Music
Italian vivacity
James Harding
Italian opera is a rich preserve for those of us who cherish the absurdity that endears — and endures. It revels in a dottiness far removed from the other type of higher lunacy displayed by huge women masquerading as Rhine maidens and fat men pretending to be Siegfried in goatskin shorts. The Italians set about the job with a gusto you can't help relishing, How, ever mad the plot, however extravagant the action, they have a vivacity that carries all before it and suspends belief, at least for as long as the roulades sparkle winningly and the cantilena ripples smoothly on. Like the operas themselves, the men who brought them into being were larger than life. Having composed about thirty-eight in twenty years, sometimes at the rate of three or four a year, Rossini gave up in his midforties and glided into luxurious retirement as a Grand Old Man. Hiss successor was Gaetano Donizetti, an even more prolific composer of more than seventy stage works. Something like half of them were modelled on Rossini. If the latter created The Barber of Seville in a fortnight, Donizetti could knock off a whole act within a few hours and write the words as well. No wonder this frail, charming, hypersensitive man, exhausted by syphilis and overwork, died paralysed and insane at the age of fifty.
With Anna Bolena in 1830 he broke out of the Rossini mould and confirmed a gift for opera seria. The time he spent in Paris
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