Rossini: Overture to ‘The Thieving Magpie’ (La gazza ladra).

Rossini’s opera The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra) premiered at Italy’s famous La Scala, and it was a triumph – the latest of many for its composer, who was barely 25 years old. He was basking in a period of phenomenal productivity and public success that saw the creation of masterpieces like The Barber of Seville and Cinderella. The Thieving Magpie was Rossini’s seventh opera in two years, and it was popular, performed with remarkable frequency throughout Europe. Then, in the year before Rossini’s death, it largely disappeared from the repertoire until our own century.

The Thieving Magpie is neither serious nor comic, but both: its is opera semiseria, a popular genre of the day, with roots in French opera from the mid-18th century. The plot is quintessential semiseria: highly dramatic, but with a happy ending, it revolves around an innocent girl saved from unjust execution by a ruthless persecutor. The story is rife with class conflicts, but also infused with comic and popular elements, and unfolds in a series of rustic settings – courtyard, prison, courtroom, village square. Its popular overture – like that of Don Giovanni – is a microcosm of the opera’s particular blend of comedy and drama. The opening drum rolls and pompous, brassy march evoke a military atmosphere, perhaps recalling the French Revolutionary-era “rescue opera” that was one of the precursors of semiseria.

The allegro that follows, in fast waltz rhythm, opens with a nervous theme in E minor, which is later re-used in the prison scene. But the theme is almost immediately re-cast in E Major, and the tone of the music shifts definitively to the comic. The overture ends with a patented Rossini crescendo: for dozens of bars, the music grows noisier and more animated, closing in a burst of high spirits.