The coastal Italian resort of Pesaro is one of those places with views of two seas. There’s the invitingly warm water of the Adriatic, which is separated from the land by a sea of beach umbrellas. It’s actually a good place to be in during a 2025 heatwave, with the water keeping the temperature down and the sea breezes providing frequent cooling.
The city is also home to a leading opera festival. Its most famous son is the composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), and the house in which he was born has been turned into a small, evocative, tightly-focused museum. Rossini is the man whose William Tell Overture provided the theme tune for The Lone Ranger, and he was also a serious foodie who has had numerous dishes named after him, most famously Tournedos Rossini in the 19th century, and a pizza with sliced egg and mayonnaise in the 1960s. His legacy brought Pesaro a Unesco Creative City of Music designation in 2017.
William Tell is with us still, even when we’re not hearing a note of it. It’s the opera in which French tenor Gilbert Duprez introduced Paris opera audiences to the sound of the tenor high C as we know it today, sung with full chest voice.
Duprez had introduced the technique in Lucca (hometown of Puccini and Boccherini) in 1831, but his use of it in Paris in 1837 was the tipping point. Audiences have loved the sound ever since. Rossini himself was not a fan.
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Rossini’s operas were first seen on stage in Dublin in 1829, just over two months after the Paris premiere of William Tell. They arrived in style. The Italian singer and impresario Giuseppe De Begnis promoted an Italian opera season at the Palladian, 2,000-seat Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street.
He presented no less than four Irish Rossini premieres between October 15th and November 4th: Il barbiere di Siviglia, Il turco in Italia, La gazza ladra and Otello. Duprez himself would sing at the theatre in 1845, in a concert which included the final scene from William Tell.
De Begnis, a bass, had form with Rossini. He had created the role of Dandini in La Cenerentola in 1817, and the singers he brought to Dublin included others who had taken part in Rossini world premieres, Alessandro De Angeli, who sang in the premieres of La gazza ladra and Bianca e Falliero, and Alberico Curioni, who sang in the first performance of La Gazzetta.
Earlier in 1829 the Irish writer, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), an old acquaintance of the composer’s, was invited to a rehearsal of William Tell, because she couldn’t be in Paris for the opening night. She left a vivid description of the occasion and boasted, “Anybody can go to a public performance by paying for it: but a ‘peep behind the curtain’ is not to be purchased; and in its way, and once in a way, it is worth all the public performances in the world.”
She regarded Rossini as the greatest of living composers, and in The Book of the Boudoir suggests that “Rossini condenses into a single bar musical ideas, which the masters of the last century would have extended through many phrases.” He was, she claimed, “the Voltaire of music.” Detractors regarded his work as simply too busy, too loud and too noisy. Rossini’s other big Irish connection is Michael Balfe, composer of The Bohemian Girl, who performed for Rossini, with Rossini and in Rossini, including an appearance at La Scala with the greatest soprano of the age, Maria Malibran.
Pesaro’s Rossini Opera Festival started in 1980, but Wexford Festival Opera had begun its Rossini exploration in 1956 with La Cenerentola, in a run which has extended to no less than 11 full-scale productions. Milan-born Pesaro resident Luigi Ferrari became the festival’s artistic director in 1995, having held the same post in Pesaro from 1992.
Rosetta Cucchi, Wexford’s artistic director since 2020, is a Pesaro native, and in 2019 directed the one-act Adina in a staging dominated by an enormous three-tier wedding cake. In Pesaro this year, she directed L’italiana in Algeri in a production with Isabella cast as a drag queen, giving mezzo-soprano and long-time Wexford favourite, Daniela Barcellona, an opportunity to revel in being a woman playing a man who’s playing a woman. Spanish director Calixto Bieito’s production of Zelmira, with Anastasia Bartoli (no relation of Cecilia) and Lawrence Brownlee outstanding as the central couple, took place in a former basketball stadium which, with a sunken orchestra in the middle of a vast, raised stage, mesmerisingly exploited the scale of the venue to the full.
Next year is Wexford’s 75th festival, and Cucchi turned the choice of one of the 2026 operas over to a public vote, to revisit earlier repertoire from a shortlist that included works by Donizetti (Wexford’s all-time favourite composer) and Paisiello (composer of the “other” Barber of Seville). But last month, when the votes were counted, the choice went to Rossini’s L’equivoco stravagante, last seen in Wexford in 1968, when Opera magazine declared it “the hit of the festival”.
Nearly 200 years on, Rossini and Ireland are still an item.
