Pesaro's 'Signature' Opera

The Rossini festival celebrates 40 years of Il viaggio a Reims and revives L'equivoco stravagante and Il barbiere di Siviglia

International Coronation Guests: The cast of Il viaggio a Reims Picture © Amati Bacciardi

For the best part of 150 years Il viaggio a Reims was known to music lovers only as a spurious orchestral piece, concocted from the ballet music Rossini wrote for Le siège de Corinthe, the 1826 French adaptation of his Neapolitan Maometto Secondo. This ‘overture’ has nothing to do with the opera of the same name, which Rossini had written a year earlier to celebrate the Coronation of the last French Bourbon King, Charles X: the opera Il viaggio a Reims has no overture, not even an orchestral introduzione.

The real Viaggio’s entry into the repertoire dates from 1984, when Claudio Abbado conducted its first modern performance at the fifth Rossini Opera Festival (followed by an award-winning Deutsche Gramophone recording), using the critical edition by Janet Johnson of the Fondazione Rossini in collaboration with the publisher, Ricordi. Johnson had reconstructed the opera using the surviving libretto (Luigi Balochi) and two thirds of the score that Rossini recycled for his French opéra-comique, Le Comte Ory. The gaps were filled by pages of the autograph score that had been discovered in the library of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.