At the age of thirty-seven Rossini had written thirty-seven operas, and thirty-four of those had been produced within the space of fourteen years—not a bad record for a man who was regarded as constitutionally one of the laziest of mankind.—Ernest Newman

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) was born to musical parents—a trumpeter and a singer. His musical training started early, and shortly after his eighth birthday he composed his first opera. His first commission came when he was seventeen. In 1812, at the tender age of twenty, his music debuted at Italy’s most prestigious La Scala, and within a year Rossini was gaining fame beyond Italian borders. Soon he was appointed music director of the opera house of Naples. In 1822, Rossini married and traveled to Vienna immediately after. Some scholars assert that Rossini met Beethoven on that journey, but the truth of that meeting remains a mystery. In 1824, he moved to Paris, where he composed his most famous opera Guillaume Tell, but abruptly stopped composing after its completion. His only significant work after Guillaume Tell was his Stabat Mater, but even the acclaim of that work couldn’t return Rossini to full-time composition. Many scholars believe it was the newly-matured Verdi or the major developments of Wagner that persuaded Rossini to stop composing, but there is no doubt that Rossini dominated Italian opera in the first half of the nineteenth century.
After his successful debut at La Scala, Rossini wrote a serious opera, Tancredi, and followed in two months with the comic opera L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). It was written as a favor to Cesare Gallo, who had been left hanging by another composer and practically begged Rossini to come to the rescue of his troubled Teatro San Benedetto in Venice. The libretto, an established work by Angelo Anelli, received some minor revisions and it is believed that Rossini finished the entire score in just twenty-seven days. The premier was a huge success and L’Italiana in Alegeri is generally regarded as Rossini’s most successful comic opera. Coincidentally, the premier took place on May 22, 1813, the day of Richard Wagner’s birth—perhaps a foreboding of the new currents in opera that would one day overshadow Rossini’s work.