent woman. Elvira puts it well: “What a woman” (Qual donna è questa).

Contexts are explanations and many have been explored. These include the evolving structures of opera buffa, the radical political thoughts and acts of the librettist Angelo Anelli, cicisbeism and the newfound social freedom of (aristocratic) women, the Barbery pirates and slavery, and the relationship of each character to love. Luigi Mosca's version has been considered and compared with Rossini's revisions. Now, a comparison to an opera by a much greater genius needs to be examined, for it is an indirect but most effective way to understand some of the deeper aspects of Rossini's approach to love in L’Italiana; indeed, to understand who he was as a composer.

Rossini and Mozart: A conclusion

In 1825, Rossini wrote Il viaggio a Reims, his last opera buffa as part of the celebration of the coronation of King Charles X of France. One of the characters, the Contessa di Folleville is a fashion-obsessed, aristocratic, and comic character. Her big scene (“Partir, o ciel! desio”) is a mock tragic double aria, in the usual form (la solita forma), according to the Code Rossini (Budden, 1973: 3–24, especially 12). The countess receives word that her coach has overturned and with it all of her belongings. She faints. When she awakens, she sings of her anguish; she simply cannot go on. The chorus tries to comfort her. Then her maid runs in with a large hatbox. Seeing that her hat had survived the accident she begins the “second aria,” a joyful reunion, and sings incredibly difficult music to her bonnet. We know that the countess is ridiculous because the chorus while outwardly supporting the countess emotionally adds an aside: “The scene is comic / It makes us laugh” (È comica la scena, / E ridere ci fa).

Never one to waste good music, Rossini withdrew Il viaggio and re-used much of it for an opéra comique, Le comte Ory, that premiered in 1828. There, the Comtesse di Folleville's aria was transferred to Comtesse Adèle, in the aria “En proie à la tristesse.” Unlike the Contessa, Adèle is not a comic figure. We know that from the testimony of Dame Ragonde, Adèle's faithful companion, who reports on her (our) severe pain (notre peine). Adèle has taken a vow to not permit a man to enter her castle until her brother returns home safely from the Crusades. She and all the other ladies have cut themselves off from worldly love as they pray for the men's return, a sort of temporary monastic existence. She has come to ask the “holy hermit” (Count Ory in disguise) for release from her torment. The text reveals that she is the victim of sadness, constantly suffering, hoping for death. She cries out “What horrible pain!” (O peine horrible) and asks the “hermit” to give her back her happiness. In these sentiments, most directors find mirth, even slapstick. ³⁴

The directors who find the comic in Adèle's suffering overlook a number of things, most obviously the words. They are apparently unaware of Stendhal's point that passion should intrude now and again in opera buffa, and they are ignorant of the fact that Rossini applies this rule regularly in his opera buffa. He does so in Isabella's patriotic aria, Cenerentola's rondo, and most famously in Il barbiere, in Almaviva's “Cessa di più resistere.” I viewed or listened to five performances of “En proie à la tristesse.” They consisted of one stage performance, two concert performances, an audio recording, a recital, and a master class. In every case the singers were true to the words, singing with serious passion and not for laughs. They did so because they were free from the director, free to sing the music and words as intended. ³⁵ The directors are also apparently unacquainted with the deep connection between Rossini and Mozart, as we shall see presently.

Rossini used the music written for a comic parody to depict Adèle's actual painful anxiety at being cut off from love. This was an old problem, the problem of imitation, the proper relationship between words and music. Where Mozart made great use of word painting, most famously in Don Giovanni and Leporello's aria “Madamina il catalogo è questo,” Rossini's imitation was new and different, some said indifferent; his music did not match the words (Senici, 2019: 23–30). ³⁶ More than 20 years after the premiere of L’Italiana, Rossini would share his ideas, a theory of music, something he rarely did, to his friend Antonio Zanolini, who published them as “Una passeggiata in compagnia di Rossini” in 1836. Zanolini begins the conversation by referring to Mozart's imitation: “I told him, with the sincerity of friendship and as a man who feels but knows nothing about music, that I found great power of imitation in Mozart's works, and in his in particular.” ³⁷ Rossini responded that, unlike painting and sculpture:

There are two consequences of this definition of music. The first is the emphasis on the “general character” of the music, music that fits the words but not in any literal sense, and the second is music's portability. This portability accounts for Rossini's willingness to mix genres, to implant an opera seria-like aria into the hilarity of L’Italiana, or to transform a comic aria into a serious one, that is, to shift the music from comic to serious words. Taken to its logical end, it was the creation of a new genre, opera semiseria, another innovation in which Rossini played a key role, his La gazza ladra (1817) being one of the best examples (Budden, 1992: 12). Zedda's invocation of Baudelaire's dual theory of the comic seems inapplicable to Rossini's music, which is not strictly divided in type but which shifts back and forth between buffa and seria characteristics (Zanolini, 1875: 284–285, 291).

