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He Wasn’t That Precocious

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One of the most successful opera composers of all time retired from writing operas at the age of 37. By then he already had a long career behind him. In fact, Gioachino Rossini began composing enduring works just after his second birthday.

In the summer of 1804 Rossini and two cousins named Morini were staying at a country house near Ravenna. Their host was the twenty-three-year-old Agostino Trossi, member of a well-to-do family of grain merchants. Trossi was an amateur bass player, and the group thought it would be fun to make music together. Rossini rose to the occasion and in three days dashed off a series of six sonatas for two violins, cello, and double bass.

Years later Rossini described the performances, saying that the others “played like dogs” and that he was “not the least doggish, by God.” In the only surviving manuscript he referred to the works as “six dreadful sonatas.”

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The musical establishment knew about the existence of the sonatas almost from the beginning, but the whereabouts of the pieces was a mystery for years. Most experts assumed that they had long since been destroyed when in 1954 Rossini’s original manuscript turned up in the Library of Congress in Washington. [Subsequent arrangements of the sonatas, probably by composers other than Rossini had surfaced as early as 1826.]

Though Rossini was the first to disparage the Sonatas and may well have touched them up in later years, they show how precocious the young composer was. In fact, technically, he wrote them just after his second birthday. Rossini was born on February 29″, 1792. His first birthday wouldn’t come until February 29″, 1796. Because 1800 was a century year not divisible by 400 it was not a leap year. And so Rossini’s second birthday didn’t occur until 1804, just a few months before the twelve-year-old Gioachino Rossini wrote his charming and enduring Sonatas for strings.

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