Rossini (1792-1868) was asked by a young composer how best to write a suitable overture. He replied in a letter: “Wait until the night before the performance. Nothing will stimulate your inspiration better than dire need, the presence of a copyist awaiting the score and an crazed impresario who is pulling his hair out in lumps from despair. I wrote the overture to The Thieving Magpie in an attic at La Scala on the day of the performance, where the director had imprisoned me. Four stagehands guarded me with the instructions to throw down each completed page to the copyist as it was ready. They also had the instruction that if any pages were missing, they should throw me through the window instead.” We don't know whether the young composer accepted this advice, or even if his recommended technique of leaving things to the very last minute works with musicians not endowed with Rossini effortless facility for composition.

Not only is the style of this overture light and easy but so is the mood of the opera which is why Rossini is remembered by posterity as a true opera buffa composer. For Rossini, the success of music was more important than its metaphysical content. Of course, this does not mean he couldn't write masterpieces since his stunning humour, unquenchable melodic inventiveness and sure footed sense of form never abandoned him. His operatic overtures can always stand on their two feet as independent compositions. For the most part, they are not closely linked to the work that follows them: they serve to warm up the audience and musicians and in this, they are unsurpassable.

Stendahl was present at the premiere of The Thieving Magpie in 1817 and left behind a description of the effect the overture had on the audience: “It would be impossible for me to communicate the rapture of the ground floor Milanese audience and their frenzy after they heard the masterpiece. They stood clapping for five whole minutes, shouting and bellowing in the most astonishing fashion. The most restrained elderly people in the boxes were yelling out: o bello! o bello!” And yet the orchestration of this overture is unusually daring: the powerful use of percussion was exceptional in Beethoven's time, while Berlioz's employment of large scale percussion apparatus was still fifteen years away. But the overture wins over the listener with its irresistible melodies and clear, some would say, schematic formal construction. The enormous orchestral build up is also stunning and led to his contemporaries christening Rossini Signor Crescendo.

Stravinsky once said that no one is immortal unless they had have had a dish named after them. Rossini's culinary inventions, the so called Cannelloni and Tournedos ŕ la Rossini certainly preserve his name, although his overtures are in no danger of being overshadowed by his gastronomic miracles.