To _La Cenerentola_ belongs the most beautiful and the most striking of Rossini's final airs for the prima donna: the once highly popular "Non più mesta." This was his fourth air of the kind; and he now abandoned this method of bringing an opera to a brilliant termination in favour of other composers--who duly adopted it. The part of Cenerentola, like that of Rosina, was written for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, who obtained therein the most brilliant success, especially in the famous _rondo finale_. All Rossini's great prima-donna parts were composed for the contralto or for the mezzo-soprano voice; for Madame Marcolini, Tancredi; for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, Rosina and Cenerentola; and for Mademoiselle Colbran, Desdemona and Semiramide. When Rossini began his career, so absurd was the prevalent custom of distributing the parts that the first woman's part was habitually given to the contralto, the first man's part to the sopranist, or artificial male soprano. Rossini continued to compose principal female parts, first for the contralto, then for the mezzo-soprano voice; and it was only when he produced _Matilda di Shubrun_ towards the end of his Italian career (1821) that he assigned a leading character to a soprano. Matilda in _Matilda di Shubrun_, and Matilde in _Guillaume Tell_, are the only two parts that Rossini ever wrote for the soprano voice. Whether soprano voices have been forced into activity in order to suit new tastes, or whether composers have taken to writing for the soprano voice because in the present day sopranos, and especially "light sopranos," abound, whereas good mezzo-soprano and contralto voices are but rarely to be met with, it would be difficult to say. But with the exception of Meyerbeer's _Africaine_ and Donizetti's _Favorita_, no leading operatic part has for the last fifty years or more been written for the contralto voice. A new kind of part, however, has been found for the most masculine of feminine voices; such parts as those of Pippo in _La Gazza Ladra_, of Malcolm Græme in _La Donna del Lago_, and of Arsace in _Semiramide_; and here again we see an innovation of Rossini's, which by his successors has been generally adopted.