Giacomo Meyerbeer his family. He arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1816, after visits to Paris and London, where he heard Cramer play. In Paris, he wrote to a friend, 'I go from museum to museum, library to library, theatre to theatre, with the restlessness of the Wandering Jew'. During his years in Italy Meyerbeer became acquainted with, and impressed by, the works of his contemporary Gioachino Rossini, who by 1816, at the age of 24, was already director of both major opera houses in Naples and in the same year premiered his operas "The Barber of Seville" and "Otello". Meyerbeer
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