Gioachino Antonio Rossini

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces. His best-known operas include the Italian comedies Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola and the French-language epics Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell. A tendency for inspired, song-like melodies is evident throughout his scores, which led to the nickname "The Italian Mozart".

Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history. According to the Oxford History of Western Music, "Rossini's fame surpassed that of any previous composer, and so, for a long time, did the popularity of his works. Audiences took to his music as if to an intoxicating drug — or, to put it more decorously, to champagne, with which Rossini's bubbly music was constantly compared."

Rossini took existing operatic genres and forms and perfected them in his own style. Through his own work, as well as through that of his followers and imitators, Rossini's style dominated Italian opera throughout the first half of the 19th Century. In his compositions, Rossini plagiarized freely from himself, a common practice among deadline-pressed opera composers of the time.

A characteristic mannerism in Rossini's orchestral scoring is a long, steady building of sound over an ostinato figure, creating "tempests in teapots by beginning in a whisper and rising to a flashing, glittering storm," which earned him the nickname of "Signor Crescendo".

A few of Rossini's operas remained popular throughout his lifetime and continuously since his death; others were resurrected from semi-obscurity in the last half of the 20th century, during the so-called "bel canto revival."

Rossini himself correctly predicted that his Barber of Seville would continue to find favor with posterity, telling a friend:  "One thing I believe I can assure you: that of my works, the second act of Guglielmo Tell, the third act of Otello, and all of il Barbiere di Seviglia will certainly endure."