Gioachino Rossini

Gioachino Rossini was born in Pesaro in February 1792, the son of a town trumpeter and a soprano singer. He studied at the Bologna Liceo Musicale from 1806 and produced his first opera, the one-act *La cambiale di matrimonio*, for Venice in 1810. Across the next nineteen years he composed nearly forty operas — at a pace that became proverbial — across the houses of Venice, Naples, Rome, Milan and Paris.

His early Italian career produced the comic operas on which his reputation chiefly rests: *L’italiana in Algeri* (1813), *Il barbiere di Siviglia* (1816), *La Cenerentola* (1817), *La gazza ladra* (1817), and *La donna del lago* (1819). The Naples period under the impresario Domenico Barbaja saw him write a series of opera seria for the soprano Isabella Colbran, whom he later married. His move to Paris in 1824 produced *Le siège de Corinthe*, *Le comte Ory* and *Guillaume Tell* (1829), the last of which proved to be his final opera. Aged thirty-seven, he abruptly stopped composing for the stage.

Rossini lived another thirty-nine years in retirement — partly in Bologna, partly in Paris — composing only sacred works (the *Stabat Mater* of 1841, the *Petite messe solennelle* of 1863) and the piano and vocal miniatures he called his *Péchés de vieillesse* or “sins of old age”. He died in Paris in November 1868. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his operatic work in twentieth-century performance.