Racine is a colossus of French culture (e.g., the face on the old 50-franc note) but his plays cannot be understood or enjoyed without submission to their protocol and the ethos behind it. In this regard it's interesting to note that when Rossini's librettist Andrea Leone Tottola adapted Andromaque, he remained faithful to Racine and yet de-emphasized the stalwart, principled captive Andromaca in favor of Ermione, Andromaca's inflamed Greek rival who causes the misery that overtakes all the characters. (The opera, tellingly retitled Ermione, received its first performance in 1819 at the San Carlo in Naples and its second only in 1987 at the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival.)
Like Racine's play, Ermione is moved by waves and then convulsions of both noble and ignoble desire, fury, and remorse, but there is greater lyric variation than alexandrine couplets permit, and this fractures the solemnity, burnished like a monumental sarcophagus, for which Racine, wielding his pen incisively yet weightily, as much like a chisel as a quill, is noted. First of all, Tottola's verse varies metrically. In addition, while Racine could split a line among as many as four characters, Rossini can have more than one character vocalize at the same time, quite apart from the contributions of the chorus. And he could handle the recitative in a different manner altogether.
Finally, Rossini dictates the changes of tempo and his vocal writing shoots out coloratura sprigs in abundance; the sound of the composer's work itself conveys the stress that Racine can inform us of only in words. As a result, the music of Ermione is nakedly feverish whereas the verse of Andromaque conveys, in Brereton's words, "the atmosphere of the assize court temperately idealized" (92). (The latter could also be said of Mozart's idealistic Enlightenment romance La Clemenza di Tito, a markedly similar story but with an allegorically "managed" happy outcome.)
In Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Lytton Strachey wrote, "The Elizabethan tradition has died out — or rather it has left the theatre, and become absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis — such as Racine conceived it — which is now the accepted model of what a stage-play should be." This may be so with respect to the lean structure of modern plays, but they sound and feel more like Rossini's version of this tale than Racine's. (This is so even though Racine seems more "modern" in some ways, beginning Andromaque in the middle of a conversation, for instance, whereas Ermione inserts two squarely explanatory scenes before the play's opening.)
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