Overture (Guillaume Tell)

Guillaume Tell was Rossini's last opera; it was staged at the Paris Opéra on 3 August 1829, when he was thirty-seven, and he wrote nothing further for the theatre in the four decades that remained to him. Étienne de Jouy and Hippolyte Bis adapted Schiller's play about the Swiss rising against Austrian rule, and Rossini answered it with four acts of such length that early performances were cut heavily, sometimes to a single act. The overture is built in four linked sections, moving from a quintet of solo cellos through a storm and a pastoral ranz des vaches to the closing galop.