Rossini's career as a stage composer spanned just nineteen years. His larger career, beginning with the six Sonate a quattro of 1804 and ending with the march La corona d'Italia in 1868, spanned sixty-four. The productivity of the operatic years was phenomenal, an Ixion's wheel of endeavour on which Rossini's fame and fortune rested. It was from this that dozens of additional commissions, the large and absorbingly diverse collection of non-operatic compositions, mainly flowed. The fate of both bodies of work has not been dissimilar, the byways neglected, the highways heavily trodden, but there the similarity ends. Formally and stylistically many of the non-operatic works have an individuality all their own.

Although Rossini was born into one revolution and lived through several others, and although his own early work revolutionised Italian opera, there was always something of the court composer about him. He wrote operas and secular cantatas for Bourbon court theatres in Naples and Paris and throughout his career accepted a string of lucrative private commissions from well-to-do patrons who had at their disposal grand and agreeable performing venues: a country villa (the six Sonate a quattro), ametropolitan cathedral (Stabat mater), a Parisian salon (Les Soirèes musicales), a private chapel (Petite messe solennelle). In his final years in Paris he took the process to its logical conclusion. A vieux rococo (his own phrase) stranded in an age of Romantic individualism, he created his own private salon, becoming composer-in-residence to the court of which he himself was king.

The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini

At its simplest, a critical edition of music presents a printed score that reflects as accurately as possible the composer's concept and provides the user with information about how the editor arrived at this form of the score and with the tools to interpret it. An immediate qualification is necessary. To speak of the composer's concept as something that is fixed, that can be expressed in a score and that can be recovered through study of the sources raises the issues of authorship and the nature of an opera as a work of art. These topics have been much discussed by textual critics and musical scholars. In some senses an opera has multiple authors: we consider the composer to be the principal author, but the work of the librettist with whom he collaborates can also be seen as authorial. Censors and financial controls can affect the final form of the opera. An opera, furthermore, needs a theatre directorship, stage director, set and costume designers, musicians and stage hands to realise it in performance.

Nonetheless, the Rossini critical edition, like the critical editions of other nineteenth-century Italian opera composers, generally regards the original score as reflecting the composer's intention – much as that intention may have been modified by the entire social setting in which an opera is composed, produced and published or otherwise disseminated – and takes the autograph as the principal source for the edition. As adjunct sources the editor uses the librettos, manuscript copies, published scores, performing materials and designs for sets and costumes for the première and subsequent authentic productions (defined as those that Rossini directly supervised), reviews, letters and whatever else may exist. In the critical edition the poetic text as found in the score is given preference over that of the printed libretto; no edition of the text as a literary entity is attempted, nor is the libretto printed separately from the music.

‘Since the death of Napoleon, another man has appeared who is talked about every day in Moscow as in Naples, in London as in Vienna, in Paris as in Calcutta. The fame of this man knows no bounds save those of civilisation itself; and he is not yet thirty-two!’ The opening words of Rossini's first biography – by none other than Stendhal, and published in Paris in 1824 – help introduce what at first might seem an extravagant claim: Rossini was Europe's most famous composer in the first half of the nineteenth century; his music reached the largest number of listeners, whether in opera houses, or concert halls, or played in countless arrangements printed for all sorts of performing forces, or simply whistled in the streets. In other words, nineteenth-century musical culture cannot be understood without taking Rossini into prominent account; any history that relegates Rossini to a secondary rôle must to some extent ignore the tastes of those who inhabited the period. And yet such histories have been the norm rather than the exception in the past century, especially in the English-speaking world.

The reasons behind this historiographical neglect are numerous and diverse, but chief among them is probably the progressive disappearance of Rossini's works from the repertory of opera houses during the second half of the nineteenth century, a trend not reversed until the later decades of the twentieth. Only a handful of his comic operas were performed, especially Il barbiere di Siviglia, which remains the most popular and frequently revived.

We may define the Rossini Renaissance as the reappearance of his forgotten operas after decades of neglect. The word ‘forgotten’ is an important qualifier because one opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia, was never forgotten, and in fact remained a constant presence in opera houses from its première in 1816. Even if we discount the anomalous popularity of Il barbiere, it would be inaccurate to say that Rossini ever completely disappeared from the repertory: performances cropped up every few years at one house or another. Still, there is no escaping the dwindling of his presence: both the number of Rossini's operas performed and the number of productions and performances of them declined.

