William Tell (opera)
William Tell (French: Guillaume Tell; Italian: Guglielmo Tell) is a French-language opera in four acts by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini to a libretto by Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy and L. F. Bis, based on Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, which, in turn, drew on the William Tell legend. The opera was Rossini's last, although he lived for nearly 40 more years. Fabio Luisi said that Rossini planned for Guillaume Tell to be his last opera even as he composed it.[1] The often-performed overture in four sections features a depiction of a storm and a vivacious finale, the "March of the Swiss Soldiers".
This article is about the Rossini opera. For the Grétry opera, see Guillaume Tell (Grétry). For other uses, see William Tell (disambiguation).
Guillaume Tell
William Tell
French
Paris Opéra archivist Charles Malherbe discovered the original orchestral score of the opera at a secondhand book seller's shop, resulting in its being acquired by the Paris Conservatoire in 1900.[2]
The famous overture to the opera is often heard independently of the complete work.[15] Its high-energy finale, "March of the Swiss Soldiers", is particularly familiar through its use in the American radio and television shows of The Lone Ranger. Several portions of the overture were used prominently in the films A Clockwork Orange and The Eagle Shooting Heroes; in addition, Dmitri Shostakovich quotes the main theme of the finale in the first movement of his 15th symphony. The overture has four parts, each linked to the next:
The instrumentation is:
During the Crimean War John MacLeod transcribed "La tua danza sì leggiera", a chorus part in the third act, to create the tune "The Green Hills of Tyrol", a well-known retreat march in the Scottish bagpipe tradition. The musician Andy Stewart added lyrics and the song in 1961 became a hit under the name "A Scottish Soldier".
In popular culture[edit]
Characters and scenes from the opera William Tell are recognisable on the court cards and aces of William Tell cards, playing cards that were designed in Hungary around 1835. These cards spread across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and are still the most common German-suited playing cards in that part of the world today. Characters portrayed on the Obers and Unters include: Hermann Gessler, Walter Fürst, Rudolf Harras and William Tell.[18]