Performed by The Toledo Symphony on March 20, 2026 at The Peristyle

Overture to The Barber of Seville (II Barbiere di Siviglia)  
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) 

The name of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini is synonymous with opera. As a composer, he was indebted to Mozart for the clear structure and character of his work. However, in his own right, Rossini remains separate and distinguished as the best and most often performed composer in the tradition of opera buffa, or comic opera.  

Rossini composed The Barber of Seville in 1816, when he was just 23 years old. The story is based on the play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, initially conceived in 1722 as an opera comique. There was already a musical setting available that was popular and had been performed across Europe and even in the US and Mexico. Despite Rossini’s best efforts to explain before the premiere that his opera, which he was planning to call Almaviva, followed a different approach, the first performance was poorly received. Happily, reservedness on the part of the audience did not last long, and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville emerged as an audience favorite, running more than five hundred performances in Berlin alone. The dramaturge Kelley Rourke notes, “In 1825, Manuel García (the first Almaviva) brought a production to New York – [it became] the first opera to be performed in Italian there.”  

Cesare Sterbini provided the libretto, and annotator Max Derrickson notes both it and the play for its “perennial themes, giddy wordplay, mad-capped action and lively characters. The addition of Rossini’s hallmark musical technique of creating a long, insistent build-up of orchestral sound over a repeating figure (ostinato) helps propel the action into wonderful and hilarious climaxes. These ‘tempests in teapots’…”  

The action follows the young Count Almaviva, who is in search of true love with Rosina, the ward of the silly and self-important Dr. Bartolo. Drama, disguise, and absurdity ensue, and everything ends happily, as it must.  

Interestingly, the overture we have now is not the original. Some researchers insist that the original was lost shortly after the premiere, and Rossini had to cobble together another in time for subsequent performances. Rossini mentions the overture in a letter in which he also gives advice on how best to compose one:  

“Wait until the evening before opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. I composed the overture to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note. I wrote the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of its opening, in the theater itself, where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stagehands who were instructed to throw my original text out the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out the window. I did better with The Barber. I did not compose an overture, but selected for it one that was meant for a semi-serious opera called Elisabetta. The public was completely satisfied…” 

In light of this, it makes perfect sense that the overture we know now as that belonging to The Barber of Seville does not share thematic material with the opera that comes after. However, that hardly seems to matter in the face of its excellence. According to Derrickson, “[Rossini] nearly single-handedly transformed the operatic overture into a discreet and flourishing work of art in its own right.” Furthermore, Verdi wrote, “I can’t help thinking that, for abundance of real musical ideas, for comic verve, and truthful declamation, The Barber of Seville is the finest opera buffa in existence.” 

Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, timpani, and strings. 

Symphony No. 4, Op. 90 “Italian” 
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) 

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Mendelssohn was exposed to the arts from an early age. His mother was a musician and an artist, and his father a banker who provided a comfortable living and took the education of his children seriously. Young Mendelssohn was privileged to have the best tutors in several subjects and both encouragement in and the time to work on artistic pursuits. All of this together with his natural talent combined to create what annotator Michael Steinberg calls an “astonishing … composing prodigy.” Steinberg notes, “Mozart was to go much farther, but as a teenager not even he surpasses or often equals Mendelssohn in assurance and certainly not in individuality.” 

Mendelssohn was especially close to his sister, Fanny, who was several years his senior. Fanny was also an excellent musician and composer, supported by an anecdote in which she performed Bach’s full The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory at age thirteen. Sadly, their father would not allow her to continue with music seriously, saying that music could only be “an ornament to her life” and not “its fundamental basis.” Mendelssohn was also discouraged from taking up music professionally – in his case with the admonition that music “is after all no kind of career, no life, no goal.” However, not being a woman left Mendelssohn freer to choose what to do with his life regardless of his father’s approval. 

Mendelssohn entered the studio of composer and conductor Carl Zelter, who was reputedly a great lover of Bach’s music. And at this time Bach’s music was undergoing a resurgence of popularity. Zelter not only fostered a similar love for Bach in Mendelssohn, he also introduced Mendelssohn to Goethe, with whom they both enjoyed a friendship until the writer’s death. 