It was not his other comic operas but the French serious ones – particularly Moïse/Mosè (as opposed to the Neapolitan Mosè in Egitto, 1818, of which it was a substantial revision) and Guillaume/Guglielmo Tell – that were most persistent in the six decades or so following the composer's death. A revival of the opere buffe began between the world wars – mostly L'italiana in Algeri and La Cenerentola but occasionally others – alongside the continued occasional presence of Mosè and Tell. In a Rossinian season in Paris in 1929 Guillaume Tell, L'italiana, La Cenerentola and Il barbiere were all presented. Largely missing were the opere serie and semiserie; aside from Semiramide at the 1940 Maggio Musicale, Florence, and La gazza ladra in an adaptation by Riccardo Zandonai in Pesaro, 1942, their revival took place after World War II, and this will be the focus of the remainder of this essay.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, a discussion of the American protest novel or of Richard Wright as a protest novelist is an exercise in retrospection. It seems from certain angles of critical thought that literary history demands a deliberate, not always happy, effort to remember things past. The glance back privileges the claims of history over the speculations of aesthetics. It is especially necessary to let history speak in the case of Wright and the African American novel. Our postmodern sense of aesthetics can betray us and muddle our understanding of the necessity for protesting social policies and cultural beliefs through the mechanism of the novel. Looking backward helps us to remember at least two points. The African American novel originated in the nineteenth century as the use of literacy and writing more for purposes of enlightenment than for the pleasures of entertainment. Richard Wright stands in a special relationship to the form he sought to develop, because he did not abandon the original purposes of the black novel for the sake of being modern.

In the introduction to one of Toni Morrison's often-cited interviews, critic Claudia Tate observed that “while her stories seem to unfold with natural ease, the reader can discern the great care Morrison has taken in constructing them.” Over the span of nearly thirty years, from The Bluest Eye in 1970 to Paradise in 1998, the Nobel Laureate has not only continued to take great care in the construction of each novel, but she has also commented on the role of the reader in the construction of meaning. In fact, in one interview, Morrison says, “[t]o make the story appear oral, meandering, effortless, spoken - to have the reader feel the narrator without identifying that narrator, or hearing him or her knock about, and to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book - is what's important. What is left out is as important as what is there.”

The publication of Margaret Walker's Jubilee in 1966 defined a subject of representation that would come to predominate in the African American novel for the rest of the twentieth century. Literally dozens of novels about slaves and slavery appeared in the wake of Jubilee. Although it would take five more years for the second novel in this tradition to appear (Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), and four more for the third (Gayl Jones's Corregidora), an African American novel about slavery would become almost annual fare thereafter. Given the paucity of novels about slavery before Jubilee and the enduring pervasiveness since, it is natural to inquire about the reasons for this development. What historical or social or cultural events permitted and sustained this new impetus in African American fiction? Since these contemporary narratives of slavery are both formally diverse and yet intellectually indebted to the first form of representation for people of African descent in the New World, the slave narrative itself, it is also worth asking questions about the formal features of this body of work.

Placing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison side by side, as contemporaries who chose to write novels for the purpose of limning the depths of the American scene, is a critical enterprise that insists as much on a critical leap forward as it does a harkening back. The reasons for this, of course, have a great deal to do with the state of American literary and racial politics in the years following World War II. At that time, with the Civil Rights Movement bringing about calls for racial integration and equal protection under the law for African American citizens, there grew to be a great need for black writers to fulfill the role of articulating what would come to be understood as “the black experience,” by an audience often bewildered by the malevolence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the unwavering insistence by Martin Luther King Jr. that justice could only be achieved by peaceful means. How could a people deemed at one time so incapable of eloquence and critical thought suddenly be so persistent in their claims for equality, in their demands that their humanity be fully recognized? Who among them could bring clarity to their motivations?

