Rossini

"Rossini" is an appealing biography of the great Italian operatic composer of "The Barber of Seville," "Mose'", "L'italiana in Algeri," "William Tell" and many more great works, so many of them marked by a vivacious sense of comedy and some spitfire vocal passages. This movie restricts itself to the years 1815 through 1829, the early years of his success throughout Europe.

The composer, in this wartime Italian production, was played by Nino Besozzi, a prolific performer in the Italian fascist cinema. He does a creditable job particularly with the film's many lighter moments. Although a bit schematic in the treatment of the composer's life and loves, we forgive it all because of a great number of excerpts from his works. They include "The Barber of Seville" and the story of its premiere and the partisans of Paisiello's version who tried to interfere with its performance, the chorus from "Mose," and the happy ending that the composer had imposed upon him by an impresario, so that Otello does not kill his wife, as in Shakespeare, but sings a therapeutic duet with her instead. Paola Barboni plays the soprano who will become the future wife of Rossini.

Some of the best moments in the movie are provided by Armando Falconi as bubbly enthusiast King Ferdinand I of Naples and Camillo Pilotto as the impresario. The bass Tancredi Passero does a fabulous rendition of the "La calunnia" aria from "Barber," and I found very affecting the melancholy encounter between the roaringly successful Rossini and the now-deaf Beethoven in which the German composer rues his own fate while praising the Italian's comic gift. It is a powerful and mysteriously haunting sequence. When this movie opened in New York in 1948, it was at the Cinema Dante, variously known over the years as the Cinema Verdi, the Princess Theatre, and the Little CineMet. It was located about a block from the old Metropolitan Opera House.