For the last two decades or so the works of the composer from Pesaro have no longer revealed very many mysteries to the historian and the opera lover, for even Rossini’s rarer works are now regularly performed. A few operas, however, still remained in the archives, among them Ivanhoé, a famous pastiche conceived by Rossini in collaboration with Pacini, his Parisian publisher. Its revival allows us to fill in a chapter of the history of music which had remained incomplete and above all to get to know the work with which Rossini introduced himself to Parisian audiences, before offering them Le Siège de Corinthe. The composer from Pesaro, indeed, had too great a sense of publicity to feed the critics’ curiosity, lightheartedly, a new opera.

Opera lovers will be surprised to find in the score of Ivanhoé the famous galop of Guglielmo Tell, a work which everybody considered to be totally new.

Rossini had loved the pastiche since his youth and he never ceased amusing himself, like a talented child, muddling his audiences by using, for example, the same Overture for the very comic Il Barbiere di Siviglia and the extremely serious Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, whose virtuoso passages are the same as Rosina’s! All admire Comte Ory, which is a pastiche of Viaggio a Reims, and so forth.

This world première recording was made live in 2001 at the Festival della Valle d’Itria.