Tancredi

Tancredi is a melodramma eroico (opera seria or heroic opera) in two acts by composer Gioachino Rossini and librettist Gaetano Rossi (who was also to write Semiramide ten years later), based on Voltaire's play Tancrède (1760). The opera made its first appearance at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 6 February 1813, less than a month after the premiere of his previous opera Il signor Bruschino. The overture, borrowed from La pietra del paragone, is a popular example of Rossini's characteristic style and is regularly performed in concert and recorded.

Considered by Stendhal, Rossini's earliest biographer, to be "high amongst the composer's masterworks", and describing it as "a genuine thunderbolt out of a clear, blue sky for the Italian lyric theatre," his librettist Gaetano Rossi notes that, with it, "Rossini rose to glory". Richard Osborne proclaims it to be "his fully fledged opera seria and it established him, more or less instantly, as Italy's leading composer of contemporary opera."