The Turk at Tanglewood

Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's summer home in the Berkshires, last week was bright with the trappings of success. Its concerts played to full audiences of summer tourists. In cape and white cap, Maestro Serge Koussevitzky, the patriarch of the place, strolled the leafy lawns of Lenox, bowed in & out of the most crowded classrooms in his Berkshire Music Center's history. But the big news at Tanglewood was not these successful appearances. It was the reappearance of a forgotten flop.

This week Opera Director Boris Goldovsky gave the U.S. the first performance in over 100 years of Gioacchino Rossini's opera The Turk in Italy. Director Goldovsky, who is becoming a kind of operatic archeologist--last year at Tanglewood he revived Mozart's long forgotten Idomeneo--had picked Rossini's youthful, lighthearted opera largely because "no one alive has ever seen it." He had found the libretto in Harvard's Widener Library, hunted down the score.

In Tanglewood's tiny wooden opera theater, his students pounced with relish on the comic story of a poet who tries to reconstruct an operatic puppet show for the audience as the opera progresses, and only succeeds in letting all of the players get out of hand. The student musicians found the music pretty much of a museum piece, though sparkling in spots (Rossini himself thought one quintet in it so good that he used it in another opera).

An Insult. When Milan's operagoers first heard The Turk in 1814, half the audience stalked out after the first act. It wasn't the music that enraged them; they had commissioned the 22-year-old Rossini to compose an original opera, and he had done little more than upend the plot of his The Italian in Algiers, composed for the rival Venetians.

Rossini for whom melody came easy and work came hard stole from himself more than once. A gifted child, but also a hellion, he was twice apprenticed by his father to a blacksmith to keep him out of trouble. He was also handsome in his youth, and had a quick eye for the girls. But at 20 he had composed four operas and brashly wrote to an impresario about his fifth: "In making me write [this] music you treated me like a boy, and I, in turning out a failure, only paid you back in kind. So now we're quits."

A Fiasco. His 16th opera was no failure, even if it was at first a fiasco. At the premiere of The Barber of Seville, Rossini foolishly allowed the tenor to improvise a serenade in the first act. The tenor tuned his guitar on stage, then sang so badly that he was laughed into the wings. Rossini, at the cembalo, stood up and applauded vigorously at the end of the act. But after the third performance, and a few changes in the opera, the audiences began applauding too.

Thirteen years later his William Tell loaded him with even more honors--and furnished brass bands with a perennial favorite for Sunday afternoon concerts. He was then 37, and had written 38 operas. But he never wrote another one. His nerves shaken from overwork, he wrote a friend that "music needs freshness . . . I am conscious of nothing but lassitude and crabbedness." He composed little, settled down in Paris to grow fat from his well-stocked wine cellar and his imported bolognas. When friends chided him for being lazy, Rossini replied: "I always had a passion for idleness."

His music and his personality had a sprightliness that led his admirers to call him "the Italian Mozart." Few musicians passed through Paris in the 1860s without paying their respects to the great Rossini. When Richard Wagner called, and tried to explain his newfangled ideas, Rossini told him grandly: "What you are saying is the funeral oration of melody."

Rossini's own melodic funeral oration when he died, wealthy and honored at 76, made history of a sort. An ensemble of Adolphe Sax's new instruments was hired to play Beethoven's Funeral March--the first time that saxophones were ever used at a funeral.

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