Tancredi, composed a year after La Pietra del Paragone, was Rossini's first serious opera. It was also the first opera by which he became known throughout Europe.

To amateurs of the present day its melodies appear of old-fashioned, or at least of antique cast. The recitatives seem long, and they are interminable compared with those by which Verdi connects his musical pieces. But when Tancredi was first brought out opera seria consisted almost entirely of recitative, relieved here and there and only at long intervals by solo airs. For much of this declamation Rossini substituted singing; for endless monologues and dialogues supported by a few chords, concerted pieces connected and supported by a brilliant orchestral accompaniment.

Rossini, in fact, introduced into serious opera the forms which comic opera already possessed. The parts were at that time differently distributed in opera seria and opera buffa; and in the latter less restricted style the bass singer was not as a matter of course kept in the background. Tancredi was the first serious opera in which a certain prominence was given to the bass, though it was not until some years later—in Otello, 1816, in La Gazza Ladra, 1817, and in MosÈ, 1818—that Rossini ventured to entrust bass singers with leading parts. Opera seria, when Rossini was beginning his career, was governed by rules as strict, as formal, and as thoroughly conventional as those which gave so much artificiality and so much dulness to the classical drama of France. The company for comic opera consisted of the primo buffo (tenor), prima buffa, buffo caricato (bass), seconda buffa, and ultima parte (bass). The company for serious opera was made up of the primo uomo (soprano), prima donna, and tenor, the secondo uomo (soprano), seconda donna, and ultima parte (bass); and in serious opera the ultima parte was not only kept in the background, but, except in concerted pieces, was scarcely ever heard.

As a solo singer, the bass in serious opera had no existence. Gradually Rossini brought him forward, until he became at last as prominent as the tenor, or even more so. In Semiramide, for instance, the principal male character is Assur. In Tancredi, from which Semiramide is separated by an interval of ten years, the bass has little to do. He already, however, possesses an importance which was denied to him in the serious operas of Rossini's predecessors.

In Tancredi, again, the composer introduces concerted pieces in situations where, had the ancient method been followed, there would have been only monologues. In these concerted pieces, moreover, the dramatic action is kept up, whereas the endless monologues and long sequences of airs which gave such character as they possessed to the operas of Rossini's immediate predecessors had the effect of delaying it. To musical reformers of a later period Rossini himself seemed to insert songs in his operas merely for the sake of singing, and greatly to the injury of the drama. But he diminished considerably the number of formal airs which, until he began to write, were included as a matter of course in every opera. He increased the number of characters, and made, for the first time in Italian opera, a free use of the chorus, which in the works of the old school plays quite a subordinate part and has no dramatic functions assigned to it at all.

Rossini's innovations are well described by Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, who has no praise, however, to bestow upon them, but on the contrary, condemns them without measure. Indeed, the more he blames Rossini, the more he calls attention to what are now recognised as his chief merits. When Lord Mount-Edgcumbe undertakes to show how Rossini was ruining the musical drama, he in fact points out how he was reforming it. "So great a change," he writes, "has taken place in the character of the (operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I cannot help enlarging upon that subject before we proceed further. One of the most material alterations is that the grand distinction between serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the singers for their performances entirely so. Not only do the same sing in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel between them, called semi-seria, which bears the same analogy to the other two that the nondescript melodrama does to the legitimate tragedy and comedy of the English stage. The construction of these newly invented pieces," continues Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, "is essentially different from the old. The dialogue, which used to be carried on in recitative, and which in Metastasio's operas is often so beautiful and interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible if it were worth listening to) into pezzi concertati, or long singing conversations, which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing motivos, having nothing to do with each other; and if a satisfactory air is for a moment introduced, which the ear would like to dwell upon, to hear modulated, varied, and again returned to, it is broken off, before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally different melody, time, and key, and recurs no more, so that no impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are almost exploded ... even the prima donna, who would formerly have complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is now satisfied with one trifling cavatina for a whole opera."

