Overture (La gazza ladra)

La gazza ladra opened at La Scala in Milan on 31 May 1817 and held the stage there for weeks. Giovanni Gherardini's libretto came from a French melodrama built on a reported case: a servant girl condemned to death for a theft committed by a magpie. Rossini called the work a melodramma semiserio, and the mixture is exact — comic servants, a military tribunal, a reprieve that arrives while the execution procession is already moving. The overture opens with two side drums, a gesture that startled the first audience and that later listeners have read as the sound of the scaffold.