Italian opera in bringing the art form back to life again. Romantic opera, which placed emphasis on the imagination and the emotions began to appear in the early 19th century, and because of its arias and music, gave more dimension to the extreme emotions which typified the theater of that era. In addition, it is said that fine music often excused glaring faults in character drawing and plot lines. Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) initiated the Romantic period. His first success was an "opera buffa" (comic opera), "La Cambiale di Matrimonio" (1810). His reputation still survives today through his "Barber of Seville" (1816), and
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