Giaoachino Rossini, having established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public by the age of twenty-one, had continued to write operas for Venice and Milan during the next few years, but their reception had been tame and in some cases unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi.

In 1815 he retires to his home in Bologna, where Domenico Barbaia, the impresario of the Naples theater, contracts an agreement that makes him musical director of the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo at Naples.

He is to compose one opera a year for each.

His payment is to be two hundred ducats per month; he is also to receive a share from the gambling tables set in the theater's "ridotto", amounting to about one thousand ducats per annum.

This is an extraordinarily lucrative arrangement for any professional musician at this time.

The contract will last seven seasons, and the composer will obliged with ten operas, including Otello, Armida, Mosè in Egitto, Ermione, La donna del lago and Maometto II.