The world has always been quite happy to take Gioachino Rossini at his own estimation, nicely summed up in his epigraph to the Little Solemn Mass he wrote 30 years after his retirement from opera. “Dear God: here it is finished, this poor little Mass … I was born for opera buffa, as you well know. Not much science, a bit of heart, that’s all. So be blessed and grant me Paradise.”Though Rossini was delighted to leave an impression of frivolity, there is another story, one that has faded since his death and is re­surfacing only now. In fact, he was overwhelmingly a composer of serious operas that reflected the turbulence of the nineteenth century; and Welsh National Opera’s new ­season, featuring two of his works under the banner “Liberty or Deat