In his valuable attack upon Rossini, Lord Mount-Edgcumbe is admirably sincere. After condemning Rossini for his new distribution of characters, and for his employment of bass voices in leading parts, "to the manifest injury of melody and total subversion of harmony, in which the lowest part is their peculiar province," he calls attention to the fact that Mozart has previously sinned in like manner; and he cannot help expressing some astonishment when he reflects "that the principal characters in two of Mozart's operas have been written for basses." It might have occurred to him, moreover, that Mozart, both in Don Giovanni and in the Magic Flute, united the serious with the comic, and, indeed, that there was not one of the so-called innovations charged against Rossini, which were not in reality due to Mozart. In Italy, where Mozart's works were at the time unknown, Rossini may well have appeared a perfectly original genius, not only by his richness of melodic invention, but also by the novelty of his forms. But it is strange that an amateur, acquainted, as Lord Mount-Edgcumbe was, with the works of Mozart, should not at once have perceived that Rossini, in introducing so much which was new only to the Italians, was making no bold experiment, but was merely following in the wake of a greater inventor than himself.

The success, however, of Rossini's first serious opera was due less to new methods of distributing parts and of constructing pieces than to the beauty of the melodies. Stendhal, in his always ingenious but seldom quite veracious Vie de Rossini, dwells on the sort of fever with which its tuneful themes inspired the whole Venetian population, so that even in the law-courts the judges, he relates, were obliged to direct the ushers to stop the singing of "Di tanti palpiti" and "Mi rivedrai ti rivedrÒ." "I thought that after hearing my opera," wrote Rossini himself, "the Venetians would think me mad. Not at all: I found they were much madder than I was."

"It is said at Venice," writes Stendhal, "that the first idea of this delicious cantilena, which expresses so well the joy of meeting after a long absence, is taken from a Greek litany; Rossini had heard it a few days before at vespers in the church of one of the little islands of the lagoons of Venice."

"Since its production," says M. Azevedo, "on the stage and in the universe, it has been made the subject of a canticle for the Catholic Church, like all other successful airs. But a litany before the air, and a canticle after the air, are not the same thing."

In connection with Tancredi, mention has been made of Rossini's reforms in serious opera, which he found too serious. Comic opera, on the other hand, as it existed up to his time, seemed to him too comic or rather, too extravagant. We have seen that the old opera buffa had its separate set of characters and singers, and its own separate style, musical as well as dramatic. Rossini raised the level of the style, and for farce substituted comedy. In the midst, too, of comedy airs, he introduced, from time to time, a sentimental one such as "Ecco ridente" in Il Barbiere, and "Languir per una bella," in L'Italiana in Algeri—which Rossini brought out at Milan (1813) soon after the production of Tancredi at Venice, and which holds among his comic operas the same position that belongs to Tancredi among his serious ones.

Italian audiences had been trained to disapprove of the same singer appearing one night in a comic and the next in a tragic part; and critical hearers are said to have been shocked at seeing the same artist appear successively as Figaro and as Assur, as Dr. Bartolo and as MosÈ. Apart from the substitution of the comic for the farcical in the general treatment, L'Italiana in Algeri is remarkable as the first comic opera in which Rossini introduced that crescendo, which was soon recognised as a characteristic feature in all his works. He had already tested its effect in the overture to Tancredi—the first Italian overture which became popular apart from the work to which it belonged—and in the concerted finale of the same opera. Rossini is said to have borrowed this effect from Paisiello's Re Teodoro. But the invention of the crescendo was energetically claimed by Mosca, who had certainly employed it before Rossini, and who regarded it as his own private property; circulating, in order to establish his prior right, copies of a piece composed long before Tancredi was brought out, in which fully developed crescendi occurred. This did not prevent Rossini from continuing to write crescendi, nor from being satirised and caricatured as "Signor Crescendo," when, some ten years afterwards, he went to Paris.