Rossini’s noisy bodies

Rossini’s comic finales consistently foreground the propensity of noise to overwhelm the senses, to both signify and induce madness or confusion, and to transform the bodies on stage into noisy automata. Such mechanical noisiness may appear ‘naturally’ comic and dramatically appropriate – and therefore hardly in need of comment. But the din of Rossini’s operas was a point of contention for critics; even Stendhal, normally the composer’s staunch advocate, displays a kind of ambivalence about the sheer physical force of Rossini’s music. This ambivalence mirrors a larger division between fans and critics, a bifurcation that produced an immense volume of printed matter as Rossini’s music became a nexus for debates about the place of reason versus sensation and the troubled relationship between physiological and moral stimulation. These tensions are especially apparent in two operas from 1817, La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Both works tend to subvert the conventions of sentimental comedy by ironizing sentimental display, mocking tender feelings or, most tellingly, juxtaposing tears with violent cacophony – tactics that did not always sit well with critics. Using Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini as a focal point, this essay situates Rossinian noise and the controversy surrounding it in the context of pervasive concern about the sensible body in a postsentimental era. Because it seemed to act on the body in such powerful ways, noise very easily allowed commentators to invoke a whole panoply of overlapping discourses – of politics, sentimentality and sensibility, morality, medicine and physiology – in their attempts to account for Rossini’s popularity.