Mi lagnerò tacendo forms part of volume 13, under the heading ‘Musique anodine’. Rossini composed almost fifty different versions of Metastasio’s text, some of which are full-scale songs, some no more than ‘album leaves’. Rossini must have relished the irony of setting a text in which the poet ‘laments in silence’ his ‘bitter fate’—he had, after all, consciously abandoned the theatre and condemned himself to a self-imposed silence. He dedicated the six different settings of ‘Musique anodine’ to his wife: ‘I offer these modest songs to my dear wife Olympe as a simple testimony of gratitude for the affectionate, intelligent care which she lavished on me during my overlong and terrible illness.’
from notes by Richard Stokes © 2008
