Through 1829 Rossini was an extraordinarily prolific composer of operas, comic, serious, and semiserious, in Italian and French, as well as of a great deal of vocal and instrumental music.

He composed sacred music, vocal treatises, cantatas. Then, for many different reasons, he wrote very little music for more than twentyfive years, if we except some songs and the ‘Stabat Mater’. Only after he left Italy definitively for Paris in 1855 did he find his voice again.

Between 1857 and 1868 a fr...