Rossini is one of the most enigmatic of the great composers. The reasons for the popularity of his best-known compositions have never been difficult to fathom. His music is sensuous and incomparably vital: ‘Full of the finest animal spirits’, wrote Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography in 1850, ‘yet capable of the noblest gravity’. It is also somewhat detached, causing his admirers to think him a fine ironist, his detractors to dub him cynical. Rossini himself was happy to cultivate the mask of casual unconcern. But the image which devolved from this – the gifted but feckless amateur who at an early age abandoned his career for a life of luxury and the otiose pleasures of the table – bears little relation to the facts of his life as we have them.

The formative years, 1792–1810

Rossini was born in the small Adriatic town of Pesaro during a time of severe political upheaval. Both his parents were musicians. His father, Giuseppe Rossini (1764–1839), a robust character, energetic, querulous and a touch naïve, was Pesaro's town trumpeter and a horn player of sufficient distinction to be admitted to Bologna's Accademia Filarmonica. An outspoken Republican, he was briefly imprisoned by the Austrians in 1799, a circumstance which forced his young wife into making more of her untrained talent as an operatic soprano than might otherwise have been the case.