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A blatant attempt to force an unlikely connection

by Jack Neely

In the bookstore the other night I overheard a woman talking to the clerk, questioning what sort of festival we were having this weekend. Her questions were persistent and, to the clerk, not easily answered.

“It was Rossini last year!” she said. “Is that what it’s going to be, Rossini every year? Why? And why Knoxville?”

The correct answer, of course, is why not? But in the spirit of authenticity, I’ve made it my quest to find the elusive Knoxville-Rossini connection.

I’m sure it’s there, but this one’s a challenge. Unlike Sartre and Nehru and Rachmaninoff, Gioacchino Rossini is one of the few people I’m fairly confident never visited Knoxville. I don’t think he ever left Europe. He died four years before we built our first opera house. Even then, we didn’t show all that many operas. But among the operatic shows Knoxvillians did watch were Rossini’s operas, or at least selections from them. The people who built the Bijou and most of the old brick buildings around downtown Knoxville had at least heard of Rossini, and many Knoxvillians of the late 19th century were fond of him.

Is that enough to justify a festival? Maybe. I thought about trying to force a genealogical connection between Rossini and William Cary Ross, the prominent old-family capitalist of about a century ago who founded, among other things, Cherokee Country Club. Maybe Ross is short for Rossini, which means, I believe, “Little Ross.”

It’s not that uncommon to force genealogical connections; people do it all the time. You’ll be grateful that I thought better of it.

So, Rossini, Knoxville, what can we do? We have a few things in common. Like Knoxville, Rossini was of humble origins, aspired to greatness, and though critics don’t always take him as seriously as he might have liked, people still enjoy what he does.

And we’re almost exactly the same age. Rossini was born a few months after James White’s land auction that was the symbolic founding of Knoxville. Rossini’s birthdate of 1792 appears on some county logos because it was the founding year of Knox County.

Looking at Rossini’s dates, he’s a near-perfect contemporary of Sam Houston, who grew up in East Tennessee. They had some biorhythms in common; as Rossini was contemplating his best-known opera, The Barber of Seville, Houston was achieving a different kind of fame by helping to win the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. When Rossini wrote William Tell, Houston was governor of Tennessee. The William Tell overture would make a good soundtrack to Houston’s life. I’m not sure whether Rossini and Houston would have liked each other, but they shared an adventurous temperament, unhappy marriages, and long sideburns.

But Houston’s accomplishment seems part of the deep, legendary past: his first triumph with Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in Alabama before Alabama existed, seems impossibly long ago, over 20 years before the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto. Houston’s career is shrouded in legend and mystery.

By contrast, we know Rossini. The bright, peppy, funny music Rossini composed at about the same time as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend is still enjoyed by young folks, used to accompany Bugs Bunny cartoons, and as motivational music for basketball warm-ups.

And this weekend, we’ll be celebrating Rossini in festive ways, with music and wine in the streets, a festival that somehow seems too modern to be appropriate for Houston. Though by all accounts, Houston would have enjoyed the wine. In any case, the old Lamar House, which once feted Houston in person, will be feting Rossini by proxy this weekend. It’s now the front of the Bijou, which will host a production of The Barber of Seville. And come to think of it, during Rossini’s life the Lamar House hosted a barber shop.

The words Knoxville and Rossini may seem an unlikely pair, but they do both appear in at least one well-known book: The Birth of the Modern, by Paul Johnson, one of those British historians who enjoys surprising you with unlikely connections. Knoxville’s in there for its connection to Andrew Jackson. Jackson and Rossini are described as two of the prominent proponents of the Romantic sensibility which, as strange as it may seem, afflicted both Italy and Tennessee simultaneously.

I’ve enjoyed the Rossini Festival so much that I wanted to force a more substantial sort of a connection. And I learned that between Knoxville and Maestro Rossini are fewer than six degrees of separation.

Recently I learned that a descendent, Jason Rossini, lived here, in the Solway area of northwest Knox County. He worked until recently for Oak Ridge Chrysler, but I wasn’t able to track him down for this column.

It occurred to me that if anyone ever lived in Knoxville who ever encountered Rossini in person, it was likely the Ricardi brothers, Pietro and Giovanni, who came from Momo, a town not far from Milan. Rossini had lived in Milan a few years before Pietro Ricardi was born. They moved to Knoxville as young men in 1852, perhaps the first Italians ever to live here. Giovanni, or John, as we knew him, was not a very prominent citizen. But Pietro, or Peter, was a candymaker who invested in real estate in a growing town and became one very wealthy Knoxvillian.

For the Ricardis’ last 15 years in Italy, Rossini was living in Bologna, maybe 150 miles from the Ricardis’ home. He was a former prodigy past his prime, in ill health and not working much. But who’s to say the Ricardis didn’t pass him on the street, in Bologna, or Milan, home of the famous opera house La Scala, and the nearest big city to these future Knoxvillians. They may even have been cognac drinking buddies.

Maybe a better bet would be in the person of a German named Gustave Knabe. Born in Leipzig in 1817, when Rossini was at his height, Knabe came to America in the 1850s, first settling in the rough-edged German colony of Wartburg, then arriving in Knoxville in 1864. Here, he promptly founded the Knoxville Philharmonic Society, a forerunner of the modern symphony. Known even in his own day as “the father of music in East Tennessee,” Knabe was Knoxville’s most prominent classical musician of the 19th century.

Knabe had attended conservatory at Leipzig in the early 1840s and had performed in an orchestra conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. Knabe knew Richard Wagner, and was close friends with Clara and Robert Schumann.

Rossini knew several of those folks; he and Wagner were mutual admirers, and they sometimes swapped notes. And he knew Mendelssohn, who reportedly found Rossini annoyingly presumptuous, at first, though they each respected the other’s music. For all we know, Rossini might have heard the future Father of Music in East Tennessee playing in Mendelssohn’s conservatory orchestra. All we know for certain is that Rossini knew someone who knew a future Knoxvillian.

For us, this weekend, it’ll have to be enough.

April 15, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 16 © 2004 Metro Pulse