In connection with _Tancredi_, mention has been made of Rossini's reforms in serious opera, which he found too serious. Comic opera, on the other hand, as it existed up to his time, seemed to him too comic or rather, too extravagant. We have seen that the old _opera buffa_ had its separate set of characters and singers, and its own separate style, musical as well as dramatic. Rossini raised the level of the style, and for farce substituted comedy. In the midst, too, of comedy airs, he introduced, from time to time, a sentimental one such as "Ecco ridente" in _Il Barbiere_, and "Languir per una bella," in _L'Italiana in Algeri_--which Rossini brought out at Milan (1813) soon after the production of _Tancredi_ at Venice, and which holds among his comic operas the same position that belongs to _Tancredi_ among his serious ones. Italian audiences had been trained to disapprove of the same singer appearing one night in a comic and the next in a tragic part; and critical hearers are said to have been shocked at seeing the same artist appear successively as Figaro and as Assur, as Dr. Bartolo and as Mosè. Apart from the substitution of the comic for the farcical in the general treatment, _L'Italiana in Algeri_ is remarkable as the first comic opera in which Rossini introduced that _crescendo_, which was soon recognised as a characteristic feature in all his works. He had already tested its effect in the overture to _Tancredi_--the first Italian overture which became popular apart from the work to which it belonged--and in the concerted _finale_ of the same opera. Rossini is said to have borrowed this effect from Paisiello's _Re Teodoro_. But the invention of the _crescendo_ was energetically claimed by Mosca, who had certainly employed it before Rossini, and who regarded it as his own private property; circulating, in order to establish his prior right, copies of a piece composed long before _Tancredi_ was brought out, in which fully developed _crescendi_ occurred. This did not prevent Rossini from continuing to write _crescendi_, nor from being satirised and caricatured as "Signor Crescendo," when, some ten years afterwards, he went to Paris. CHAPTER V. OPERATIC CUSTOMS IN ROSSINI'S TIME. The year after the production of _Tancredi_, Rossini, in 1814, brought out _Aureliano_, which was not successful. It contained, however, at least one piece of music which the composer, with due regard to economy, was determined not to waste. This was the introduction itself, borrowed from _Ciro in Babilonia_, which, when Rossini afterwards adapted its melody to words written for Count Almaviva in the _Barber of Seville_, obtained lasting success in the form of the charming cavatina "Ecco ridente il cielo."