"Cinderella, or the Triumph of Kindness" is a comic operatic drama in two acts by Jochino Rossini. The libreto is by Jacopo Ferretti and borrowed from charles perrault's fairy tale of the same name.
The first performance of the opera was on January 25, 1817, at the Teatro Valle in Rome.
Rossini was 25 years old when he wrote Cinderella, but he already has behind him a series of opera tics such as "The Seville Barber," "Tancredi," "The Italian in Algeria" and others.
The opera "Cinderella" is considered one of the most exquisite scores for vocals and ensemble. Due to the usual lack of time, manner, deadlines and pace of composing, the whole opera is completed in three weeks.For this reason, Rossini uses the overture from "The Gazette", an opera-buff written a few years before, as well as part of an aria from "The Barber of Seville". Some help, Rossini received from Luca Agolini, who wrote the "dry" speeches, as well as three other passages – of Alidoro, Clorinda and the choral scene "Ah, beautiful stranger". Rossini changed and added different scenes and numbers in some cases to subsequent performances, such as those in 1818 and 1820.
The overture to the opera "Cinderella" was often performed in concert programs and participated in the "standard" orchestral repertoire from its inception, along with most of its overtures.
The first performance was adopted with some hostility, but soon gained great popularity in Italy and other countries in Europe, including Lisbon (1819/ , London /1820/, New York (1826). Almost the entire 19th. its popularity rivals that of "The Barber of Seville", but due to the exceptional vocal demands and difficulties in the counter-alto party, as written in the original, it gradually dropped out of the repertoire of theaters and became a rarity.
In the 1960s, Rossini's music enjoyed a real renaissance. A new generation of mezzosopras and contraalts are regaining the popularity of "Cinderella" and she's back on stage.
There are also some changes in the fairy tale itself, mainly due to Rossini's choice of realistic solutions rather than on the magical magic, as in the original, due to the obvious limitations and the lack of "special effects" in his day.
In recent decades there have been numerous recordings of the opera, and in the standard list of the most frequently performed operas, it occupies 28 position among several hundred titles from the current opera repertoire!
