Guillaume Tell was first performed, to great acclaim, on 3 August 1829 at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris. It was put on in London and Berlin in 1830; performances in New York and not one but two Italian translations (by Luigi Balocchi and Calisto Bassi) came the following year. Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy, a senior and respected member of the Académie Française, had written the libretto, and Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, the Opéra's chief designer, mounted a lavish production. It seemed the pinnacle of Rossini's career. Yet the composer's largest-scale, most monumental work for the stage was also his last: he wrote no more operas, preferring to retire, at the age of thirty-seven, to amore leisurely life in Italy (Bologna and Florence) and then, from1855, Paris. Tell on its own would have represented a substantial legacy: it was to prove a foundational example of French grand opéra, that handful of massive, four- and five-act historical spectaculars that held sway at the Paris Opéra from the 1820s almost throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the time it dropped out of the repertory there in the 1930s, Tell had clocked up over 900 performances.

After that time Tell, along with other grands opéras, virtually disappeared from the stage. In twentieth-century America and Great Britain, the best known music from the opera was a section of the overture made famous by the Lone Ranger. For later generations of Rossini's compatriots, on the other hand, it was a more meaningful passage from the other end of the opera (ex. 12.1). The scene is alpine Switzerland, the rocky heights above Lake Lucerne to be precise, in the year 1308: the villain defeated and the fatherland freed, Tell and his band survey the landscape as the storm clears and the sun comes out.