Overture to ‘William Tell’

Program notes

About the Work

Guillaume Tell was Rossini’s last opera, and his most ambitious. Written for the Paris Opéra, where it was first performed on 3 August 1829, it is a vast historical epic in four acts, based on Friedrich Schiller’s play about the legendary Swiss hero who led his people’s revolt against Austrian tyranny, the man forced to shoot an apple from his own son’s head. It pointed the way to the grand French opera of the following decades. And then Rossini, at thirty-seven the most celebrated composer in Europe, simply stopped writing operas. He lived for almost forty more years, but William Tell was his operatic farewell.

The full opera is long and rarely staged, but its overture is one of the most famous pieces of orchestral music ever written. Unusually for its time, it is not a single movement but a kind of miniature tone poem in four linked sections, painting in sound the Swiss landscape and the story to come. Its final galop, thanks to generations of radio, cinema and cartoons, is known to millions who have never set foot in an opera house.

What to Listen For

The overture falls into four clear scenes. It begins at dawn in the Alps, and with a startling sound: five solo cellos, accompanied by the double basses, in a hushed, richly harmonised meditation. It is one of the most original openings in all of Romantic music.

Then a storm gathers. Listen for the patter of the first raindrops in the violins and woodwind, the rumbling of the lower strings, and the full fury of the tempest with crashing brass and timpani, before it rolls away into the distance.

In the calm that follows comes a pastoral scene: a ranz des vaches, the traditional call of Swiss herdsmen summoning their cattle, played by the cor anglais and answered by the flute’s airy decorations. It is pure Alpine tranquillity.

And then the trumpets shatter the peace with a fanfare, and the orchestra launches into the famous galop, a thrilling charge that represents the Swiss soldiers’ march to liberation. Listen to how Rossini, the master of the crescendo, keeps the energy building and building to a breathless close.