Many of you may have spotted a new Google Doodle on the Google homepage today, this time around it’s a doodle to mark the 220th birthday of composer Gioachino Rossini and also the fact that it’s Leap Year. To celebrate the occasion we thought we’d give our readers some information about a couple of top opera apps featuring Gioachino Rossini.

The leap year frogs on the Google Doodle can be seen warbling away to some presumably Rossini-inspired music and it’s a great way of marking two occasions with one doodle. You can see a video about the Google Doodle below this story. Italian composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 and was celebrated across the world as one of the greatest composers in history. He wrote 39 operas in all including The Barber of Seville and William Tell and many other musical pieces and was dubbed ‘the Italian Mozart.’ Despite huge success Rossini chose to retire at the height of his career before the age of 40. He suffered from physical and mental health issues and died of pneumonia in Paris on November 13,1868 aged 76.

We’ve found a couple of great apps featuring Rossini and we have details of those next. The first concentrates on one of Rossini’s greatest works and is ‘Opera: The Barber of Seville (Il Barbiere di Siviglia),’ which is priced at $2.99. It’s compatible for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch using iOS 3.0 or later. Simply hit the link here for the iTunes download. The app gives you the background to the opera, a summary of the plot and details of the characters. Although the actual audio of the opera is not included, the libretto is and because you can use the application and play music at the same time users can follow the libretto as it goes along, in either Italian or English. We’ve shown you a screenshot of this app below so you can see what to expect.

The second app we have for you focuses on another Rossini work and is ‘Opera: L’Italiana in Algeri.’ The price of this app is also $2.99 and the download link is here. Again this app gives you information of how the opera came about, a character list and plot summary and the libretto is in English or Italian. The layout of the app makes it very easy to read and it also scrolls very smoothly. This is also available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or later.

If you want to find out more about the backgrounds to these Rossini operas and read the texts, these are ideal apps to use. We’d like to hear your thoughts on the Google Doodle for Rossini and also these apps? If you have any further apps to share featuring Rossini let us know by sending your comments and remember you can see the Rossini Leap Year Google Doodle logo video below.