Rossini—A Psychoanalytic Approach to "The Great Renunciation"

Gioacchino Rossini, when only thirty-seven years old and at the pinnacle of success, permanently ceased his career as an opera composer. A psychoanalytic approach to "the great renunciation"—unique in the annals of serious music and heretofore only inadequately explained—suggests that the crucial factor was the death of the composer's mother two years previously. From his earliest years, which were punctuated by frequent separations from her, he had never established a secure, maturely neutralized, and internalized image of his mother which could lead to the formation of a stable ego structure and a meaningful sense of identity. Throughout his life, Rossini continued to act out his infantile and

highly ambivalent attachment to her; operatic composition itself was a precariously sublimated and insufficiently neutralized expression of his aggression.3 This intense ambivalence toward his mother made it impossible for him to mourn her in a healthy way, and his refusal to compose was the ultimate expression of his unconscious anger at her for having deserted him. Most of the remaining thirty-nine years of Rossini's life were basically one long agitated depression, which at times reached psychotic proportions. Only when he had established sufficient obsessional defenses and a stable enough dependent, sadomasochistic relationship with his second wife (and perhaps, too, when the instinctual energies involved had sufficiently diminished in intensity with old age) could he compose music again, albeit still not opera; but even then he seems to have had some awareness of the aggression involved, for he called these compositions "sins" and, by negation, identified himself with Judas. While he had always consciously maintained an exaggerated adoration of his mother, it was in attempting to master the unconscious aggression toward her that he had originally written such beautiful music; and it was his inability to neutralize this aggression sufficiently that, unfortunately, led to "the great renunciation."