ON THIS DATE IN 1829 – the start of snobbery.

"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger." -Dan Rather

One of the most famous melodies in all of music was first enjoyed one hundred eighty-one years ago today, when the Paris Opéra premiered Rossini’s William Tell at the Salle Le Peletier. Closely linked to Friedrich Schiller’s stageplay about the sharp-shooting Swiss rouge’s defiance of the Austrian government, the then five-act epic was initially received with indifference from the public, a familiar story for as old a composing hand as Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868). More alarming was the reaction by the director of the opera, who asked to annul a contract for more works by Rossini only moments after the curtain fell. Legend says that Rossini countered with characteristic gusto. "I’ll cancel the contract at once,” he said, “and if you like, I’ll add that I’ll never write another opera as long as I live." Whether he said it or not, he kept his word.

Facing a high-ranging tenor part and a lengthy runtime even by 18th century standards, artists willing to perform William Tell have often faced a choice between significant cuts or short-lived runs. Paris management began to perform the piece one act at a time; even the composer was informed one night that he’d be seeing only the second act. "What! the whole of it?," he replied. In Rossini’s native Italy, concerns about a work glorifying a revolutionary figure led to marked censorship. The Teatro San Carlo first presented William Tell in 1833 but did not mount another production for nearly fifty years, while Venice did not host the work until 1856. The Vienna Court Opera, by contrast, offered 422 performances of Tell between 1830 and 1907.

The opera was, in the end, a swan song for a composer who had begun composing and presenting opera as a teenager. He had spent the 1820s enjoying the fruits of international stardom, including multiple visits as a dignitary to the orchestral music hotbeds of Vienna, London, St. Petersburg and Paris. William Tell was meant to pave the way for five new works for the Paris Opéra, but even in 1829, Rossini felt that his place was at home with his family in Bologna (his mother had died two years earlier). By 1830—the year of French King Charles X's abdication—Rossini was living in Italy, with a hearty joie de vivre that centered on lavish dinner parties showcasing his considerable talents as a chef. Though he composed several concert pieces in later days, he never returned to the stage, leaving as his last theatrical note a melody now singularly famous for its place in front of a TV show. As famed musicologist François-Joseph Fétis said of William Tell, "The work displays a new man in an old one, and proves that it is in vain to measure the action of genius."