3 Péchés de vieillesse (1857-68)

Ariette à l’ancienne

Ariette: Le Dodo des enfants

Chanson de Zora

If only all sins of old age were as attractive as the Péchés de vieillesse committed in such abundance by Rossini in his late sixties and seventies. He had completed his last opera Guillaume Tell in 1829, the Soirées musicales in 1835 and the Stabat Mater in 1841 but was then too ill and too depressed to compose anything at all until his health was restored after settling in Paris in 1855. Apart from the Petite messe solennelle, virtually everything he wrote from 1857 onwards - including well over a hundred vocal and instrumental pieces - was intended for private performance at the apartment in the Chaussée d’Antin where the aged sinner presided over his much-prized “Samedi soirs.”

The Ariette à l’ancienne is to be found in the third (Morceaux réservés) of the thirteen volumes of Péchés de vieillesse as published at long last by the Fondazione Rossini. Neither classical parody nor pastiche, it toys with both possibilities in the outer sections, where it acknowledges the period in which Rousseau’s lines were written, but develops a more romantic kind of ardour as it goes its own way in the middle. There is a similar kind of ambiguity in many of the songs in the collection but it is surely safe to trust in the sincerity of the impassioned pleas of the mother of the child in the otherwise economical and strangely hesitant treatment of Emilien Pacini’s Le Dodo des enfants. Certainly, it most effectively offsets the brilliance of the spirited refrain of Emile Deschamps’s gypsy girl in the Chanson de Zora Both these songs - to words by poets valued more by composers than literary connoisseurs - come from the second volume (Album français) of the Péchés de Vieillesse.