Guillaume Tell

Guillaume Tell was Rossini's thirty-ninth opera and his last. Written for the Paris Opéra on Schiller's play and staged there on 3 August 1829, it runs close to four hours and abandons much of the machinery of Italian opera — the vocal display, the closed numbers — for a continuous historical drama with choruses and ballet. Rossini was thirty-seven. He lived another thirty-nine years in Paris and Bologna and wrote no more for the theatre, an abdication that has never been fully explained. The overture became the best-known thing he wrote.