Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 1755. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Rome, 20 February 1816, Teatro Argentina. An opera buffa that the playbill calls Almaviva, o sia L’inutile precauzione goes on stage, and the evening sinks amid whistles and uproar. The audience does not know it, but it is hearing one of the most performed comic operas of all time, the one the world will come to know as The Barber of Seville. In the first act an unctuous music master, Don Basilio, explains to the guardian Bartolo how to get rid of a rival without touching him: you slander him. And to explain it he sings the aria that every listening guide cites when it needs to show what the Rossini crescendo is.
The words of that aria, though, have a father older than Rossini and his librettist Cesare Sterbini. They come from Paris, from the Comédie-Française, where on 23 February 1775 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had staged Le Barbier de Séville. Beaumarchais was the son of a watchmaker and had taught the harp to the four daughters of Louis XV: he knew mechanisms and he knew music. In the second act, scene eight, his Bazile gives Bartholo the same speech, in prose. Slander starts low, “comme hirondelle avant l’orage,” like a swallow before the storm; then “pianissimo murmure et file”; it passes from mouth to mouth “piano, piano”; it grows “rinforzando de bouche en bouche”; and in the end it becomes “un crescendo public, un chorus universel de haine et de proscription.”
Look at those words. In a French prose text, to describe how a man is destroyed, Beaumarchais uses the technical terms of the Italian score: pianissimo, piano, rinforzando, crescendo. Each is a dynamic marking, and they appear in the exact order in which a conductor would find them on the stand. Forty-one years before Rossini made it a trademark, the crescendo was already written down, word for word, as the shape of a piece of gossip.
Sterbini carries it into verse almost to the letter. Slander “begins to whisper,” goes “softly, softly, close to the ground, under the breath, hissing”; then, “out of the mouth, the din keeps growing,” until it bursts “like a cannon shot,” in a tumult “that makes the air resound.” Rossini does not have to invent anything. He only has to make the orchestra do what the text says: begin in a whisper and arrive at a roar. It is the technique he used all his life, the one that earned him the nickname Signor Crescendo, and the textbook definition coincides with the plot of the aria. A few bars repeated; the sections of the orchestra entering one after another; the dynamics climbing while the phrase stays the same.
Heard with the libretto before your eyes, Basilio’s slander becomes a lesson in anatomy. The Rossini crescendo is repetition gaining weight. The phrase that on the first pass goes almost unnoticed, by the fourth pass fills the entire hall, and no one could say at which bar it stopped being a whisper. Slander works the same way: a rumour told once is an insinuation, repeated enough it becomes a public fact. Beaumarchais had understood it as a man of the court and the courtroom; Rossini set it to music as a man of the theatre, with the coolness of one who knows that an orchestra, like a public square, catches fire one music stand at a time.
That is why Basilio’s aria is the best starting point for anyone who wants to learn to hear the crescendo in the symphonies, where no words point the way. In the overtures the repeated phrase tells no story, and yet the mechanism is identical: a short idea, stated under the breath, that finds one more accomplice at every return. Whoever has followed it once in The Barber, with Sterbini’s verses as a map, recognises it everywhere.
Beaumarchais died in Paris on 18 May 1799. Gioachino Rossini, born in Pesaro on 29 February 1792, was seven years old.