BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, July 20, 1822

Tonight is the final performance of Rossini’s Zelmira, the centerpiece of the Vienna Rossini Festival. As the adulation continues unabated, Rossini must nevertheless depart. He writes a song, “Addio ai viennesi” as a way of showing thanks to Vienna. Rossini would recycle the song in his farewell to various other cities as he took his leave from them.

According to Robert Osborne, Rossini p.77, “The first stanza, in the minor, speaks of leave-taking; the second pays tribute to the people ‘nobile e sincero‘, from whom he is reluctantly departing. The third is a covert tribute to the sensuality of song, after which Rossini asks his audience to imagine him expressing his feeling with ‘a crescendo of sighs’, the famous crescendo punningly alluded to, before being subsumed in a grand yet perfectly scaled peroration with which he makes the Danube (Thames, Seine, or whichever) resound to the applause of the adoring multitude. The song is quintessential Rossini: affecting yet ironic, propelled and coloured by harmonies which are as unobtrusive as they are ingenious, gloriously laid out for the voice, grand but never pompous, and not a moment too long. No wonder they were charmed by him.”

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee sings “Addio ai vienessi” here: