A life: having only just completed the monumental Guillaume Tell in 1829, Rossini stopped writing operas at the age of thirty-seven and gave himself over to a despairing renunciation, barely interrupted by the “sacred conversation” of the Stabat mater (1832 and 1841). Then, before the day of his death on 13 November 1868, a single mass, on its own, recovered the measure of his old masterpieces: Petite messe solennelle a quatre parties avec accompagnement de deux pianos et harmonium, nearly an hour and a half of music written at Passy in 1863. A change of heart? Perhaps, a tender glance backward and timid hopes for the day of farewells, as he wrote in the dedication: “It is over now, this poor little mass. Will I have written sacred music in earnest, or the usual blessed music? You know, O Lord, how I was born for opera buffa: a little learning, a bit of heart, that is all. May you be blessed and grant me Paradise. G. Rossini. Passy, 1863”.

A moral: the choice of the sacred genre is shrewd and up to date. Barely three years earlier Rossini “likewise lamented the decline of church music in Italy, recalling with enthusiasm the sublime creations of Pierluigi da Palestrina and Benedetto Marcello”. But the complaint was of long standing, and lively in Germany ever since the years of Tieck (1796) and Hoffmann (1810): in an age of decline, who does not firmly believe he is living in the worst of times? sacred music might remind composers of rigour, dedication and seriousness.

And after all the text of the mass, many-hued as it is, ready to pass from the lament of the Kyrie to the unbridled gaiety of the Gloria, is a text supremely suited to Rossini, if we are to believe the toast that one Giovanni Raiberti read out to him at a banquet, as the maestro returned home in 1838:

Gh’è novitaa, gh’è foeugh, gh’è frenesia,

gh’è on corr semper de trott o de galopp,

on avegh semper robba de trà via,

on trasà fina el bell perché l’è tropp

e buttà in d’on spartii tanti motiv

che on alter ghe n’ha assee per fin ch’el scriv.

Sfidi a trovà situazion del coeur,

vizzi, virtù, che lu nol metta lì

con quell brutt, con quel bell, con quell grandeur

che l’è impossibil de fa mej de inscì!

The “little” last Messe is born under the sign of Mozart: the piano notes, detached and separated by rests in the right hand and the left, the characteristic gesture at the opening of the Messe, evoke the “bass” in the Requiem; while the harmonium’s motif takes up its bassoon. And then our whole introduction reproduces almost word for word the very faint rise of the melody in the bass up to a celestial arc, exactly as in Mozart. From this I draw important conclusions: Rossini inaugurates his last work under the sign of the funeral liturgy, and entrusts himself to the protection of the great Amadeus, the model of a lifetime; life itself had been his guide.

Let us say at once that there is a single addition to the traditional text of the mass, the so-called ordinarium, and it is precisely the penultimate piece, the O salutaris ostia. On the one hand he must have wished to delay the dazzling final episode a little, so as to heighten its effect. On the other, the text was extremely convenient for him: “O saving host that opens the gates of heaven, when the dread war comes give me strength and aid”, words that prepare very well the imminent advent of peace (“Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace”). In short, after the memory of war (O salutaris hostia) the comfort of peace (Agnus Dei) comes all the more welcome.

So Rossini did take a small liberty with the text. Yet he knew his duties: whoever writes sacred music must know how to write “a cappella” (that is, pieces for unaccompanied voices, without organ or any other accompaniment). And so, after the brief opening Christe eleison, the whole Sanctus is placed in the mouth of the choir alone, to remind us that the human voice, more than the instruments, is close to the Lord. The long instrumental interlude set against it hints at other models and other masters: the fugue subject belongs to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and precisely to No. 16 of the first volume, only to adopt, towards the end, more “expressive” attitudes and set off on the trail of a Mendelssohn barcarolle (shall we read Op. 30 No. 6, to see for ourselves?). The passage into the a cappella Sanctus is secured by a Ritornello at once concise and substantial, as tiny as a little prelude by Muzio Clementi, yet in truth a genuine introduction: to be clear, look at the opening of the second act of Norma (Vincenzo Bellini, 1831)!

And so we have sketched the plot: the interlude of pure music (Preludio religioso), a brief prelude (Ritornello), the episode for unaccompanied voices (Sanctus), the number for suspense (O salutaris hostia), the marvellous ending (Agnus Dei). And it is one of those endings one would rather not speak of, for fear of shattering its spell. The chords with the appoggiatura that introduce it possess the desolate sadness of the piano at the beginning of Schubert’s Leiermann. Three times the contralto alone intones the first section of the text (climbing ever higher in the closing ornament), and twice the unaccompanied choir answers it with its own prayer, “Dona nobis pacem”, “the prayer for an outward and inward peace” (as we might say, borrowing Beethoven’s words). With that feeling of consolation which belongs, alas, to every ending, the singers, mark this, stress “pacem” while the contralto goes on offering its “miserere”: in relation to the soloist, they recover the role of the classical chorus, representing, more than the individual, the fear of the solitary man.

At this point the listener will wonder whether writing so self-aware provides, at least on occasion, some depictive details that lend the “libretto” a touch of the theatrical, as one expects from a born opera composer such as Rossini. At the “Et incarnatus est” (from the Credo) he uses an old figure made from the four descending notes of a scale fragment, the so-called “lament bass”. The soprano’s Crucifixus, indeed, is preceded by a series of unison E flats in different registers, pianissimo in the bass, forte in the high notes, with the two hands literally striking the keyboard: I am inclined to believe that Rossini wished to stage for real the hammer blows nailing the Saviour to the cross. Wholly “depictive”, finally, is the task of the piano in the central section of the O salutaris hostia, “when that dreadful war comes”, of which we have already spoken.

Let us too obey Rossini’s taste and, glad of the repetition, copy out once more the precious autograph dedication: “Bon Dieu, la voilà terminée cette pauvre petite messe. Est-ce bien de la musique sacrée que je viens de faire ou bien de la sacrée musique? J’étais né pour l’opera buffa, tu le sais bien! Peu de science, un peu de coeur, tout est là. Sois donc beni et accorde-moi le Paradis”. He certainly deserved it, “con quell brutt, con quel bell, con quell grandeur che l’è impossibil de fa mej de inscìc!”.

Marco Grondona, a pupil of Antonio La Penna at the Scuola Normale, taught Latin Literature and the History of Music at the University of Pisa. He has published several musical studies, in particular on the forms of the serious Rossini (La perfetta illusione and Otello). His specialist vocation for commentary has produced works on Madama Butterfly, Suor Angelica and Tosca. In 2018, with Ilaria Conserva, he published a commentary on Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. His recent Stile tardo in musica, published by the AREA foundation, contains two ample essays on the last masterpieces of Beethoven and Richard Strauss. For the same foundation, in 2018, came “Cattiva musica” e paradisi perduti, on the relations between art music and “light” production. His love for Todi, his native city, has led him to write many works of “local history”, among them Le stazioni di ieri, an essay on the Tempio di San Fortunato, and above all the enlargement of Todi storica e artistica, a text whose first draft was owed to his father Carlo. For these works, in 2017, he was awarded the “Raccontami l’Umbria in un libro” Prize at the “L’isola del libro” festival in Passignano.