quality:corruption, structural:expansion
"The Code Rossini"

"Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre ennuyeux".

Rossini, in a letter of 1868 (citing Voltaire)

The writer Julian Budden, noting the formulas adopted early on by Rossini in his career and consistently followed by him thereafter as regards overtures, arias, structures and ensembles, has called them "the Code Rossini" in a reference to the Code Napoléon, the legal system established by the French Emperor. Rossini's overall style may indeed have been influenced more directly by the French: the historian John Rosselli suggests that French rule in Italy at the start of the 19th century meant that "music had taken on new military qualities of attack, noise and speed – to be heard in Rossini." Rossini's approach to opera was inevitably tempered by changing tastes and audience demands. The formal "classicist" libretti of Metastasio which had underpinned late 18th century opera seria were replaced by subjects more to the taste of the age of Romanticism, with stories demanding stronger characterisation and quicker action; a jobbing composer needed to meet these demands or fail. Rossini's strategies met this reality. A formulaic approach was logistically indispensable for Rossini's career, at least at the start: in the seven years 1812–1819, he wrote 27 operas, often at extremely short notice. For La Cenerentola (1817), for example, he had just over three weeks to write the music before the première.

Such pressures led to a further significant element of Rossini's compositional procedures, not included in Budden's "Code", namely, recycling. The composer often transferred a successful overture to subsequent operas: thus the overture to La pietra del paragone was later used for the opera seria Tancredi (1813), and (in the other direction) the overture to Aureliano in Palmira (1813) ended as (and is today known as) the overture to the comedy Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). He also liberally re-employed arias and other sequences in later works. Spike Hughes notes that of the twenty-six numbers of Eduardo e Cristina, produced in Venice in 1817, nineteen were lifted from previous works. "The audience... were remarkably good-humoured... and asked slyly why the libretto had been changed since the last performance". Rossini expressed his disgust when the publisher Giovanni Ricordi issued a complete edition of his works in the 1850s: "The same pieces will be found several times, for I thought I had the right to remove from my fiascos those pieces which seemed best, to rescue them from shipwreck... A fiasco seemed to be good and dead, and now look they've resuscitated them all!"