Rossini and La Cenerentola

1628
Charles Perrault is born in Paris, the child of a well-to-do family. He will spend much of his life as a civil servant and member of the Académie Française, an organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of the French language.

1697
In his retirement, Perrault publishes a collection of literary fairy tales for aristocratic audiences, which soon becomes known by the title Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose). The collection includes such classics as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Cinderella.”

1792
Gioachino Rossini is born on February 29 in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy. Both of his parents are musicians: His father plays horn, and his mother is an opera singer.

1804
The Rossini family moves to Bologna. Young Gioachino, a talented musician who already enjoys an active career as a performer, begins formal studies in composition. Soon he will begin composing individual arias for operas being performed in the area.

1813
Rossini’s first huge international success, Tancredi, premieres in February at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Overnight, Rossini’s reputation as Italy’s foremost composer is made.

1814
An opera based on Perrault’s version of Cinderella, Stefano Pavesi’s L’Agatina, o la Virtù Premiata (Agatina, or Virtue Rewarded), premieres in Milan. Together with a French opera from 1810, also based on Perrault, it will form part of the source material for Rossini’s own Cinderella opera.

1816
On February 20, Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) premieres at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. The opening night performance is a flop. But in August, following slight revisions, the opera is performed again in Bologna, this time to thunderous acclaim.

In December, Rossini agrees to write an opera for the Teatro Valle in Rome. After considering over a dozen possible subjects (including one rejected by the city’s censors), Rossini and the librettist Jacopo Ferretti finally settle on Cinderella. Ferretti bases his libretto on Perrault’s story, but he also borrows from two recent operas on the same subject.

1817
Rossini produces his opera in less than a month, borrowing the overture and other bits and pieces from his own prior works. La Cenerentola, ossia La Bontà in Trionfo (“Cinderella, or Goodness Triumphant”) premieres on January 25 at the Teatro Valle. History repeats itself: As with Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the opera is initially given a frosty reception but soon becomes one of Rossini’s most beloved works.

1823
Rossini’s last Italian opera, Semiramide, receives its premiere at La Fenice in Venice.

1824
By the age of 32, Rossini has written 34 operas and enjoys international acclaim of staggering proportions. In a biography of Rossini published the following year, the French novelist Stendhal writes that “Napoleon is dead, but a new conqueror is now spoken of from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta.” Rossini officially relocates to Paris.

1829
Rossini’s final opera, Guillaume Tell (William Tell), premieres in Paris. Following this, Rossini retires from the stage altogether; for the remaining four decades of his life, he will never write another large-scale opera. Instead, he turns his attention and accumulated wealth to cooking and exchanging recipes with famous chefs.

1868
After a short illness, Rossini dies at the age of 76. His last years have been marked by an emergence from his self-imposed musical silence: He has written more than 150 short pieces of music, mostly in a humorous vein, under the general title Péchés de Vieillesse (“Sins of Old Age”) for performance in his Parisian salon.

1887
Two decades after Rossini’s death, his widow, Olympe, transports his remains to Italy. In May, they are reinterred at the church of Santa Croce in Florence, where his final resting place may still be visited today.