The Life of Rossini

ROSSINI was a very celebrated man fifty years ago. Forty-seven years ago he had already finished his Italian career. "Semiramide," the last opera he composed for Italy, was produced in 1823; and that same year the Abbé Carpani wrote the letters on which Stendhal founded, if not the best, at least the best known life of Rossini that has appeared. Stendhal's Life of Rossini was given to the world, and found a ready acceptance, nearly half a century before Rossini's death. But it so happened, what his biographer could not have known at the time, that, in the year 1823, the composer of "Semiramide" had really completed an important, probably the most important, period of his artistic life. He began to write in the year 1808; and it was between the years 1813 ("Tancredi") and 1823 ("Semiramide") that he made his immense reputation.