ROSSINI, GIOACHINO
(Pesaro 1792-Passy, Paris 1868)

Italian composer. Born into a musical family (his father was a horn player and his mother a singer), young Gioachino taught himself music before going on to attend the Liceo Musicale in Bologna (1806). During this period he composed his first opera, Demetrio e Polibio (1812). But his official debut had already taken place in Venice (l8l0)with La cambiale di matrimonio. This was followed by L'equivoco stravagante (1811), L'inganno felice, Ciro in Babilonia, La scala di seta, La pietra del paragone and L' occasione fa il ladro, all dating from 1812, of which La pietra del paragone was especially important as Rossini's first major success at La Scala, Milan. In 1813 he continued to write for the Venetian theaters (for whom he composed L'inganno felice, La scala di seta and L'occasione fa il ladro), completing Il signor Bruschino and Tancredi, the latter firmly establishing his reputation and leading to the overwhelming and irresistible L'italiana in Algeri. The year 1814 began with a failure. Aureliano in Palmia at La Scala, but the same opera house would shortly witness the success of his next opera, Il turco in Italia. Sigismondo turned out to be another fiasco, but then Rossini had written it for Venice, where he was on the Austrian police's list of prime suspects for his openly republican sympathies. So it was at the age of 23 and already at the height of his fame that Rossini left Venice for Naples, where in 1815 he won acclaim for Elisabetta, regina d' Inghilterra. During 1816 he spent some time in Rome, during which he produced Torvaldo e Dorliska and, most notably, Il barbier di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), followed in 1817 by La Cenerentola (Cinderella) and, for La Scala, La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie). But it was in Naples that Rossini composed his most important opere serie: Otello (1816), Armida (l817), Mose in Egitto (1818), Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), Ermione (1819), La donna del lago (1819), Maometto II (1820) and Zelmira (1822). Other operas belonging to these years include Adelaide di Brgogna (Rome, 1817), Adina (composed in 1818, but not staged until 1926 in Lisbon), Bianco e Faliero (Milan, 1819) and Maltilde di Shabran (Rome, 1821). Semiramide was premiered in Venice in 1823 and marked the end of Rossini's career as a composer in Italy. He moved to France, settling in Paris in 1824, and made his Paris theater debut in 1825 with Il viaggio a Rheims (1825), written in honour of the coronation of Charles X. As he adapted  to French taste in opera, Rossini radically revised Maometto II and Mose in Egitto, transforming them into Le siege de Corinthe (1826) and Moise et  Pharaon (1827). After the exquisite Le Comte Ory (1828), an opera which would have no little influence on French opera in the years that Followed, Rossini himself composed in 1829 what was to be his swan song in opera, Guillaume Tell, a work which Berlioz hailed as "Rossini's masterpiece" and included everything Rossini had achieved as an opera composer.