While the location and duration of the movement popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance remain highly contested, its importance in the development of African American literature - and “modernism ” in general - is more widely accepted today than ever. Central to the movement then known as the “Negro Renaissance ” was the effort of black writers and artists after World War I to re-conceptualize “the Negro ” independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans' own relationship to their heritage and each other - independent, too, of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of African American life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs. The struggle with onedimensional mainstream stereotypes was, of course, far from over, and it was hardly new; a central feature of the work of Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt in the 1890s, it played a major role in such novelistic “forerunners ” to “renaissance ” fiction as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man andW. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

For many commentators, some of the most distinctively African American elements that readers encounter in African American novels are reflections of the blues tradition. However, the phrase “blues novel” might seem to some to be so incongruous as to approach the level of oxymoron. After all, the two terms comprise widely different genres stylistically. The novel as we know it today, though it has roots in the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom Egyptian prose fiction and appeared in embryonic form in Boccaccio's Decameron and The Arabian Entertainments, emerged most forcefully in the English literary tradition in the eighteenth century with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Novels are traditionally extended written prose narratives with some amount of plot and character development, though the genre has proven very pliable over the years.

Recent work in African American literary studies has attempted to define an “Afro-modernism,” an aesthetic position that participates in the project of modernity while not being subsumed by or subordinated to the “high” modernism of the early twentieth century. While Houston A. Baker has identified this practice as “mastery of form/deformation of mastery,” Richard Powell and others have defined it as a “blues aesthetic,” clearly linking it to the African American vernacular tradition. While these are highly useful constructions, they are not quite adequate to much of modern and contemporary black writing. These theorizations have created a “difference from” high modernism when at least some artists - Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison are clear examples - have chosen to position themselves within the tradition of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. At the same time, they have also made use of the vernacular tradition, but this should not be surprising, since many of the “high” modernists themselves, whether in poetry, fiction, or the visual arts, found the vernacular to be an important resource.

The list of early African American fictions is unexpectedly provisional. Presently it includes “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, Clotel, or the President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb, The Bondwoman's Narrative (1857?) by Hannah Crafts, Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson, Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859-62) by Martin R. Delany, and “The Two Offers” (1859) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. But the list has been evolving. The full text of Blake was not made available until 1969. Our Nig was not identified as an African American novel until 1982; The Bondwoman's Narrative was not discovered to be an African American fiction until 2001. It has been identified by several kinds of forensic and scholarly tests as a manuscript written by an escaped slave woman. On the authority of its finder, Henry Louis Gates Jr., it is proper to treat that manuscript as authentic, but it is so newly found that it is also proper to retain the possibility that it might prove to be otherwise.

While the location and duration of the movement popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance remain highly contested, its importance in the development of African American literature - and “modernism” in general - is more widely accepted today than ever. Central to the movement then known as the “Negro Renaissance” was the effort of black writers and artists after World War I to re-conceptualize “the Negro” independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans' own relationship to their heritage and each other - independent, too, of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of African American life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs. The struggle with onedimensional mainstream stereotypes was, of course, far from over, and it was hardly new; a central feature of the work of Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt in the 1890s, it played a major role in such novelistic “forerunners” to “renaissance” fiction as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

One hundred and fifty years ago the first known African American novel was published by the fugitive slave William Wells Brown. Brown was as uncertain about the audience for Clotel, a story about American miscegenation, as he was about the kind of text he was creating. He continued to experiment with the form and “test” his audience by publishing variations of the story for a decade. For a people prevented from reading and writing by law, it is not surprising that novel writing and novelists have since become highly valued within African American culture. The very idea of an “African American novel” then and now precipitates an intense debate about the form and function of any belletristic genre. Embedded in the term is a history of achievement and a cultural heritage that raises as many questions as it answers.

A considerable number of African American novels written after 1970 are inspired by postmodernist themes and strategies. The postmodernist novel is essentially antimimetic; it frequently questions the linearity of plot structure, confuses time sequences, blends levels of reality and fictionality, fragments characters, looks at events through several focalizing lenses arranged one behind the other, enjoys unreliable narrators, falls short of expectations, breaks rules, undermines conventions, and sometimes even resists interpretation. All this it does with an excessive blending of wit, irony, and paradox. In short, it favors experimental, avant-garde, progressive literary techniques and approaches.