Overture (La cambiale di matrimonio)

La cambiale di matrimonio was the first Rossini opera to reach a stage: a one-act farsa comica given at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice on 3 November 1810, when the composer was eighteen and still a student in Bologna. The small Venetian house specialised in short comic pieces with modest casts, and the commission came at short notice. Gaetano Rossi's libretto turns on a merchant who orders a bride from abroad by contract, as though settling a bill of exchange. The overture already contains the mechanisms — the repeated crescendo, the chattering woodwind — that Rossini would use for twenty years.