Rossini's comic one act opera L'inganno felice (The Fortunate Deception) was written and first performed in Venice in 1812 and became an instant success, performed around Europe over the next few years.

The aria Una voce m'ha colpito (A Voice Struck Me) is a bass/baritone solo that was arranged for solo Tuba a hundred years later by British bandmaster, composer and cornetist, Colonel James Ord Hume. The Tuba solo went out of print quite a while ago but has been rediscovered and edited for solo Bass Tuba and Piano by Warren Ryland. This solo is featured as part of our Vintage Brass Series.

Arrangement of the semiserie opera by La Gazza Ladra, composed by Rossini and first performance of The Thieving Magpie was on 31 May 1817, at La Scala, Milan.

Thalberg (1812-1871) was a renowned piano virtuoso and composer. His technical specialty, since widely imitated, was to play a central melody with the thumb of either hand and surrounding it with brilliant arpeggios and arabesques.

Sigismond Thalberg was one of the most famous and most successful piano composers of the 19th century. During the 1830s and the 1840s his style was a major force in European piano-playing. He was greatly in fashion and was imitated by others. In 1852, Wilhelm von Lenz wrote:

'The piano playing of the present day, to tell the truth, consists only of Thalberg simple, Thalberg amended, and Thalberg exaggerated; scratch what is written for the piano, and you will find Thalberg.'

Ten years later, in 1862, a London correspondent of the Revue et gazette musicale wrote:

'Nobody in fact has been so much imitated; his manner has been parodied, exaggerated, twisted, tortured, and it may have happened more than once to all of us to curse this Thalbergian school'.

Expressions like "exaggerated", "twisted" and "tortured" indicate that some contemporaries were starting to feel jaded of his style. It was at this time when Thalberg's career as composer and as virtuoso came to an end.

In the late 19th century, Thalberg's fame had come to depend on his association with a single piano technique, the 'three-hand effect'. Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, in his Geschichte des Klavierspiels (1879), wrote about this.

'His bravura pieces, fantasies on melodies from Rossini's Mos� and La donna del lago, on motifs from Bellini's Norma and on Russian folk-songs, became extraordinarily popular through his own, brilliant execution; however, they treat their subjects always in one and the same way, [namely] ... to let the tones of a melody be played in the medium octave of the keyboard now by the thumb of the right, now of the left hand, while the rest of the fingers are executing arpeggios filling the whole range of the keyboard'.