Though Mendelssohn was still only twenty-one when he began work on the “Italian” Symphony, as Steinberg writes, “he had found a voice [with the Octet for Strings, completed when he was sixteen and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at seventeen] unmistakably his own and he used it with the confidence of a seasoned professional.” This symphony is, after all, numbered opus 90 despite Mendelssohn’s youth! 

Mendelssohn was inspired to write this symphony after a long trip to Italy and other parts of Europe in 1830–31. Though this much seems obvious, there is not a more specific program for the work, and while on his journey abroad he also began working on the “Scottish” Symphony, though this wouldn’t be completed until much later. Mendelssohn himself bestowed these nicknames. In a letter dated from February 1831, he wrote to his family that his “Italian Symphony [was] making rapid progress.” 

Annotator Peter Laki notes that these two symphonies, more than Mendelssohn’s other works, “seem to complement one another in several ways. Not only were they inspired by two completely different landscapes, some of their musical characteristics are also in contrast.” Mendelssohn ultimately finished the work on the “Italian” in somewhat of a hurry in order to fill a commission from the London Philharmonic Society for “a symphony.” 

The opening movement, Allegro vivace, opens with quick, driving wind chords, over which the violins run forward with their melody. The second theme is a little more relaxed, paving the way for the clarinet’s iteration in minor, which Steinberg calls “a shadow over the landscape.” Listen for the horn calls in this movement. 

The second movement is marked Andante con moto and may depict a subdued procession of a religious nature. Laki explains that this movement is sometimes called “Pilgrim’s March” to acknowledge its similarities with the movement of that name in Berlioz’s Harold in Italy. There is another possibility, outlined by musicologist Eric Werner, who links this movement’s thematic material to that of a song written by Zelter. Zelter’s piece used an excerpt of text from Goethe’s Faust. Given the importance to Mendelssohn of both Goethe and Zelter and the fact that he had lost them both, it’s possible that this movement was intended as a private tribute. 

The third movement, Con moto moderato, is essentially a minuet and trio, albeit a more Romantic setting of the form. Steinberg calls it “delicate and surely quite un-Italian.” In the trio section, Mendelssohn features the horns and bassoons. 

The final movement is marked Presto – Finale: Saltarello. A saltarello is a dance originating in the medieval and Renaissance courts that was eventually adopted by popular Italian culture. It’s a light dance – and usually involves actual leaping! – in triple meter. Mendelssohn also slips into a tarantella in the development section of this movement. The tarantella is similar to the saltarello, and Mendelssohn closes the movement by combining the two dances. 

Mendelssohn finished his “Italian” Symphony in 1833 and conducted the premiere that spring in London when he was only 23 years old. Following the premiere, he withdrew the score for revisions. This is a baffling choice, given that the “Italian” was so well received. Steinberg, trying to account for Mendelssohn’s action, writes: “It was also characteristic of its staggeringly gifted and ruthlessly driven organizer. Mendelssohn, elegant classicist nurturing Romantic fantasies, was amazingly facile and at times no less amazingly self-critical: the twelve-year gestation of the Scotch Symphony and his never-resolved doubts about the Italian tell their own stories.” 

Fellow composer Hector Berlioz, who notoriously disliked Mendelssohn, called the “Italian” “admirable, magnifique.” However, Mendelssohn refused to be swayed by others’ opinions and refused either to allow performances of the work or to publish it. He did not complete revisions before he died in 1847, but he left behind sketches outlining what he would have done. These changes, however, were never implemented. 

The “Italian” Symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. 

Suite No. 1 from Ancient Airs and Dances 
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) 

Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was an incredibly talented musician, which included excellence on both violin and viola. Respighi’s first professional musical appointment was as a violist for the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, far from his native Italy. This job, besides providing him with playing experience, also gave him the chance to study composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, after which he did further studies with Max Bruch in Berlin before returning to Italy. 

