About the work
“Il viaggio a Reims, ossia L’albergo del giglio d’oro” (The Journey to Reims, or The Hotel of the Golden Fleur-de-lis) is a one-act dramma giocoso by Gioachino Rossini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Balocchi, which borrows and parodies motifs from Madame de Staël’s novel “Corinne ou l’Italie”. Rossini, director of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris since late 1824, wrote it as a contribution to the celebrations for the coronation of Charles X. It premiered on 19 June 1825 at the Salle Louvois as a royal gala performance, with Giuditta Pasta as Corinna. It is Rossini’s last opera in Italian.
Plot
At the Golden Fleur-de-lis spa hotel in Plombières, travellers from across Europe are waiting to continue to the coronation in Reims, among them the celebrated Roman improvising poet Corinna, a Polish marchesa, a fashion-mad French countess, a jealous Russian general, an English lord and a music-loving German baron. Amid courtship, rivalries and lost luggage full of gowns, news arrives that there are no horses to be had anywhere in the area. A letter announcing coronation festivities in Paris as well consoles the company: they hold a party in the hotel garden instead, each guest sings a song from their homeland, and Corinna finally improvises a hymn to the new king.
Cultural significance
Rossini did not intend this occasional piece for other stages and reused much of its music in “Le comte Ory” in 1828. The score was long thought lost; only after its scattered parts were rediscovered in the 1970s and reconstructed by Janet Johnson and Philip Gossett did the opera return to the stage at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in 1984, conducted by Claudio Abbado and directed by Luca Ronconi. Since then, with its fourteen solo roles and its grand ensemble for 14 voices, the work has won a place in the international repertoire; the German premiere followed in Saarbrücken in 1992.