6 - Stendhal and Rossini in Paris: Il viaggio a Reims, Le Comte Ory, and the July Revolution

Summary

Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta his name is constantly on every tongue… . The name of this hero knows no bounds save those of civilization itself; and he is not yet thirty-two! The task which I have set myself is to trace the paths and circumstances which have carried him at so early an age to such a throne of glory.

—Stendhal, preface to Life of Rossini

Stendhal wrote the preface to his Life of Rossini two years after he returned to France after spending seven years in Italy. He had been with Napoleon during the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 and seen Moscow go up in flames. After Napoleon's defeat he went to Italy to pursue his various interests: literary, artistic, musical, and romantic. He wrote on Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio when he was in Italy; he had not written any fiction when he published his Life of Rossini in 1824. Only with The Red and the Black, published in 1830, did Stendhal establish himself as a major French novelist. He called The Red and the Black a chronicle, as if he were incorporating the history of his own time into his novel. This is what he did, with remarkable prescience. Begun in 1828 and completed in 1830, Stendhal's novel portrays religious and political conflict in France that culminated in the Revolution of 1830, the “glorious days” that drove Charles X, the last Bourbon monarch, from his throne. In a strange coincidence, a year after Stendhal published his biography of Rossini, the Italian composer wrote an opera for the coronation of Charles X, as if he were introducing the king whom Stendhal would wave off the stage five years later. The analogy is not off the mark; the king for whom Rossini wrote his first Paris opera does not appear as a heroic figure in the composer's Il viaggio a Reims. In fact, he does not appear at all, as we shall see. In their different ways, both Rossini and Stendhal rendered negative judgment on the last of the Bourbon kings.