Respighi’s compositional style is relatively conservative. As part of the group called Lega dei Cinque, or “League of Five,” a title that references Russia’s “Mighty Handful” from a century before, he supported a rebirth in Italian music, an attempt to revive it from what it had become: “with very few exceptions, depressed and circumscribed by commercialism and philistinism.” In 1932, Respighi took action by signing a statement (along with several likeminded colleagues) criticizing more progressive and experimental composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, for their musics’ negative impact on musical tradition. Respighi didn’t dislike all contemporary composers, however, and loved the tone poems of Richard Strauss. 

Respighi was very interested in music of the past, especially of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He was not only inspired by the pure tonalities and ornamented textures of such music, but he wrote many pieces based squarely in the styles of some of his favorite composers. Throughout history, both nature and art have been great sources of inspiration for composers, and Respighi was no exception. He composed his famous Fontane di Roma in 1915–1916 and followed it with the even more famous Pini di Roma (1923–1924) and Feste Romane (1928). He composed Trittico botticelliano, or “Botticelli Triptych” in 1927. Each movement mirrors a painting by Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), who was most well-known for his depictions of religious and mythological scenes.  

Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances has several suites that are usually programmed individually. Tonight, you will hear the first suite, written in 1917. It is fundamentally a group of transcriptions of 16th and 17th Century lute music for orchestra and is among Respighi’s most popular and often-performed work. It is in six movements, all examples of 16th and 17th Century dances and forms.  

A note in the score provides more details about the source material: “Simone Molinari (1570-1633) composed numerous collections of sacred and secular vocal works, and, as a music publisher, brought out an important edition of Don Carlo Gesualdo's five-voice madrigals in 1603. Molinaro's Intavolatura di liuto libro primo is one of the most notable lute collections of its time. In that collection, his Balletto Detto ‘Il conte Orlando’ appears as a triple-time dance. Respighi alters it to duple meter and in the middle provides contrast by transposing the melody into the minor mode, where the solo line is played dolce before the material is revisited in its original form by the full ensemble.”  

Respighi’s Suite No. 1 from Ancient Airs and Dances was premiered in Rome in 1917 and is scored for two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, harp, harpsichord (or piano), and strings.  

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45 
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolific, respected, and troubled composers. His output spans a number of genres, although he’s best known as a composer of symphonies and music for the ballet. He was also an accomplished conductor and was received well in that capacity almost everywhere he traveled. However, none of this professional success was able to alleviate his depression, and he attempted suicide more than once at various points in his life. 

In 1877, Tchaikovsky (then 37 years old) married Antonina Miliukova, a former student of his who had written to him not long before confessing her love. He was not in love with her, but was struggling with his father’s recent death and decided to marry her anyway. The marriage failed quickly, impacting his work. As it dissolved, Tchaikovsky’s patroness and friend, Nadezhda von Meck, stepped in and funded his flight abroad. Though Tchaikovsky and Von Meck never met in person, they remained close friends for many years. Now unencumbered, Tchaikovsky threw himself into composing. In a letter to Von Meck from this time, he wrote, “My heart is full. It thirsts to pour itself out in music.” In the spring of 1878, he settled briefly in Switzerland and completed his Violin Concerto, along with his Fourth Symphony and Eugene Onegin in the same year. Biographer Alexander Poznansky points out “[the] paradoxical fact that Tchaikovsky’s tragicomic marriage and his hysterical breakdown proved to be, in the final analysis, beneficial.” 

During his European tour, Tchaikovsky travelled to Rome and immersed himself in the art and culture there, including Carnival. From Rome, he wrote to Von Meck, “This country is a gift of God!” Inspired by this joyful experience, he composed his colorful Capriccio Italien in 1879-80. The title references a whimsical caprice and speaks to the structure of the work. Annotator Thomas May writes, “It resembles a fantasy in which musical ideas flow together in an impressionistic sequence.” Tchaikovsky may have also been referencing music in a similar form by Mikhail Glinka, whose music Tchaikovsky greatly admired.  

Capriccio Italien was premiered in 1880 in Moscow with Nikolai Rubinstein conducting. It is scored for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.