Having begun studying some of Rossini's music in class, I know a few things about him. For example, he wrote many operas, for which he was most famous. Hence this piece is very operatic, like an aria (with soprano singer and string-dominated orchestra included). This type of orchestra is very typical of Romantic period opera, the period in which Rossini was composing.
The piece opens with a solo piccolo, accompanied only by a call-and-response style pizzicato on the strings, which creates a very light, gentle effect for the introduction. The only chords used here are I and V, which is very harmonically strong. Then at 0:11 the singer comes in, with a melody that begins exactly like the piccolo's, creating imitation. This melody then repeats, with different lyrics, but at 0:29 it is different, with the vocal part having a leap of a 6th, followed by descending scalic patterns, to return to the tonic. The orchestra then play a short, chromatic melody (0:35-0:40), which the singer joins in with half way through, before she ornaments the last note. They then repeat this. Next the singer has a florid (heavily ornamented) melody that plays upon the opening, giving a theme and variation structure to the piece. At 1:21, the piece moves into the second variation, which is faster and even more ornamented than the previous one. Throughout these two variations, the orchestra's texture is pulled right back, so that they are only playing pizzicato (or staccato notes for the woodwind etc.) At 1:33, the woodwind have a short descending scalic melody, that imitates the voice in a comical cadence (a perfect cadence). At 2:12 this variation ends, with the orchestra coming back in fully with repetitive semiquaver movement. This begins the long, extensive cadence, as is so common with opera, and arias in particular, in which the music moves through many different keys, returning, of course, to the tonic.
I used this recording
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