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A feathered thief, a servant wrongly sentenced to death and a corrupt, power-hungry politician: those are the protagonists of Rossini’s semi-serious opera whose overture, with its drum rolls and oboe solo, is one of the best-known pieces in the history of music. "La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie)" is set in a time of great social upheaval.

When writing the pasticcio "Il Tamerlano" in 1735 for the Venice carnival, Antonio Vivaldi made use of a musical ruse: He gives the sultan Bajazet and the Ottomans his own arias in the Venetian style, while the "barbarians", the Tartars led by Tamerlano, sing arias in the Neapolitan style of his younger rivals Johann Adolf Hasse, Riccardo Broschi and Geminiano Giacomelli.

Venetian Antonio Caldara was made first deputy kapellmeister of the court music ensemble at Vienna under Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, where he primarily wrote vocal music. He had already been in Vienna for nine years when he wrote the opera "Il Venceslao" in 1725.