Music: La Stupenda

Sometimes Rossini wrote good operas poorly; sometimes he wrote bad operas well. The mind of a genius and the soul of a hack confronted him like matched pistols, and under the guns, he once wrote 28 operas in ten years. But now and then while on vacation from himself, Gioacchino Rossini wrote a great opera, and at such times there was no one like him The glory of this man." wrote Stendhal in 1823. "is only limited by the limits of civilization itself; and he is not yet 32." That same year Rossini pushed...

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