Thalberg: Les Soirées de Pausilippe, Op. 75 - Hommage à Rossini: 24 Pensées musicales

A major genre in the solo piano repertoire was the operatic paraphrase or fantasy and in this Thalberg excelled. In works of this kind performers could exhibit a high degree of virtuosity based on more or less familiar material in which an audience might take delight, while marvelling at the ingenuity and artifice with which well-known melodies were treated.

Thalberg relied, in works of this kind, very heavily on the operas of Rossini, who occupied an unrivalled position, having established himself during the second decade of the 19th century as a composer of wit and dramatic power. Thalberg's villa at Posillipo had belonged to his father in-law Lablache, born of an émigré French father and an Irish mother in Naples, and was bought by Thalberg after the latter's death in 1858. Here he introduced French vines and gave much attention to the production of a fine wine, while using the villa as a base from which he might emerge for occasional concert tours. In this final period of his life he was always glad to return to his house, his family and his vineyards. It was in 1864 that Thalberg and his wife established themselves at Posillipo and by 1867 he was able to exhibit the wines of his vineyard at the Paris Exposition Universelle, where he won prizes. He was able to give recitals in Naples and to receive pupils, although he refused an invitation to teach at the Real Collegio di Musica, from which, as a foreigner, the rules of the institution had earlier excluded him. In 1866, however, his pupil Beniamino Cesi became professor of piano at Naples Conservatory.

Les Soirées de Pausilippe - Hommage à Rossini ('Evenings at Posillipo - Homage to Rossini') are described in a secondary title as 24 Pensées musicales ('24 Musical Thoughts'). Grouped in complementary pairs, they are in a form comparable to Mendelssohn's Songs without Words or the Albumblätter of other 19th-century composers. As had been the case with Mendelssohn, Thalberg's publisher urged that each piece should be given a title, a suggestion that he rejected with equal vigour, threatening to withdraw them from publication. Here Thalberg avoids the element of ostentation necessary in the earlier operatic fantasies and transcriptions, preferring a general elegant simplicity, in which the piano is allowed to sing, in accordance with the principles laid down in his L'art du chant appliqué au piano ('The Art of Singing as applied to the Piano'), in which he makes use of operatic arias as a means of piano instruction. The work mixes material that draws inspiration from Rossini, as it does from Posillipo itself.