IMSLP Forums

According to one WorldCat entry, this is based on Rossini (La Cenerentola). I don't know La Cenerentola well at all. If anyone does, could they just have a quick look at:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Cinderella_(Bellak,_James)

and tell me if this is based on Rossini's themes? If so, I will make the link. (It will save me a good half hour of diving into the opera score . . .)

If RISM-online has incipits from the Rossini opera (will check myself in a bit!), that could help here. It passes the "makes sense" test- the Rossini is a Cinderella opera, and Bellak very very often wrote (and very very many) opera potpourris &c of which this may well be one (question is probably whether it's of Rossini's or someone else's, e.g. Massenet's Cendrillon.) (... er, or not, obviously.)

Looking for things like Coro dei cacciatori (hunter's chorus- the opening theme of the Bellak) on YouTube - doesn't seem to be one in Cenerentola or at least one isn't readily turning up under that name (also going through this annotated PDF linked to from Wikipedia to look for some of the themes in Bellak's brief potpourri) - I'm thinking maybe that if it isn't just a simple brief piano piece inspired by Cinderella (I don't know that Bellak did that often, but he might have...) it might be based on Isouard's earlier opera, or a rather lesser-known one... don't know. It's from his "Shower of Melodies" series, the other members of which have operatic titles (Caliph of Baghdad, Don Pasquale, etc.) so it's probably an operatic potpourri if one can just find the opera...

Actually, the theme at bar 44 (GCECECA...) (starting at Non più mesta) does seem to come from the Rossini opera. Hrm... (yep, bar 2 of p.346 of that vocal score, transposed to C major. RISM gave me the hint there, then I had to go looking. Maybe/probably? the rest, too. Hrm. I guess the Isouard wasn't it after all- still, was good to download it and learn about it.)