A precocious composer with a jovial temperament, Gioachino Rossini reigned over
opera throughout the first half of the 19th century, giving it some of its
finest pages with The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, The Thieving Magpie,
The Italian in Algiers and Guillaume Tell, whose overture is more famous than
the sung part. Of modest origins, Giovacchino Antonio Rossini was born in
Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast, on February 29, 1792, to a father who was a
municipal musician playing trumpet and horn, and a mother who worked as a
laundress and became a soprano at the Bologna theate...