Maria Callas’s two comic roles were both in operas by Rossini: 'Il barbiere di Siviglia' and Il turco in Italia.

She first played the capricious and flirtatious Fiorilla – a married Neapolitan woman who takes up with a visiting Turk – in Rome in 1950. Five years later, at La Scala, she appeared in a production by Franco Zeffirelli, also, famously, the director of her Covent Garden Tosca and Paris Norma.

Gramophone wrote: ‘Mme Callas acts vividly, chiding, boasting, melting, and when in typical Rossinian style she is given a “key” figure, each repetition of it carries, so one thinks, a slightly different meaning. I found myself teased by memories of these little phrases for hours afterwards.’