Guillaume Tell

The overture, the piece most orchestras actually perform, unfolds in four connected sections without pause. It opens with a slow, dark passage for solo cello and low strings, a quiet dawn before anything else happens. This gives way to a sudden storm, full orchestra depicting a violent Alpine thunderstorm with rushing strings and crashing brass. As the storm clears, a solo English horn plays a gentle, folk-like melody answered by a flute, a pastoral calm meant to evoke shepherds calling to each other across mountain valleys. Finally, trumpets snap the mood awake with a fanfare, and the orchestra launches into the galloping finale, a bright, driving theme in a fast triple meter that has been used in countless films, cartoons, and radio broadcasts. Listeners who know only this last two minutes are often surprised by how much quieter and more atmospheric the rest of the overture is. If a performance includes excerpts from the full opera, expect additional arias and choruses telling the story of the Swiss archer and marksman William Tell, who defies an occupying governor.

Guillaume Tell was Rossini's last opera, premiered at the Paris Opera in 1829, based on Friedrich Schiller's play about the legendary Swiss marksman who resists Austrian occupation. Rossini was in his mid-thirties and already famous across Europe for decades of comic and serious operas, but after Tell he never completed another opera, living another 39 years mostly in retirement from the stage. The full opera, long and demanding, is rarely staged complete today, but its overture became one of the most popular orchestral works of the nineteenth century. Its final galloping section was later adopted as the theme music for radio and television's The Lone Ranger, cementing its place in American popular culture far beyond the concert hall or opera house.