From Publishers Weekly
Servadio, a prolific U.K.-based writer on music and art, has had access to a new trove of personal letters to paint a much fuller picture than usual of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), ebullient (at first) composer of such works as The Barber of Seville and William Tell. She shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, he had a poor and unhappy childhood, so that his early enormous productivity was, as much as anything, a way to help himself and his family rise above poverty. By the age of 30, working at white heat, Rossini had written most of the music we recognize; for nearly 40 years thereafter, though rich and famous-he was mobbed wherever he went in Vienna, Paris and London-he put down his pen. Servadio shows him suffering from a combination of deep depression and neurasthenic illness of a type then unfamiliar to doctors. After his opera singer wife died, Rossini married one of his mistresses, the beautiful Parisian courtesan Olympe Pelissier, who devotedly nursed him for the rest of his life. The personal details in Servadio's account are fascinating, but even more so are her observations on the composer's role in 19th-century music. As one of the few who could, and did, meet both Beethoven and Wagner as an equal, Rossini spanned the period that saw music evolve from a high craft to the center of Romantic tumult. Beethoven, perhaps unkindly, urged him to stick to the opera buffa at which he excelled, though Servadio reminds us that some of his greatest and little-known works, like Moses in Egypt and Lady of the Lake, were in fact profoundly serious and moving. This is a deeply rewarding book, written with real personality and much scholarship. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The son of a singer and a ne'er-do-well, Rossini (1792-1868) became rich and respected as the composer of one opera buffa smash after another. A playboy who contracted gonorrhea and suffered severe depression, he married, but eventually separated from, a Spanish soprano. He spent his last years, dogged by paranoia and gonorrhea-related inflammations, under the courtesan Olympe's care, which included maintaining an artist's salon in their Paris home so that the composer could spend his final months among friends. No less a figure than Stendhal wrote the first Rossini biography. Servadio places Rossini within the political environment of his period, making his biography an engaging tale of the rise of Republicanism and the shifts between Austria and Napoleon for the domination of Europe--and this despite dwelling excessively on Rossini's state of mind during the long denouement between Guillaume Tell (1829), his final opera, and his death. In Servadio's hands, Rossini's music is hardly important; the plot in which he was a player reigns supreme. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioacchino Rossini captured the ears and hearts of music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph-works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece, William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent for more than forty years. The mystery that drove Rossini from the forefront of Europe's cultural stage and that curtailed an unparalleled operatic career lies at the center of Gaia Servadio's perceptive and revealing biography. With the benefit of previously unpublished letters and other new material, Servadio traces the history of Rossini-a man who exchanged ideas with Richard Wagner and in Paris salons kept company with Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Eugene Delacroix-from a difficult, impoverished childhood through his complicated relationships with his divas, to his battles with nervous illnesses. She sets Rossini's life, too, against the sweep of European history in an age defined and betrayed by Napoleon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioachino Rossini won over music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph - works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, the charming La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent, for more than forty years." "With the benefit of Rossini's previously unpublished letters and other new material, Gaia Servadio's perceptive and revealing biography explores the mystery of Rossini's withdrawal from the forefront of Europe's cultural stage and the curtailing of an unparalleled operatic career. She traces the remarkable rise of Rossini - a man who parleyed with Richard Wagner and in Paris kept company with Victor Hugo and Eugene Delacroix - from a difficult, impoverished childhood through complicated relationships with his divas to his long battle with nervous illnesses." "Servadio also sets this fascinating life against the Romantic era of European history, an age defined musically by Beethoven and betrayed politically by Napoleon. Rossini - whose career peaked between Napoleon's downfall in 1815 and the "July Monarchy" of 1830 - was the link between the neoclassical and the romantic, between monarchies and revolutions, autocracy and liberalism." When Beethoven told him that he should stick to comedies, however, Rossini never forgot or forgave him. After he returned to Italy in 1836, he did not compose again until he moved back to Paris in his final years. His last major composition of this period is his Petite messe solennelle, holds Rossini's final testament. For Servadio's conclusion of this unparalleled career, it is this Mass that yields a clue to the mystery and the key to the soul of the man who made music once for all Europe and finally for God alone.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Summerville, an English bookseller and Napoleon buff, has done a thoroughly fine job of editing one of the classic Napoleonic memoirs into a volume accessible to modern English-speaking readers. De Segur, a general in Napoleon's army, was an expressive eyewitness to the partial triumphs and total tragedies. Many of these events are well known, so Summerville condenses the political and diplomatic background, as well as many of the battle reports, with editorial skill. He demonstrates, too, descriptive (sometimes irreverent) flair: Napoleon in 1812 was like "some ageing rock star embarking on a farewell tour"; General Mikhail Kutusov was "an overweight bon viveur; a one-eyed womanizer." Summerville also offers a chronology, a glossary and extensive annotation. Even the accounts of the high points give us new dimensions to a story often rather brusquely summarized in general histories. We see Napoleon's belief in his "star," and his position in the eyes of his men weakening as his physical and mental health decline. We learn that Smolensk had stout medieval walls, that the Emperor narrowly escaped being blown up by stored gunpowder in the Kremlin during the burning of Moscow, and that starving soldiers sliced flesh out of living horses, who were apparently too numb with cold to notice, on the last stage of the retreat. And the crossing of the Berezina-on improvised bridges with discipline breaking down and the Cossacks hovering around-is something no horror novelist would have dared to invent. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Servadio (The Real Traviata) traces the life of Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) from humble beginnings in Pesaro through lionization as one of the most important composers of the 19th century. She also provides historical background for his compositions, some details regarding plot, performers, and venues, and descriptions of Rossini's interesting encounters with the likes of Beethoven, Byron, and Stendhal (an early biographer of Rossini). Rossini's relationships with his two wives and with his parents are thoroughly explored, and Servadio devotes considerable space to his dalliances with a variety of women, his difficulty with nerves and depression, and his (and writer Balzac's) deaths, finally crossing the line from tasteful to lurid. In addition, her traversal is marred by odd anachronisms (references to Tony Blair and Tiananmen Square), slang ("cool"), personal interjections, amateur psychoanalysis, unnecessary vulgarity, and many spelling or grammatical errors as well as use of Italian words that are not translated or explained. Servadio claims to have relied on Richard Osborne's excellent Rossini volume in Oxford's "Master Musicians" series; libraries would do better to acquire that book and search out Alan Kendall's Gioacchino Rossini: The Reluctant Hero. Not recommended. (Index and illustrations not seen.)-Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews