Rossini was one of the most famous composers of his day. He was also one of the most prolific - he composed an average of two operas each year of his career. His operas were very popular, much like Broadway shows from hit composers like Andrew Lloyd Webber are today.

Two of his operas are still performed frequently today: La Cenerentola and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). Barber features the famous baritone aria in which the barber, Figaro, sings about how he is so important around town that all day long he hears people calling "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!" The spirited overture of his final opera, the magnificent William Tell, is familiar worldwide.

Rossini wrote in a style used by most opera composers of his day called bel canto. Rossini was a master of this style and made several important innovations drawing on Mozart's legacy and that helped pave the way for the great opera composers of the late 19th-century, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner.

Singers of bel canto operas would improvise lots of fast notes, trills, and runs (coloratura singing) to show off their singing technique. Rossini helped establish the composer as more powerful than singers by writing out the coloratura passages himself and insisting that singers do them just as they were written. But even Rossini could not completely control his artists. A famous soprano of the day, Adelina Patti, once performed an aria from Rossini's The Barber of Seville for the composer. "And how do you Like the aria, Maestro?" she asked. "A charming tune," replied Rossini dryly, "I wonder who wrote it?"

Rossini had a gift for writing beautiful melodies, but he was notoriously lazy. He procrastinated writing music until the very last moment and often "borrowed" music from his other operas. The overture to The Barber of Seville, for instance, had been previously attached to three different operas. He also worked fast: Barber was written in an incredible thirteen days.