These comments express different views of Rossini and his comic operas. For Mark Elder, conductor of the English National Opera in 1980, Rossini's opere buffe are not “rooted in the past”; they are outside history, a point of view that meshes well with opera productions that transpose settings in time and place. A musical score is a text, with its particular patterns, markings, and syntax; musicologists have worked assiduously to get Rossini's scores right so that performances of his operas are musically accurate, as close as possible to what the composer intended. Yet today's productions of Rossini's operas sometimes take many liberties, as in a production of Cenerentola I saw at the Glimmerglass Opera in 2009, which was set in America at the time of the Great Depression. This is the same opera Mark Elder conducted in a 1980 English National Opera production and in connection with which he made the above comments. Paul Robinson, a historian, takes a different approach. For him, “Music is connected in numerous ways with the other intellectual and cultural artifacts that make up our history.” Robinson believes Rossini's best-known comic opera, Barber of Seville, completely fit its time; it breathed the intellectual atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe. He goes so far as to say that the opera is “inconceivable” outside the historical period in which it came into being.

Musicians, musicologists, and ordinary people who care about opera respond to Rossini's operas according to their various predilections. They can enjoy them to the hilt regardless of when they were written and what Rossini's intentions might have been at the time of their composition, as a friend did when she saw the Glimmerglass Cenerentola in 2009. At intermission she commented on how wonderful the performance was and how much she loved the opera. I agreed and added an observation that had occurred to me while watching the first act.