Gioachino Rossini
Io proteggo! E questo detto.
Aria per Baritono e orchestra nell'opera Il bello piace a tutti di Valentino Fioravanti
critical edition and vocal score by Francesco Paolo Russo

(Opera, 1)

XX, 60 pp. 21 x 29 cm
Intro and Apparatus in Italian and English

The year 1810 marked a turning point in eighteen-year-old Rossini’s stage career. Besides getting his first opera commission (for La cambiale di matrimonio, a farce, produced in November at San Moisé Theater, Venice), he also co-authored with tenor Domenico Mombelli an opera seria, Demetrio e Polibio, actually a pastiche with music by both, to be staged in 1812 at the Valle Theater, Rome. The baritone aria, Io proteggo! E questo detto (“I protect! And this statement”), edited and published here in its entirety for the first time, was born soon after La cambiale di matrimonio as an insert—sung by Luigi Zamboni—for a restaging of Valentino Fioravanti’s opera, Il bello piace a tutti (Valle Theater, January 1811). This discovery confirms that Rossini was acquainted with a common usage in period Italian opera, that is, penning arias for other composers’ works produced in various cities up and down Italy. Also, Rossini’s contacts with Rome, where he was to triumph with such major works as Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, must now be backdated two years.

Francesco Paolo Russo studied Musicology at University of Pavia (Cremona). His research centres on Italian opera of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, on theory and historiography of opera. He received the PhD in Musical Philology, specializing in the field of textual criticism. Among his publications are the critical edition of the operas Il barbiere di Siviglia by G. Paisiello (Laaber Verlag, 2001), Torvaldo e Dorliska by G. Rossini (Rossini Foundation of Pesaro and Ricordi, 2007) and La buona figliuola by N. Piccinni (Bärenreiter 2017). From 1998 to 2010 he was professor of Musical Dramaturgy and of History of Modern Music at the DAMS of the University of Calabria. From 2005 to 2019 he was teacher of Music Editing Techniques at the Universities of Valladolid and Salamanca (Spain). Professor of Musical Bibliography at Conservatory of Music "O. Respighi" of Latina, he is a member of the editorial board of the musicological journal Fonti Musicali Italiane.