Gioachino Rossini

Rossini wrote thirty-nine operas by the age of thirty-seven, stopped, and spent the next four decades writing very little. The catalogue is opera, the overtures, the sacred works, and the late piano miniatures he called his Sins of Old Age.

For singers the coloratura arias are the draw and they are the most technically exposed writing in the standard repertoire — the ornamentation is the piece, not decoration on it. Editions differ on how much of it they print, because some of it was traditionally improvised, and a scholarly edition may give you a plainer line than the recording you learned from.

The overtures — The Barber of Seville, William Tell, The Thieving Magpie — are the most-arranged orchestral music in this index and exist for every ensemble at every grade.