Comic Duet for Two Cats

1825

By Gioachino Antonio Rossini

Item Number: PE.EP7145

Italian.

Duetto Buffo di due Gatti for medium-high and medium-low voice (nearly always a duet for Mezzo-Soprano and Alto, or two Altos)

This duet, typically attributed to Rossini, was not actually written by him, though it does draw on his 1816 opera, Otello. The composer was most likely the English composer Robert Lucas de Pearsall, who for the purpose used the pseudonym G. Berthold. // Pearsall was born in Bristol on March 14th, 1795, and was originally trained as a barrister, but after a mild stroke in 1825, he left England and settled first in Mainz and then Karlsruhe, in Germany, from 1830 to 1842, and then at the Schloss Wartensee by Rorschach in Switzerland, where he and his family remained until his death on August 5th, 1856. Pearsall is now mainly remembered for his part-songs and his twenty-two compositions in madrigal-style, such as Lay a Garland, Great God of Love, and I saw lovely Phyllis. He also composed church music for both Roman Catholic and Anglican use. His part in the re-estalishment of plainsong, renaissance polyphony, and ancient church hymns in German-speaking countries qualifies him also as an unsung hero of the nineteenth-century Cecilian Movement.