Gioachino Rossini: SEI

"Largo al factotum della citta! Largo! La la la la la la la LA!"

"Simple melody and variety in rhythm".

"Rossini, in music, is the genius of sheer animal spirits. It is a species as inferior to that of Mozart, as the cleverness of a smart boy is to that of a man of sentiment; but it is genius nevertheless" — Leigh Hunt, English essayist and poet

The composer Rossini, I feel, is a fairly clear typing.

Rossini was constitutionally, cheerfully, almost philosophically lazy. He once famously refused to retrieve a manuscript page that had fallen on the floor on the grounds that it would be easier to rewrite it than to bend down — SEI's Si comfort-seeking at its most crystalline. A contemporary biographer noted that England and Rossini "were not made for each other" — he was unlikely to be enthused by the weather or the cooking. The sensory register clearly was very meaningful to him.

His natural home was opera buffa — comic opera, the genre most oriented toward immediate sensory pleasure, warmth, and delight rather than grand historical emotion or systematic development. The contrast with Wagner is almost typological in itself, the EIE composer par excellence: wound-tight historical consciousness, the sense of personal mission to transform culture, the exhausting need to make opera a total artwork serving a grand ideological vision. Although even Wagner, who had hardly a kind word to say for anyone but himself, described Rossini's music as "narcotising melodic invention" — an inadvertently perfect description of SEI's gift, music that works on the senses directly, pleasurably, without demanding intellectual labor in return. Rossini, for his part, conceded Wagner's importance as "the voice of the future" while quipping that his operas had "beautiful moments, but awful quarter-hours." The wit is SEI's — warm, sensory, judging everything by immediate experiential pleasure rather than systematic significance. Rossini's ability to create an emotional impression without any high dramatic register pointed to the way SEI's creative Fe interacts with lead Si.

The quintessential example of Rossini at his best is Figaro's 'Largo al factotum' from The Barber of Seville — music that is sensuous, brilliant and rhythmically vital, overflowing with immediate delight. Verdi himself praised the opera's "abundance of true musical ideas." Rossini was so obsessed with Mozart in his youth that his friends nicknamed him "The Little German" — both composers share an extraordinary facility for melody and an instinct for theatrical pleasure, though Mozart's range extended further into complexity and darkness than Rossini's essentially sunny musical temperament ever wished to go. When Beethoven met Rossini in Vienna — where "Rossini fever" had swept the city to what one observer called "an idolatrous orgy" — he made plain that Rossini's talents were not for serious opera, and urged him above all to "do more Barbiere." Beethoven's own type is harder to discern — the socionist Talanov had him as ILE with an accent on SLE — but what's clear is that it was a case of a serious, systematically ambitious composer recognizing and endorsing a completely different but equally genuine artistic intelligence. Rossini's Ne was by no means particularly weak, and it was clearly "suggestive" to the original ideas of the age — SEI, on average, has the highest Ne among sensory types — but it's hard to see it as leading fuction-strength level, either.

At 37, having written 39 operas in roughly 19 years, Rossini simply stopped — producing only the late Péchés de vieillesse, which he called "sins of old age," in the remaining 39 years of his life. He retired because composing for public consumption was effortful and eating well was more immediately pleasant. He was an expert chef who, judging from his well-rounded physique, enjoyed consuming his culinary creations as much as preparing them. He claimed it took him about four minutes to write an aria — roughly as long as it took to boil himself a portion of rice.

He suffered serious physical and mental deterioration in his later years, but the pattern of his recovery is itself revealing. Gossett observes that although an account of Rossini's life before 1855 makes depressing reading, "it is no exaggeration to say that, in Paris, Rossini returned to life." Restored to good company and comfortable circumstances, he recovered his health and joie de vivre — and he and his second wife Olympe established a salon that became internationally famous, its Saturday evening gatherings quickly becoming, in one writer's words, "the city's highest social prize," attended by Liszt, Verdi, Gounod, Rubinstein, and the leading singers and violinists of the day. This is SEI's wellbeing in a nutshell: genuinely dependent on sensory comfort and warm sociality, genuinely recoverable once the conditions of pleasure are restored. He dedicated his first new music to Olympe "as a simple testimony of gratitude for the affectionate, intelligent care which she lavished on me during my overlong and terrible illness." The warmth is characteristically direct and unperforming.

At the end of the manuscript of his Petite Messe Solennelle, Rossini wrote: "Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is it sacred music I have written, or damned music? I was born for opera buffa, as you know well. A little technique, a little heart, that's all. Be blessed then, and grant me Paradise." The self-deprecation is partly performative, but the reduction of his entire genius to "a little technique, a little heart" captures something genuine about SEI-style artistic sensibility — the orientation toward immediate sensory impression and emotional warmth, not the systematic ambition or historical grandeur of many other composers. 

It's also worth noting that Rossini, unlike many other composers, didn't seem to have any significant public feuds with other people. Wagner's ideological combativeness was legendary, and even Beethoven had his share of bitter disputes. These are composers for whom conflict had a certain inspiring quality — the enemy clarifies the artistic mission. Rossini simply didn't operate that way.

Perhaps the most perfectly SEI thing ever recorded about him is his account (found on classicfm.com) of the three times he wept in his life: the first when his earliest opera failed, the second when a truffled turkey fell into the water during a boating party, and the third when he first heard Paganini play. The juxtaposition of artistic failure, culinary catastrophe, and genuine aesthetic rapture — ranked without apparent irony as equivalently moving experiences — is SEI's entire sensory-emotional world compressed into a single anecdote.

"Animal spirits", from the initial quote, are exactly the right words for SEI's immediate sensory vitality, and Hunt's condescensing attitude toward it (versus Mozart's "sentiment") reveals more about Hunt's own type preferences than about Rossini's limitations. The comparison to "a smart boy" versus "a man of sentiment" is a complaint that Rossini doesn't take things seriously enough — which is exactly what SEI doesn't do, and exactly why the music feels the way it does.

Rossini's SEI typing is one of history's great demonstrations that sensory immediacy and present-focused pleasure can produce artistic genius just as surely as systematic ambition or historical mission, and considerably more enjoyably.