Another explanation, less theoretical, more sentimental, is found in Rossini's veneration of Mozart. With “En proie à la tristesse,” Rossini faced with the opportunity to write an aria for a countess in pain, a love lost, who prays for the return of her former happiness (Rendez-moi le bonheur). It would be difficult to imagine that Rossini failed to see the parallels with the Countess Almaviva's aria “Dove sono” from Le nozze di Figaro, what might be called a Mozart moment. This is one of the best arguments for playing the aria seriously, recognizing Rossini's chance to emulate his hero, an assumption that bears testing.

No composer's quips have been compiled more assiduously than Rossini's; some of them he actually said. One of his most-often quoted was to Ignaz Moscheles: “I take Beethoven twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day,” placing himself firmly in the classical-style tradition (Radiciotti, 1929: 22). Two of the most interesting anecdotes linking Rossini to Mozart came from Pauline Viardot, the famous mezzo-soprano, and her husband Louis. In the first, they asked Rossini which of his operas was his favorite. He replied Don Giovanni. That may have been another quip, or it may reveal a deep psychological connection to Mozart, an ideal to strive for, perhaps even a goal to merge, the best of Germanic science (read harmonic invention) and Italian melody. After all, Rossini was weaned on Haydn and Mozart. The second story is more extraordinary. The Viardots owned the autograph score of Don Giovanni, which they kept in a special room and in an elaborate wooden box resembling a reliquary. Louis Viardot wrote an account of Rossini's visit to their home in 1855:

Then he asked to see the manuscript of his favourite opera. “I am going,” he said, “to genuflect in front of this holy relic.” Then, having leafed through a few pages in a religious contemplation: “My friend,” he said to me, stretching out his hand on Mozart's writing, “he is the greatest, he is the master of all, only he had as much science as genius and as much genius as science.” I have gathered these words of Rossini piously. (Everist, 2001: 177)

Before continuing, let 's complicate things a bit by citing Stendhal, and then ask why it seems that while Rossini worshipped Mozart his music does not resemble that of his idol. Here are just a few of Stendhal's points: “… Rossini's music and Mozart's music scarcely ever appeal to the same audience.” “Such qualities [of lightness] are entirely foreign to Mozart; he has neither comic verve nor lightness; he stands almost as diametrically in contrast to Cimarosa as he does to Rossini.” “The more completely one surrenders to the music of Rossini and Cimarosa, the more one gorges on its richness, the more austere the discipline needed to appreciate Mozart.” Finally, and definitively, “Between Rossini's real masterpieces … and Mozart's operas, there is not one single characteristic idea in common” (Stendhal, 1970: 40–42; original emphasis). ³⁹

One explanation for Stendahl's perceptions is a cultural assumption widely held at the time that southern, Italian culture was so profoundly different from northern, Germanic culture that emulation was simply impossible; they were two different worlds. Stendhal wrote: “Mozart in Italy will never enjoy the success which he has known in Germany or in England; the reason which is simplicity itself, is that his music does not reflect the temperamental characteristics induced by the Italian climate …” (Stendhal, 1970: 37; original emphasis; see also Harthan, 1946: 177). (On the contrary, Rossini was accused by some of just such a cultural transmigration, that he had become German) (Mathew and Walton, 2013: 3). ⁴⁰ Stendhal concludes that if you are seeking right reason and deep passion, turn to Mozart, while “[i]n genuine opera buffa, passion is permitted to intrude only now and again; its function, as it were, is to give us respite from too much hilarity” (Stendhal, 1970: 76). The necessary conclusion to this insight is that Rossini wrote better opere buffe than Mozart did, because he followed its tradition of hilarity more faithfully, while Mozart added too much reason, too much weight, so that his operas transcend the genre.

