Guglielmo Tell, originally Guillaume Tell as Gioachino Rossini's second French opera, premiered on August 3, 1829, at the Paris Opéra. Although Rossini composed works in other genres after 1829, Guglielmo Tell was his last opera. As director of Paris' Théâtre Italien, Rossini led this organization to great heights; his goal was to compose French operas, the greatest of which came to be his Le comte Ory (1828) and Guillaume Tell. Personal illness, political troubles, and Meyerbeer's ascent in the world of French opera in the early 1830s possibly conspired to bring about Rossini's retirement as an opera composer. Etienne de Jouy, Hippolyte Louis-Florent Bis, and Armand Marrast collaborated on the libretto for Rossini's Guglielmo Tell, basing it on Friedrich von Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell (1804). Received well by the contemporary Parisian public and press, Guglielmo Tell remains today a popular work.

Although Guglielmo Tell was originally a French opera, it was translated into Italian in the early 1830s, making it accessible to Italian audiences. After the Italian premiere of Guglielmo Tell in Lucca in 1831, the Italian version was more frequently performed than the original French one.

A cello solo begins the overture to Guglielmo Tell, in a sectional arrangement typical of Rossini's overtures. Trumpet fanfares introduce the final section of the overture, which features a galloping tune, perhaps Rossini's most famous music, stated first by the violins, and adding sections of the orchestra in a crescendo to the end of the overture. After the overture a lilting chorus of villagers sets a pastoral scene with a gracefully simple instrumental tune supported by a perfect fifth drone in the horns. The 6/8 time, simple harp accompaniment, and modified strophic form and arrangement of the fisherman's song ("Il piccol legno ascendi o timida donzella") reinforces this opening pastoral image. The finale of Act One virtually enacts the plot's festivities, with a chorus of young people ("Cinto il crine di bei fiori"), a chorus of villagers ("Gloria, onore al giovinetto" and the chorus "Di destrezza il premio ottiene"), diagetic dance music, and pantomime music accompanying an archery competition. The chorus of villagers returns in a stormy minor mode supplication for Leuthold ("Nume pietoso, Dio di bontà!"). A lengthy, large ensemble passage for soloists and choruses closes the act. The extent to which Rossini relied on the chorus in Guglielmo Tell is evident in Act Two, which begins with a chorus of huntsmen ("Qual silvestre metro intorno"), accompanied by a bombastic orchestra featuring prominent horn motifs, and which is extended by choruses of men of the Swiss cantons, and also in Act Three, in which various groups of soldiers and Swiss people occupy a central position in triumphant choruses ("Gloria al poter supremo!"). Arnoldo's recitative and aria at the beginning of Act Four ("Non mi lasciare, o speme di vendetta"/"O muto asil del pianto") is a fine example of Rossini's treatment of this operatic convention, an expressive bel canto vocal idiom forming the basis for the ternary form aria.

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Act 1 - 1.Overture

Rossini's oversized spectacle Guillaume Tell, his last opera, is not widely performed these days, but the famous overture lives on in countless orchestral performances, television reruns, and whistled renditions of its final section. Sometimes even that final section is excerpted from its surroundings, but listeners to such performances miss the scope and variety of color that give the overture its power. It begins with a celebrated quiet section for cellos and basses representing a peaceful sunrise in Switzerland; a storm then breaks out, followed by a wonderful English horn solo representing the pastoral scenes of mountain meadows. The famous trumpet call heralds the patriotic Swiss army, and leads to the equally famous double-time galop used as the theme to The Lone Ranger program on radio and television. Partly because he stopped composing while still a young man and partly because of his contemporaneity with late Beethoven and Schubert, one tends to think of Rossini as a musical conservative whose music harked back to a Classical ideal of natural melody. Yet Guillaume Tell was in many ways the first grand opera, and its overture, unprecedented in its time, was recognized as a cornerstone of the orchestral repertory well before the first Hollywood cowboy rode into the studio. In its vivid programmatic qualities and in its use of a rousing popular dance (the galop), the overture, chestnut though it may be, was once well ahead of its time.

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