A signal event of the Swiss national saga, it was already the stuff of children’s tales when Schiller wrote his play in 1805. The story of the master archer Tell ordered to shoot an apple off his son’s head by the Austrian tyrant Gessler, was supposed to have transpired sometime in the early fourteenth century.
William Tell is not much more historical a figure than Robin Hood, and so makes a perfect hero for an all-purpose celebration of liberty and solidarity with none of the ambivalences and mixed motives of actual politics.
Here Rossini, having come to Paris five years earlier as the renowned thirty-one-year-old composer of thirty-three operas, created in what would be his last work for the stage a perfected fusion of the approaches available to him, by turns epic and delicate and charged with dramatic bravura.Īs a French opera by an Italian composer based on a German play adapted from a Swiss legend, it is tempting to think of Guillaume Tell as a symptom of transnational yearning, with Swiss patriotism serving as the emblem of a wider union. Its broad and spacious structure is animated by warm and full-bodied surges of feeling, and when set in motion this nearly five-hour work can still deliver a sustained experience of sensory and emotional overabundance. Rossini’s Guillaume Tell-now being staged at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since 1931, and for the first time ever there in its original French-is as powerful a piece of operatic machinery as Parisian opera had to offer in 1829. Gerald Finley in the title role of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, 2016
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