Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:38:25.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Reimagining Rossini

Obituaries as Transnational Narratives of Italian Opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2022

Axel Körner
Affiliation:
University College London
Paulo M. Kühl
Affiliation:
University of Campinas, Brazil
Get access

Summary

As the first textual document to be produced following an individual’s death, the obituary is often the starting point of any biography, a work which by nature requires a retrospective assessment of the experiences of a concluded life. Yet despite the value and relevance of biographical literature to the field of musicology, the obituaries of composers are rarely employed as source material by historians of music. The death of Gioachino Rossini, one of the first true global celebrities in the history of music, provoked a tremendous international media response whose full extent may only be speculated upon. This chapter examines and compares obituaries of the composer from the French, English, German and Austrian press, bringing to light in condensed form the then-predominant narratives of Rossini’s life. The reading of these obituaries reveals a general transnational perspective on Italian opera, typical of the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the national peculiarities of Rossini’s reception.

Type
Chapter
Information
Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective
Reimagining Italianità in the Long Nineteenth Century
, pp. 147 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×