This chapter explores why, in an era so strongly associated with Beethoven and Schubert, Rossini’s music was such a hit in Vienna, looking at the contribution of opera in the home to this popularity. Opera arrangements spread Rossini’s music around a wide public even before public performances were staged. Hit numbers such as ‘Di tanti palpiti’ from Tancredi were performed over and over in Vienna, in various venues and with various combinations of instruments and voices. The ‘judges of German art’ decried his work in newspaper reviews; but this did little or nothing to dampen the market’s enthusiasm. Sales of Rossini’s operas rocketed, as publishing catalogues from the era demonstrate. The popularity of Rossini, fuelled via opera arrangements, is linked to those aspects of Rossini’s music that the critics decried, especially repetition, noise, genre blurring, and theatricality. The thirst for arrangements that promoted and exacerbated these aspects is linked, in turn, to the context of surveillance and censorship in which the contemporary Viennese found themselves, and related to Habsburg politics and the Metternich System.

Monteverdi’s relationship with Torquato Tasso (1544–95) is typically associated with the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624; pub. Eighth Book, 1638): a spectacular musical scena drawn from Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata, in which the crusader knight Tancredi battles the Saracen heroine Clorinda. But Monteverdi’s introduction to the musical possibilities of the Gerusalemme began decades before, just as his experiments with the musical lament long predated the opera Arianna (1608). This chapter examines Monteverdi’s earliest settings of Tasso’s epic – the lamentations of Tancredi and Armida in the Third Book (1592) – as musical representations of lament through not the verisimilitude of opera but rather the artifice of five-voice madrigals. Monteverdi’s initial engagement with Tasso’s Gerusalemme catalysed the composer’s early experiments with the musical lament, a topos that occupied an important space both in opera and in madrigals.