Gioachino Antonio Rossini^{[n 1][n 2]} (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music.
He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring
from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height
of his popularity.

Born in Pesaro
to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a
singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at
music school in Bologna.
His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years
old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in
Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage
that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara,
Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost
formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain
amount of self-borrowing. During this period he produced his most
popular works including the comic operas L'italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia (known in English as The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola, which brought to a peak the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. He also composed opera seria works such as Otello, Tancredi and Semiramide.
All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody,
harmonic and instrumental colour, and dramatic form. In 1824 he was
contracted by the Opéra in Paris, for which he produced an opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, Il viaggio a Reims (later cannibalised for his first opera in French, Le comte Ory), revisions of two of his Italian operas, Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse, and in 1829 his last opera, Guillaume Tell.

Rossini's withdrawal from opera for the last 40 years of his life
has never been fully explained; contributary factors may have been
ill-health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of
spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer.
From the early 1830s to 1855, when he left Paris and was based in
Bologna, Rossini wrote relatively little. On his return to Paris in 1855
he became renowned for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly
attended by musicians and the artistic and fashionable circles of Paris,
for which he wrote the entertaining pieces Péchés de vieillesse. Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini's last major composition was his Petite messe solennelle (1863). He died in Paris in 1868.