Gioachino Rossini's background and upbringing could hardly have been more different from that of Mozart. The Austrian composer was born into a correct family that paid utmost attention to the two children who survived infancy, Nannerl and Wolfgang, one unusually talented, the other a prodigy if ever there was one. Mozart performed before leading courts across Europe and traveled to Italy at age fourteen, where he composed an opera seria, Mitridate, rè di Ponte, first performed at the Teatro Regio Ducal in Milan in 1770. In that same year he was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna after passing an exam in one hour that others needed four hours to take, as he said proudly afterward. Whether at home in Salzburg or traveling across Europe, Mozart was under the watchful eyes of caring parents who observed his every move, grooming and cultivating him for the successes they felt someone of his unique gifts was certain to achieve. His mother died on one of his musical tours when he was twenty-one, and from this time on he was subject to the careful scrutiny of his father, whose attentions became smothering and resulted in a painful breach when Mozart established his independence in Vienna as a composer who severed ties with his patron and entered into a marriage to which his father objected. Mozart's world was that of Salzburg and princely courts from Vienna to London; he moved in cultivated circles and partook of a cosmopolitan culture of which he was one of the leading ornaments. The polish and sophistication of his music expressed not only Mozart's personal qualities but the values and forms of an elite civilization he had absorbed; this was a world that would be blown away by the French Revolution.

Rossini was born on February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic at the northern end of the Papal state. Rossini was born on leap-year day, one of many bizarre touches in the life of this singular composer in which incongruities and paradoxes were ongoing, one might say a constant. A river, the Rubicon, had emptied into the Adriatic somewhere near Pesaro, but it had disappeared by the time of Rossini's birth.