Everybody's got a shtlck. Pee-wee Herman made bundles with his geeky little-kid routine. Elvis had hyperactive hips. Georges Seurat painted with dots.
Gioachino Rossini, who would have celebrated his 200th birthday in 1992 if he'd had a little more stamina, had a great shtick. He wrote a frothy kind of opera known as opera buffa, and made it so appealing that people still flock to certain of his shows. The form has been parodied by celebrities ranging from cartoon star Bugs Bunny to movie director Brian DePalma.
And Rossini did one thing in opera buffa that nobody else has ever pulled off with nearly so much flair - he built excitement with a standard technique called a crescendo (pronounce the middle ``sc'' as if it were ``sh''), but with so many secret ingredients that he invented something that's now known as a Rossini crescendo. More on that later.
Rossini wrote in both the main Italian operatic genres of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, opera seria and opera buffa. Opera seria was serious, formal and complex with lots of flashy singing. Even the best examples, Mozart's ``Idomeneo'' and ``La Clemenza di Tito,'' appeal to only a few of today's opera lovers.
The more popular genre, and the one at which Rossini excelled, was opera buffa. This was comic opera, full of the shifty characters you'd meet on the city street and the bumpkins you'd encounter in the countryside.
Rossini started writing operas when he was 14, and was internationally famous by 1813, when he was barely of legal age. He served as music director at not one but two theaters in Naples from 1815 to 1823, churning out one opera for each house per year, plus others on commission from theaters in Rome and Milan.
He was only 23 when he wrote his most enduring score, ``The Barber of Seville,'' a devastating social comedy in which Figaro, the gadabout barber and master of intrigue, sings the famous rapid-patter aria called ``Large al factotum.''
Rossini moved to Paris in 1824 to take charge of the Italian theater there, writing less prolifically but turning to the bigger, more serious sort of opera the Parisians preierred. After completing ``William Tell,'' a work in a new, more deeply Romantic style and one of the first efforts to merit the designation ``grand opera,'' Rossini retired in 1830. He was only 37.
Perhaps he knew he could not return to his old ebullient style after ``William Tell,'' but wasn't sure how to proceed. Perhaps he was simply disgusted with the taste of the public. But between then and his death 38 years later, he wrote very little of consequence - and never again did he apply his quill to an opera score.
He spent his final decades entertaining, inventing recipes, eating to excess, tossing off trifling piano and vocal pieces (gathered under the title ``Sins of Old Age'') and developing a serious case of hypochondria.
There's a famous story about Rossini's old-age laziness. It seems that one day he was writing a score in bed, where he spent most of his time, when a page of the manuscript tell to the floor. Rather than get out of bed and pick it up, Rossini wrote out the whole page again.
The second point to this story, after the obvious one about what a physical sluggard he'd become, is that composing always came easily for Rossini. He could whip out an overture in a few hours, if necessary, and he possessed an excellent musical memory.
Did writing come too easily to Rossini? Most of his operas had respectable runs when they were new. In the 19th century, operas were presented like Broadway shows are today; a new production stayed on the stage as long as it was making money. As soon as people stopped buying tickets, it folded.
But many of Rossini's works were rarely, ii ever, revived. The scores were packed away in the attic like dresses that were out of style, or toys that had been outgrown.
Since the 1960s, singers like Marilyn Home and Samuel Ramey have become adept at the once-forgotten Rossini style, and some Rossini revivals have been built on their star power. And, thanks initially to celebrations tied in with the Rossini bicentennial year - his birth date is leap day - long-ignored operas are finding their way onto the stage again.
What's becoming apparent from all this new examination of old operas is that Rossini's basic gifts of melody and rhythmic élan extended through every dramatic genre - opera buffa, opera seria, melodrama, tragedy, grand opera and half a dozen subdivisions.
But it's also clear that the buffa works hold the widest appeal. The characters come to life more vividly, and are more attractive to today's audiences than the cardboard figures in the more serious works.
Rossini's music is distinctive for an irrepressible tunefulness, that rhythmic blan that is persistent without becoming monotonous (something Verdi could not always accomplish), and an almost transparent orchestral accompaniment.
The composer had to keep his orchestration thin, because his vocal lines were so florid. Singers in Rossini's day often got out of control, ornamenting their melodies with so many improvised extra notes - many of them designed to show off how high the vocalist could sing - that the tune got lost.
The term for that elaborately decorated singing, by the way, is coloratura. A coloratura soprano is a specific kind of singer, a high female voice that is especially light and agile and capable of virtuosic twists and turns.
Anyway, to keep his singers in hand. Rossini began writing out all the ornaments and cadenzas himself. So Rossini's scores are valuable to modern singers, who can learn from them what sort of ornamentation was considered tasteful. Then they can apply those principles to operas by Rossini's contemporaries, who did not write out everything they expected the singers to do.
Another Rossini innovation was in the accompaniment of recitatives. A recitative is the rather flat, colorless material almost in the manner of speech that precedes a full-fledged aria. Until Rossini started changing things around 1815, the recitatives were accompanied simply by the harpsichord. The full orchestra was saved for arias, ensemble pieces, interludes and of course, the overture.
But in operas like ``Otello'' and ``Elisabetta'' (as in the English queen), Rossini turned the whole orchestra loose during the recitatives. This was the first step toward a more integrated style of opera, with fewer stops and starts and more continuous orchestral work.
Rossini pretty much defined the elements of opera construction that would remain essential for Italian composers more than 15 years after Rossini's retirement. One of the most important of these was the cabaletta, a short aria with a simple, repetitive rhythm.
The melody was to be sung the first time exactly as written, and then a couple more times with more and more elaborate embellishment.
Now, Rossini didn't invent the cabaletta; its ancestry can be traced back to the da capo aria, a format Handel had used in his operas nearly a hundred years before.
But Rossini made it a virtual requirement of Italian opera. Decades later, in 1892, the cabaletta would still have an important place in Leoncavallo's ``Pagliacci.''
Rossini's most famous technique, and one nobody has successfully copied, is the crescendo. To play a basic, garden-variety crescendo, all that's necessary is to become gradually louder. A Rossini crescendo is more involved than that. Rossini builds excitement by repeating a passage over and over, gradually making it not just louder but faster and often higher in pitch, with more and more singers or instruments joining in.
Rossini used crescendos in vocal passages, but it's really his overtures that make the most striking use of the technique, with each buildup culminating in a burst of comic frenzy.
Rossini introduced this and other buffo elements into even his most serious operas (except the innovative drama ``William Tell''), and it's impossible to figure out which operas are supposed to be serious and which are comic just from hearing the overtures.
The overture to the drama ``Semiramide,'' for example, has as much bounce as that for ``Barber of Seville.'' And it's always hard to take all those screeching piccolos and crashing cymbals with a straight face.
Rossini listening suggestions
Those popular overtures are a good place to begin exploring the Rossini style. Two compact discs will suffice, both on Deutsche Grammophon. One features the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in the early pieces for small, light orchestra - ``Barber of Seville'' and similar items. In the other, Claudio Abbado conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the bigger overtures, including ``William Tell.''
For the full-length ``Barber,'' several worthy options are headed by the version on Philips, performed with verve by Thomas Alien and Agnes Baltsa, with Neville Marriner conducting.