Cruda sorte! (L'italiana in Algeri)

Rossini was twenty-one when the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice needed a replacement opera at short notice. He took a libretto Angelo Anelli had written five years earlier for Luigi Mosca and set it in under a month — eighteen days, by his own later claim. The premiere on 22 May 1813 was an immediate success and carried his name beyond Italy. Stendhal described the result as organised madness, and the first-act finale, in which the characters are reduced to onomatopoeia, is the clearest early statement of Rossini's comic method: rhythm and mechanism carrying the drama once sense has broken down.