Things are more complicated still when we recall that Zedda used the exact word to describe Rossini's music as did Stendhal—lightness. It is a limiting term, for Rossini lacks Mozart's seriousness; he is “light Mozart.” Rossini himself said as much in a sort of postscript and prayer to the Petite messe solennelle (1863). Whereas Rossini when viewing the Don Giovanni manuscript said that Mozart had “as much” science as genius and vice versa, Rossini described himself as having “A little science, a little heart, that's all” (“J’étais né pour l’Opera Buffa, tu le sais bien! Peu de science, un peu de cœur, tout est là”) (Rattalino, 1977). Perhaps so. More certain is that Rossini had a deep relationship with Mozart and it was a complicated one. How to understand that relationship? One answer is found in L’Italiana.

In L’Italiana, Rossini did something almost unique. While musicologists have detected any number of ways that Rossini's music reflects Mozart's influence, in L’Italiana he quotes “Non più andrai” so boldly and clearly that he wanted everyone to know that he was evoking Mozart. It occurs at a crucial moment as Isabella is about to be brought before the Bey for the first time. At the beginning of the finale to Act One, the chorus of eunuchs sings how Mustafà is the scourge of women and turns tigers into lambs. The next time the chorus sings solo, it is to proclaim the Bey an idiot and a fool (uno stupido, uno stolto) seized by love (amore l’ha colto). It was another Mozart moment. What message was Rossini sending? It was surely to be found in one of the Da Ponte librettos.

In La nozze di Figaro, “Non più andrai” is sung by Figaro to the lovesick Cherubino who is about to be shipped off to the army. Like the Bey, love has caught him and is holding him at its mercy. Then there are all the disguises and deceptions in Act Four, and the uncertainty of whose love is faithful. This is paralleled in Isabella's aria “Per lui che adoro,” the most Mozartian part of the score, where Rossini goes out of his way to create ambiguity and anxiety about who she is making herself beautiful for. Mustafà, with his bloated ego, assumes that it is he she loves, but Lindoro and Taddeo denounce her as crafty and ungracious. ⁴¹ Figaro's Act Four aria “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi” comes to mind.

It was no accident that the invocation of “Non più andrai” occurs just after the words “Chi non sa soggiogar queste belle / venga a scuola dal gran Mustafà” (Those who don’t know how to subjugate those beauties come to the school of the great Mustafà; emphasis mine). A school for lovers, Mustafà style, and so it is to that other school for lovers that we turn: la scuola degli amanti, or Così fan tutte. This is a somewhat risky strategy because Così's libretto poses so many questions. As Gazzola has pointed out, Da Ponte's librettos are almost always based on well-established literary sources while “Così fan tutte presents an uncommon fusion of distinct threads echoing many different possible sources whose interaction in the plot line signals the intention of the librettist to revise well-worn literary conventions” (Gazzola, 2015: 108). ⁴²

The key to understanding Stendahl's comparison of Mozart and Rossini is chronology. Così fan tutte premiered on January 26, 1790, L’Italiana on May 22, 1813. Between those dates, the world had changed, the Old Regime was destroyed, political boundaries were redrawn, and Italy was united in a series of republics and then a kingdom. Interestingly, the musical forms were more continuous than the social and political ones. Mustafà, like Don Alfonso, has no fully developed arias, and Così fan tutte is the ultimate concertato d’azione with six duets, five trios, two quintets, one quartet, a sextet, and two finales. There are other more complicated bases for comparison.

Characters are analogous. Don Alfonso and Taddeo take the world for what it is, but it is Despina and Isabella who share the closest affinity. Both are realists about men, both are sensualists, both are the mechanism that drives the plot, and both are willing to forget the past and to trust in the future. ⁴³ In Despina's aria “Una donna a quindici anni” can be found ideas similar to Isabella's in “Cruda sorte.” Woman should know all the little tricks (Dee saper li maliziette), to feign laughter and tears (Finger riso, finger pianti). They are most alike in claiming how women can lead a thousand men by the nose (ho già menati / Mill’uomini pel naso). But when the maid includes the telling of lies with a straight face (Senza arrosire saper mentire) she reveals herself to be a much cruder advocate for woman. There is nothing heroic about Despina.

