Lauro Rossi's Il borgomastro di Schiedam, a melodramma in three acts to a libretto by Giovanni Peruzzini, received its premiere at Milan's Teatro Re on June 1, 1844. Although its success was short-lived, the opera circulated widely in the mid 1840s, with about a dozen revivals around the peninsula during the two years following the premiere, several of which were well received and went on for numerous performances. A few days after the premiere, composer and critic Alberto Mazzucato published an extensive review in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, providing the readers with unusually detailed insights into the libretto and the music of the new opera. To a greater extent than most other published criticism of the time. Mazzucato's review gives us the rare opportunity to read a comic work of this period through the lenses of someone who had tried his own hand at opera buffa. In addition to being a respected music critic, Mazzucato was also a teacher and an accomplished opera composer. Born in 1813, he studied at the Padua conservatory and made his debut in that city in 1834, with La fidanzata di Lammermoor, one of several operatic mutations of Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor that precede Donizetti's Lucia (1835). Two years later, he composed an opera buffa, Don Chisciotte, for Milan's Canobbiana (1836).