THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.(Gioacchino Rossini's Italiana septet)(Critical Essay)

PAUL THOMASON believes that Rossini's hard-charging Italiana septet is slower than it sounds -- and smarter than you think

Rossini's comedies are justly renowned for their brilliant finales, with singers and orchestra gradually piling up individual rhythms and melodic patterns on top of one other, capped by the composer's best-known invention, the Rossini crescendo. The breathtaking virtuosity required in the Act I finales of L'Italiana in Algeri and the more famous Il Barbiere di Siviglia should leave audiences reeling. To achieve the intended effect, the music must be sung cleanly, accurately and with panache. Any sloppiness dilutes the drama.

Yet time after time, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, one of the great examples of deft, commedia dell'arte humor, gets ruined by directors who don't trust the composer, adding gratuitous, utterly inappropriate, slapstick stage business. Unfortunately, the critical response to such travesties has been along the lines of, "While the stage action wasn't Rossini's, a director has to do something to make the routine, formula music of an Italian comic-opera finale interesting to today's audience."

It is true that Rossini's finales have a structure, but what he does within that structure can by no stretch of the imagination be labeled "routine" or "formula" music. Consider the maligned Act I finale of Barbiere. The soloists sing in unison, "My head seems to be in a fiery smithy: the sound of the anvils, ceaseless and growing, deafens the ear." Under them, Rossini quite superbly illustrates all the turmoil in the orchestra. The first and second violins play rapid eighth-note triplets (marked pianissimo), but Rossini adds another dimension by marking the first two notes of the triplets to be slurred on the first and third beats, and all the other notes staccato. It is a subtle touch, but one that gives the music a buoyant sense of propulsion on the measure's strong beats. While this whirling is going on in the violins, the trumpets, horns, clarinets and piccolo each play a single quarter note -- the trumpets on the first beat of the measure, horns on the second beat, clarinet on the third and piccolo on the last beat. The cumulative effect is a constantly shifting orchestral timbre, as the single note travels higher and higher up the scale.

Rossini repeats this gently roiling music for only thirty measures, barely enough time for the audience to assimilate the magic of it before he changes it subtly. The higher-voiced singers begin a staccato eighth-note pattern, with individual lower voices providing a rhythmic anchor with a four-note motif. To the violins' eighth-note triplets, Rossini adds first the clarinets for four measures, then the piccolo for the next four measures, which means the color of the orchestral sound is always changing. Under this, the bassoons, violas, cellos and double basses are playing staccato eighth notes -- all this marked pianissimo in the score.

It is only after Rossini has asked the orchestra to crescendo "little by little" that he has all the soloists sing the same eighth-note rhythm (which automatically makes a stronger sound) and has all the instruments of the orchestra playing at the same time.

For this music to make its full effect, all the notes must be heard, with their individual markings observed precisely. The texture has to be clean, so the audience can grasp the difference between a note being played by the clarinet or by the piccolo. If the sound from the orchestra -- and soloists -- is murky and undifferentiated, all Rossini's brilliantly textured music becomes merely a lump of sound, and the unerring pacing of the growing dynamic level is lost. When that happens, some conductors begin racing through the piece, trying to whip up the music artificially, and stage directors throw in comic routines to try to distract the audience.