Gioacchino Antonio [Gioacchino] Rossini (29/02/1792 - 13/11/1868), an Italian composer, born in Pesaro. He was a great opera composer. Nickname: "the swan from Pesaro". Both his parents were musicians, his father a horn player, his mother a singer; he learnt the horn and singing and as a boy sang in at least one opera in Bologna, where the family lived. He studied there and began his operatic career when, at 18, he wrote a one-act comedy for Venice.
At 37, he retired from opera composition. He left Paris in 1837 to live in Italy, but suffered prolonged and painful illness there (mainly in Bologna, where he advised at the Liceo Musicale, and in Florence). His wife Isabella Colbran died in 1845 and the next year he married Olympe Pélissier, with whom he had lived for 15 years and who tended him through his ill-health. He composed hardly at all during this period (the Stabat mater belongs to his Paris years); but he went back to Paris in 1855, and his health and humour returned, with his urge to compose, and he wrote a quantity of pieces for piano and voices, with wit and refinement that he called Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) including the graceful and economical Petite messe solennelle (1863). He died, universally honoured, in 1868.

In 1868, four days after the death of Gioacchino Rossini, composer of The Barber of Seville, Moses, and William Tell (among much else), Verdi proposed a requiem mass for the illustrious deceased consisting of individual movements by Italy's "most eminent" composers. Of the dozen recruited (in addition to Verdi himself), contemporary audiences will recognize not one. At Verdi's suggestion, it consisted of contributions from the following composers: Antonio Buzzolla ('Requiem and Kyrie'); Antonio Bazzini ('Dies irae'); Carlo Pedrotti ('Tuba mirum'); Antonio Cagnoni ('Quid sum miser'); Federico Ricci ('Recordare'); Alessandro Nini ('Ingemisco'); Raimondo Boucheron ('Confutatis' and 'Oro Supplex'); Carlo Coccia ('Lacrymosa'); Gaetano Gaspari ('Domine Jesu'); Pietro Platania ('Sanctus'); Lauro Rossi ('Agnus Dei'); Teodulo Mabellini ('Lux aeterna') and Giuseppe Verdi himself ('Libera me'). Yet each did his part, and a two-hour homage to Rossini resulted. The composite requiem mass for Rossini was to have been performed in 1869 in Bologna to commemorate the anniversary of Rossini's death. For tangled reasons—this was Italy—the planned performances failed to materialize. Verdi was not the only contributor to recycle his part within a larger composition of his own, and his staggering 'Libera me' duly made its way into the requiem for Italy's great nationalist novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni. But the forgotten patchwork Messa per Rossini only saw the light in 1988, in Parma. On June 22, Helmuth Rilling, the conductor on that occasion, dusts it off as the opening concert of his Oregon Bach Festival, in Eugene, which by no means confines itself to Bach.