Stealing Rossini’s Fame: On Nineteenth-Century Media Manipulation and Operatic Reception (original) (raw)

Abstract

When the Gazette musicale opened in January 1834, the journal accepted as fact that Gioachino Rossini was a genius. Within three years, the coverage dramatically changed: Rossini went from “living god” to “plagiarist” with “irritating” music. Within a few years his status as genius was restored, then revoked again. Rossini’s French publisher Eugène Troupenas alleged that the owner of the Gazette, music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, used his journal as a means to pressure musicians into publishing contracts. Refuse his overtures, and suffer derision in the journal. And sure enough, the Gazette’s flip-flopping tracks perfectly with Schlesinger’s minor contracts for Rossini pieces: an old cavatina here, a new romance there. When Schlesinger had something to promote, Rossini was lauded, and when Schlesinger needed more, he commissioned journalists for hit pieces to get his way. Even though Rossini had not written a new opera in years, his music — and his image — still had value, not only to the publishers who sold his scores, but also to theatres, singers, composers, and the public. And Schlesinger’s schemes represent an effort to extort control over that value that deserves more attention. Schlesinger and his proxies did not simply disparage Rossini: they inflamed anxieties about fame, invented rivalries intended to taint Rossini’s reputation, and suggested that writing opera was easy, among other tactics. Applying research on both media (Soules 2015) and celebrity (Marcus 2019) to examine Schlesinger’s techniques sheds new light on how media manipulation influenced Rossini reception. Rather than viewing negative press as merely a way to mark changes in taste, this research approaches negative press as a powerful media tool. This paper examines anti-Rossini coverage in the Gazette to better understand the role of negative press and anti-celebrityism in operatic reception. Becoming more attuned to nineteenth-century media techniques can help us identify commonplace press strategies that transformed public taste for personal benefit. Overall, this paper explores the rhetoric and tactics that separated genius from celebrity, turned celebrity into a liability, and influenced the frames of operatic reception — for both Rossini and others — for centuries to come.

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