Overture: Semiramide

Most of Rossini’s operas, including nearly all of those written before he abandoned Italy to take up a new career in Paris in 1824, begin with overtures that have little or nothing to do with them. The major exception among those composed for Italy is the very last, Semiramide, a “melodramma tragico” based on Voltaire’s tragedy Sémiramis and first performed at La Fenice in Venice in 1823. The overture is still far from being as opera-specific as the Swiss tone poem that sets the scene for the last of Rossini’s Parisian operas, Guillaume Tell - and even further from contemporary examples by Weber like Der Freischütz and Euryanthe - but it clearly belongs to Semiramide. Unlike the piece now associated with Il Barbiere di Siviglia - which is universally accepted as a comedy overture even though it was attached first to the “dramma serio” Aureliana in Palmira and then to the “dramma” Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra - it could not easily be transferred to any other opera, a comedy least of all.

Structurally, Semiramide follows the pattern of most of Rossini’s Italian opera overtures: a slow introduction is followed by a quick movement which is basically an exposition (two main themes and an extended crescendo) and, with no intervening development, a recapitulation. While it is a little different from others of its kind in that the quick movement is briefly anticipated before the slow introduction, what makes it specific to the Semiramide is its use of material to be heard later in the opera. The solemn melody introduced by horns and repeated by oboes in the Andantino is adapted from an unaccompanied chorale in the first act where the subjects of Semiramide, Queen of Babylon, swear their allegiance. Of the two main themes of the Allegro - one presented by strings and the other by woodwind, as the Rossini conventions required - the second is derived from a procession of Magi priests. The crescendo that inevitably follows, based on material from a duet in the Hanging Garden in the first act, secures on its recapitulation a thoroughly dramatic ending.