Gioacchino Rossini

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (February 29, 1792 November 13, 1868) was an Italian musical composer who wrote more than 30 operas as well as sacred music and chamber music. His best known works include Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), and Guillaume Tell (William Tell) (the end of the overture is popularly known for being the theme song for The Lone Ranger).

Procrastination!Rossini was a great procrastinator of his works primarily his operas. He'd spend up to the final hours before the opera started to finish the overture.Rossini wrote to an aspiring opera composer giving advice about composing an overture for a new stage work: “Wait until the evening before the opening. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. I composed the overture to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note. I wrote the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of the opening in the theater itself, where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stagehands who were instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out the window bodily I composed the overture to Comte Ory while fishing, with my feet in the water, and in the company of Signor Agnado, who talked of his Spanish fiancée. The overture to William Tell was composed under more or less similar circumstances.” Even though this admission seems to confirm both Rossini’s lazy procrastination and his awesome ease of composition, the effort he expended on William Tell seems to have been rather greater than his words allow.