In The Barber of Seville and his many other operas, Gioacchino Rossini gave singers plenty of opportunities to show off their talents. But in a letter he wrote in 1851, Rossini made it clear that he didn’t have much patience for the cult of the great singer, or for singers whose pretensions got the better of them. “To fulfil his part properly,” Rossini wrote, “the good singer needs only to be a capable interpreter of the ideas of…the composer, trying to express them to full effect and bring them