Everyone knows that Rossini's operas are part of "classical music," but it hasn't always been that way. During Rossini's lifetime, he was widely reviled by lovers of "classical" music, as were many other operatic composers. One writer in a French journal proclaimed that there were only two kinds of musicians: classicists and Rossinists. Like nearly everyone else who wrote for the major journals, he was a Rossini-disdaining classicist. I have put "classical" in quotation marks, but when that French critic used it, it meant something very specific.