Both operas fell out of the repertoire, both conclude equivocally, both librettos were criticized. Così's libretto was particularly reviled in the 19th century and was not performed with its original poetry for more than a century. The real problem with Così fan tutte is not misogyny but Don Alfonso, a bad philosophe. We know that something is amiss right away. In the opening measures of the opera, he sings “Ho I crini già grigi / ex cathedra parlo” (I already have gray hair and speak ex cathedra). He bases his authority on age and religion, the two bulwarks of the Old Regime, the state and the church, the antiquity of dynasties, or on the idea that that which is, is good and true, and on dogma, the ability of bishops to speak ex cathedra, not only authoritatively about what we should believe but also with coercion if necessary. These are exactly the things that the philosophes rejected in Rousseau's Social Contract and Voltaire's famous slogan “Écrasez l’infâme!” In addition, like Voltaire in Candide, Don Alfonso criticizes optimism, the naïve confidence of Ferrando and Guglielmo which disables their critical thinking. Yet in the concluding verses of the opera, Don Alfonso also embraces the opposite idea, to look at the bright side of everything: “Fortunate is the man who takes / Everything in a positive light (Fortunato l’uom che prende / Ogni cosa pel buon verso). While Don Alfonso thinks that he has won the bet, proven that women are like that—inconstant—what he has really done is to undermine the stability of love, having destroyed Ferrando's and Gugielmo's rock-solid if naïve faith in their lovers' fidelity. Indeed, the entire structure of Così fan tutte is riddled with unreality. It is not based on good consistent philosophical argument but rather on disguises, falsehoods, and ploys that Alfonso orchestrates with Despina. What sort of philosopher would argue that truth can be learned through a series of deceptions? “V’ingannai, ma fu l’inganno / Disinganno ai vostri amanti” (I deceived you, but my deception / Undeceived your lovers) sounds like a bit of sophistry.

There is no Don Alfonso in L’Italiana. Along with political reaction came the conviction that the Enlightenment was too destructive in its criticism, too ambiguous to provide something better and more solid as the Revolution seemed to prove. The “philosopher” in L’Italiana was not a gray-haired aristocrat but a pirate. It may be that Don Alfonso is led by reason and not the senses, but his proof is rigged. Isabella has no need for proof; she operates on instinct, on “vaga femina,” on the conviction that her own beauty and self-confidence enable her to control everyone, just as Don Alfonso does but in a completely different way. The soldiers serve some vague, unnamed sovereign, while Isabella “thinks” (pensa) about country, not any or every country but her native land, Italy. All those universal platitudes about reason and nature (“È legge di natura,” says Despina) were replaced by something much narrower, corporate, and concrete—the nation, the right of each people to exercise their unique identity together, nationalism, the most powerful force in 19th-century Europe.

The closest connection of all between the two operas is found in the subtitle of Così fan tutte, that is, Ossia la scuola degli amanti. Here is how L’Italiana ends:

Have a good trip. Take care.

You can happily leave these arenas.

There is neither fear or danger for you.

The beautiful Italian girl came to Algiers

To teach jealous and haughty lovers

So that a woman if she wishes,

can do what she likes to anyone. (Emphasis mine) ⁴⁴

It is not “Così fan tutte” but “la scuola degli amanti” that resonates as the lesson to be learned, a revolutionary one, that a woman, Isabella, a beautiful one, has the power to teach lovers more effectively than Mustafà and more truthfully than Don Alfonso “insegna agli amanti gelosi ed altieri.” Despina may be an extension of Don Alfonso but Isabella acts alone, based on her own innate talents. She is neither old, nor aristocratic, nor ecclesiastical. Her power is erotic, romantic, perfectly free, and absolutely feminine. She does not calculate like Taddeo (she does not have to); she responds instantaneously from her own nature. All is made well not by a wager made in some cafe (where Alfonso declines to take up the sword) but by force of arms that she leads that allows the Italian slaves to liberate themselves from the brutality of a slave-owning despotism and to return home. Many enlightened ideas have been rejected; what survived was not that all women are like that but that all women are free to be whatever they want to be.

Returning to Zedda's disparagement of Anelli's libretto as “having nothing to do with realism,” L’Italiana has much more to do with realism than Così fan tutte, so much of which is fabricated. ⁴⁵ The Albanians are not Albanians. The doctor and the notary are really Despina in disguise. Any suggestion that Don Alfonso's and Despina's manipulations have strengthened the couples’ relationships is dubious at best. What they have learned is just as likely that as couples they were mismatched.

