No composer in the history of Western music had ever experienced the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim and artistic influence enjoyed by Gioachino Rossini during his career as an opera composer in Italy, between 1810 and 1823. Rossini's music reached an unprecedented of number of listeners, whether in opera houses or concert halls, or played in countless arrangements for all sorts of performing forces in spaces both public and private, or simply whistled in the streets. It is all the more surprising, then, that with few exceptions Rossini's works have played a decidedly secondary role in twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of nineteenth-century music. One of the reasons is that the causes of the instantaneous and enormous success with which his operas were greeted at their first appearance have not been examined in sufficient depth: the call of history has not been answered precisely because, by and large, Rossini's operas have been kept out of history. The foremost aim of this project, therefore, is to think afresh about the motives behind the Rossinian furore in early nineteenth-century Italy by putting his works back into history, which is to say, into the culture and society within which they were conceived, performed, seen and discussed, and to which they made self-evidently important contributions. In order to do this, this project first examines a wealth of new documents concerning, on the one hand, the genesis of Rossini's operas in Italy, and, on the other, their discourse. It then builds a new interpretation of their musical dramaturgy on the basis of both these documents and of some key texts of contemporary Italian literature and thought (by Foscolo and Leopardi among others). The working hypothesis is that Rossini's operas can be interpreted as a reaction to the trauma that the Napoleonic wars constituted for Italians, which these works tried to counter through their highly repetitive dramatic shape and musical style.
The present project is the first to investigate nineteenth-century Italian opera in terms of its encounter with modernity, arguing that Rossini's Italian operas were greeted with furore by Italians because they responded in an unprecedentedly satisfactory way to the challenges thrown at these very Italians by the traumatic arrival of the Napoleonic armies in 1796 and all that followed. Rossini's Italian operas, then, coincide with that specific moment in Italian history identified with the beginning of modernity proper (as opposed to early modernity; Italian terminology is of course different, but here I adhere to the usage common in the English speaking world).
In this sense, the present project shares significant premises with a few recent musicological volumes that explore the relationship between music and modernity. Beside the already mentioned _Listening to Reason_ by Michael P. Steinberg, these include Karol Berger's _Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity_ (University of California Press, 2007), John Butt's _Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions_ (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Julian Johnson's _Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity_ (Oxford University Press, 2015). Our common aim is to tease out the intersections between particular kinds of music and that "bundle of attitudes and mindsets" (Butt) generally called modernity. Yet the present project stands apart from these volumes in its concentration not only on opera, but on precisely the theatrical mode that many have argued is crucial to modernity. More significantly, unlike these volumes, the present project takes great pains to emphasize the many ways in which Rossini's modernity remains radically at odds with common present-day understandings of musical and operatic modernity. While conceived in response to events, situations, ideas and emotions that are usually taken to herald the beginning of "our" era, Rossini's Italian operas present us with ways of conceiving the relationship between representation and reality that are significantly different from those we consider "ours", at least in today's world of opera and art music. This is proven by the ongoing difficulties of integrating Rossini's works into histories of music and opera discussed above. Twentieth-century popular music may function as a closer correlate to his operas.
The music of Rossini's Italian operas, much like most of twentieth-century popular music, is a music in the present tense, conceived of and for a very specific historical moment, and so closely connected with that moment that, once the moment itself passed, most of the music also quickly fell out of fashion, to an extent not experienced by the musics discussed in the volumes mentioned above. Bach's would be the obvious exception if it were not for the immense canonical and historiographical prominence that it has acquired over the past two centuries, a prominence to which Rossini's music cannot even remotely come close. The connection between Rossini's music and modernity is therefore particularly unusual. This music constitutes an unprecedentedly successful response to the advent of modernity in a country where that advent was particularly traumatic. At the same, its very topicality -- its very modernity in a sense -- was the cause for its progressive decline in the public consciousness once that particular moment became the past. Unlike some other music composed at the time and in response to a very similar moment of modernity -- Beethoven's, for instance -- this music was not conceived for the future as well as the present, and did not make any meaningful gesture of recognition toward its past. Rossini's operas thus retrospectively failed to conform to some defining characteristics of the music of modernity as discussed by Berger and Johnson among others. By attending to the reasons for this gap, the present project has the potential of changing our conception of musical modernity by expanding it to include hitherto neglected procedures and attitudes.
Moreover, the hypotheses about the functions and meanings of musical repetition advanced by the present project can have significant implications for the understanding of repetition in music by other composers, either from Rossini's time -- for example Schubert -- or later -- Bruckner comes to mind. Traditional music historiography has cast both of these composers as the "other" of a perceived mainstream (Beethoven, Wagner), much like Rossini. In fact, the present project contributes to recent efforts to deconstruct a number of compositional and aesthetic assumptions central to the project of musical modernity, especially in its nineteenth-century manifestations, and specifically regarding its privileging of "development". As the case of Rossini's Italian operas proves, repetition can be an equally modern compositional technique and aesthetic category, even in the nineteenth century.