The composers of Italian Opera after Gluck's time, unaffected by his exhortations to reform, continued to concentrate their efforts on pleasing their audiences. In this direction they succeeded extremely well. The most conspicuous proof of the fact was the career of Gioachino Rossini, born at Pesaro near Ancona in 1792. His father's circumstances were comparatively low and his own opportunities of musical education rather slender. He earned a little money as a boy by singing; was admitted into the Lyceum at Bologna in 1807, learned some counterpoint, and wrote his first opera, “La Cambiale di Matrimonio” (the Marriage Market), for Venice in 1810. He followed it up with a number of light comic operas in similar style, and won his first great success in opera seria with “Tancredi“ in 1813. The music, though often borrowed from familiar sources, exactly hit the taste of typical opera audiences, and from that time what is known as the Rossini fever began, and spread by degrees over the greater part of Europe. Several buffa operas followed “Tancredi,” and he had one or two checks before he arrived at the full measure of his popularity. “L'ltaliana in Algeri,” produced in Venice in the same year as “Tancredi,” was a success, “Aureliano” was a failure, so was “Torvaldo e Dorlinska,” and so at first was the famous “Barbiere.” But this last failure was merely owing to the fact that the Romans, for whom it was written, were much attached to a setting by Paisiello, and regarded it as an impertinence of the young composer to use the same subject.