On 15 December 1815 a twenty-three-year-old from Pesaro signs a contract with Duke Francesco Sforza-Cesarini, impresario of the Teatro Argentina in Rome. He undertakes to write a comic opera for the following carnival, to deliver it in time for rehearsals, and to sit at the harpsichord for the first three performances. The fee is four hundred scudi. The opera goes on stage on 20 February 1816 and will be called Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Between the signature and the premiere little more than two months go by, and in those two months fit the choice of subject, the writing of the libretto by Cesare Sterbini, the composition, the copying of the parts and the rehearsals. The music, by Rossini’s own account, repeated many times, he wrote in less than three weeks. The figure fluctuated in his tales, as all his tales fluctuate, but the order of magnitude holds and is confirmed by the calendar.
The contemporary reaction to this fact is always the same, and it is wrong: what a genius, how did he do it. The right question is a different one: what production system made such a thing normal, given that it was not an exception but the rule for everyone in that trade.
The system was called impresa, and it worked like this. A theatre opened by seasons, the main one of which was carnival. The impresario took the theatre under management, hired a company of singers, and commissioned one or more new operas. The composer arrived in town a few weeks beforehand, met the singers he found there, and wrote for them: if the tenor had a formidable high note and little agility, his aria was built accordingly. The cast was not chosen for the opera, the opera was written for the cast.
There were precise rules on what was due to each, and they were called convenienze. The leading man and the leading lady were entitled to a certain number of solo pieces, the supporting singers to fewer, and nobody could fall below the minimum for their rank without a lawsuit. The structure of an Italian nineteenth-century opera is also the result of this bookkeeping.
Reuse was declared practice, not shame. The overture that stands in front of Barbiere Rossini had already used twice for other operas, serious in subject and completely different. Nobody found it scandalous, because operas were given in one city and then vanished, the audience was local, and music was working material, not a monument. By the same criterion composers moved arias from one title to another depending on who was singing.
The numbers that come out of this system look impossible today. Rossini wrote thirty-nine operas between 1810 and 1829, that is, in nineteen years, and then stopped at thirty-seven. Donizetti wrote about seventy in a career of twenty-five years, and in his best years delivered three or four a year. They were not workaholics: they were professionals inside a market that demanded new product continually, as television demands it today.
The average quality of that output was uneven, and it is the point the nostalgic skip. Of Donizetti’s seventy operas, those that stay in the repertoire are fewer than ten. But the ratio must be read the right way round: those ten exist because there were seventy. A system that produces a lot also produces masterpieces, for statistical reasons before artistic ones, and above all keeps everyone’s muscles in training: composers, singers, orchestras, audience.
It ended for reasons that are not musical. Operas began to stay on the bill longer, copyright made it more convenient to revive a successful title than to commission a new one, and in the twentieth century the repertoire crystallised around some thirty titles. From that moment the opera house stopped being an industry that manufactures and became an institution that preserves.
Rossini died at Passy in 1868, forty years after he had stopped writing for the theatre. In the meantime Europe had begun to consider his operas classics, that is, exactly the opposite of what they were when he wrote them: fresh goods, delivered on deadline, for an audience that wanted another one the following month.