Beethoven and his contemporaries the third movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony has an opening theme that is very similar to the one in Mozart's 40th Symphony. Beethoven wrote cadenzas (WoO 58) to the first and third movements of Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor. Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) was an Italian composer known for his numerous operas including "The Barber of Seville" and "William Tell". When Rossini visited Vienna, he made several attempts to meet Beethoven, who was then 51 and in failing health. Finally, Rossini was able to arrange a meeting with Beethoven through the help of Giuseppe Carpani, an Italian poet living in
Gioachino Rossini life. During his Paris years, Rossini created the comic operas "Il viaggio a Reims" and "Le comte Ory" and the grand opera "Guillaume Tell" ("William Tell"). The production of the latter in 1829 brought his career as a writer of opera to a close. Fabio Luisi said that Rossini planned for "Guillaume Tell" to be his last opera even as he composed it. He was thirty-eight years old and had already composed thirty-eight operas. "Guillaume Tell" was a political epic adapted from Schiller's play "Wilhelm Tell" (1804) about the 13th-century Swiss patriot who rallied his country against the Austrians. The