What opera after Guillaume Tell? | The Rossini Graduation

You have survived the summit of Guillaume Tell! You have tasted the grand scale, the freedom, the sheer magnitude of Rossini’s final serious opera.

Where do you go after the mountaintop? You have two paths. You can follow the thread of "French Grand Opera" which Tell invented (go to Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots or Verdi's Don Carlos). OR, you can follow the "Bel Canto" thread back to the raw emotion of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Tell is the bridge between the old world of singers and the new world of spectacle.

The Sovereign Solution:

1. Seek the Spectacle: If you loved the scale, go bigger. Meyerbeer is your next port of call.

2. Seek the Humanity: If you loved the father-son dynamic in Tell, look for Verdi. He is the master of the parent-child bond.

3. Rest Your Ears: Tell is massive. Take a palate cleanser—maybe a Mozart comedy—before the next climb.