Italian Opera [First Article — Rossini’s Barber of Seville]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 15 December 1827, p. 255. Never reprinted. Familiarity with ‘English Opera’, and the claim of having heard Fanny Ayton’s ‘performances in London’, suggest De Quincey alone, among the regular Post writers. Other symptoms of Englishness include ‘Our English Figaro’, and recollections of London’s ‘Theatre Royal’ and ‘a London play-house’. Allusions to Hamlet, Don Quixote, Horace, Coleridge and Wordsworth would also be typical of De Quincey. Other familiar signs include the passage of dialogue, and colloquial phrases like ‘old pet’, ‘by the way’, ‘the old doting buzzard’, and ‘to get through (as it is called)’. Interest in ‘what is … pleasing’, and (even more so) in ‘malicious fun’, sound very De Quinceyan. The description of Rossini as a ‘rogue [who] contrives to conceal his … plagiarisms by a most skilful instrumentation’, recalls the liberal attitude on plagiarism in De Quincey’s piece on Thomas Campbell (see above, p. 119). In general terms, the appreciation of Rossini is more witty, discerning, and worldly, than could be expected from most writers in the Post – as, for example, when Rossini’s ‘usual recipe’ for an overture is said to contain ‘of motive, an agreeable proportion, – of the crescendo, quantum suff. – [and] of good old-fashioned cadence, as much as will nearly act as an emetic’.