The overture, moreover, to _Aureliano in Palmira_, after serving as instrumental introduction to _Elisabetta_, produced a year later at Naples, found ultimately a permanent position as musical preface to the _Barber of Seville_. The failure of _Aureliano in Palmira_, which Rossini attributed in a great measure to the liberties taken with the music by at least one of the performers, caused him to adopt the practice of writing for the singers the very notes he intended them to sing. Strange innovation! But, until Rossini's time, the vocalists were really the composer's masters, and regarded his airs merely as so much canvas for embroidery. To Rossini belongs the honour of having helped greatly to expel the sopranists from the operatic stage. The Church, with a view to soprano voices in choirs, from which women were excluded, had introduced them; and ultimately the Church pronounced against them. But nothing could have had a greater effect in putting them down than Rossini's absolute refusal to write for them, or to allow them to sing in those of his operas performed under his direct superintendence. The circumstances under which Rossini broke with the most celebrated sopranist of his time--that Velluti, whom a wit described as "_non vir sed veluti_"--are worth relating. Rossini had written for this personage a part in his _Aureliano in Palmira_ (1814), the most celebrated of his very few failures; and the composer soon found that the singer had no respect for his music, which he treated as so much substance for elaboration and pretended adornment; while the singer discovered that the composer was so narrow-minded as to require his melodies to be sung as he had thought fit to write them. In those days dramatic propriety and music itself were sacrificed to the vocalists, who, far from studying parts, do not seem, in any true spirit, to have mastered airs. We read of singers having been kept to scales and passages for years at a time; and every one who takes an interest in musical history must remember the burlesque exclamation of Porpora, who, when Caffarelli had practised nothing but exercises with him for no less than five years, cried out: "You have nothing more to learn! Caffarelli is the first singer in the world!" _Aureliano_ was not played after the first night: and Rossini had the satisfaction of hearing that though his opera had failed, Velluti had made a brilliant success in the principal part. Velluti had, in fact, astonished and delighted the public by his vocal gymnastics. But it was not Rossini's music, it was really his own music, suggested by Rossini's, that he had sung. Unable--perhaps even unwilling--to run altogether counter to the prevailing taste, Rossini continued to write highly florid music. But he supplied his own decorations, and made them so elaborate that the most skilful adorner would have found it difficult to add to them.