Rossini's career as a stage composer spanned just nineteen years. His larger career, beginning with the six Sonate a quattro of 1804 and ending with the march La corona d'Italia in 1868, spanned sixty-four. The productivity of the operatic years was phenomenal, an Ixion's wheel of endeavour on which Rossini's fame and fortune rested. It was from this that dozens of additional commissions, the large and absorbingly diverse collection of non-operatic compositions, mainly flowed. The fate of both bodies of work has not been dissimilar, the byways neglected, the highways heavily trodden, but there the similarity ends. Formally and stylistically many of the non-operatic works have an individuality all their own.

Although Rossini was born into one revolution and lived through several others, and although his own early work revolutionised Italian opera, there was always something of the court composer about him. He wrote operas and secular cantatas for Bourbon court theatres in Naples and Paris and throughout his career accepted a string of lucrative private commissions from well-to-do patrons who had at their disposal grand and agreeable performing venues: a country villa (the six Sonate a quattro), ametropolitan cathedral (Stabat mater), a Parisian salon (Les Soirèes musicales), a private chapel (Petite messe solennelle). In his final years in Paris he took the process to its logical conclusion. A vieux rococo (his own phrase) stranded in an age of Romantic individualism, he created his own private salon, becoming composer-in-residence to the court of which he himself was king.