The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

Abstract

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.