One of the key questions for Così fan tutte has been: where did Da Ponte get the idea for the story? The answer seems to be out of his own learned head, his imagination, though there is no lack of traditional elements in the libretto such as the resourceful and grumbling servant (Gazzola, 2015; Polzonetti, 2002). ⁴⁶ L’Italiana is based on real things: Algiers, its Bey, corsairs, harems and slavery, cicisbeism, love triangles, Italian patriotism, all really existed in the minds and experience of both creators and listeners. True to the opera buffa tradition, it exaggerated real and everyday things for laughs. It is true that we cannot be certain that the relationship between Isabella and Lindoro will last or that the reconciliation between Mustafà and Elvira is permanent, but at least at the end of the opera romantic and married loves have been restored, and patriotic love has won Italian freedom. Love is triumphant.

Far from the ironic and inscrutable Rossini, detached from reality, he is a composer very much connected to his world through his first comic masterpiece. There is no greater proof of this attachment than his popularity, which was second to none. As Senici points out, he was in sync with his time and much imitated. He brought opera buffa to a new level of development in two opposite directions simultaneously. He inserted opera seria-style singing while imbuing his music with a whole new level of energetic rapid flow and concertato d’azione, especially in the famous finale to Act One of L’Italiana. This was a version of opera buffa that had traveled far from its great archetype, Pergolesi's La serva padrona. At the same time, he looked back to Mozart with veneration as the greatest master of the genre, the close parallels of schools of lovers in both Così fan tutte and L’Italiana being no accident, just as were the symmetries between Le nozze di Figaro and Le Comte Ory. This is Rossini's great contribution to Italian music; he served as the transitional figure from the great classical composers of the 18th century to the romantic ones of the 19th. Anelli deserves much credit for his libretto, setting it amidst the barbery corsairs and cicisbei, all recognizably modern. Rossini brought things further through the revisions to Mosca's version and the music he made for it, emphasizing Isabella's freedom and the source of all love. In her patriotic aria, he established himself as a bona fide supporter of a united Italy, even if it were not his intention. With hindsight, one can see why Rossini retired from the operatic stage 16 years later, just as his international career was at its apex. He was a person caught between revolutionary and reactionary forces, a modernizer born out of a collapsing classical past, a process that could hardly have been foreseen in 1813. One thing is certain: that much of Rossini's creativity was entangled with Mozart's. Therein lies the puzzling nature of his love duets, or their absence thereof, Rossini the classicist the reluctant founder of romantic Italian opera. ⁴⁷ That tangled web is too deeply embedded in his psyche to fully explain. The same may be said about his clear identification with Isabella whose character he greatly strengthened. Was that impulse possibly related to his mother Anna Rossini and his future wife, Isabella Colbran? All that can be said is that they all shared one thing—singing—and that was paramount to his creative life. ⁴⁸

Despite his sacred devotion to Mozart, it seems that Rossini understood that his world no longer existed, was no longer real, Enlightened philosophy no longer trustworthy. Not only had the aristocracy of birth been destroyed by revolution but the aristocracy of wisdom had as well, replaced by a contending array of ideologies. ⁴⁹ Don Alfonso was substituted by the more modern Isabella. Relations between the sexes were based not on abstract philosophical assumptions, whether medieval or enlightened, but on much more emotive and physical love. ⁵⁰ If anyone in Così fan tutte emerges as a wise predictor of the future it may be Despina, who says: “Well, we’re on earth, not up in heaven” (Eh, che noi siamo in terra, e non in Cielo,” Act Two, Scene One). Like Isabella, her feet are planted firmly on the ground. So too in his own way were Rossini's, whose creative ideal was personified by Mozart but who made few theoretical claims. Rossini never ceased to respect the audience's opinion and when it lost its dedication to beautiful singing, as he perceived it, he quit the stage. ⁵¹ Mozart's world could be preserved in a literal, material way, in Viardot's box, and it could survive too as an aesthetic ideal. Mozart's music was never the problem; it could be worshipped, idealized but not duplicated because he was the greatest composer, the master of both genius and science. The strains of “Non più andrai” were an homage to another type of love, the love of a lost past and to Mozart's genius. The rest was forgotten.