The Great Musicians: Rossini and His School

"'You have the consolation of knowing,' said Hiller, 'that singers, managers, and publishers, have been enriched by your means.'

"'A fine consolation' replied Rossini. 'Except during my stay in England, I never gained sufficient by my art to enable me to put by anything; and even in London I did not get money as a composer, but as an accompanist.'

"'But still,' observed Hiller,'that was because you were a celebrated composer.'

"'That is what my friends said,' replied Rossini, 'to decide me to do it. It may have been prejudice, but I had a kind of repugnance to being paid for accompanying on the piano, and I have only done so in London. However, people wanted to see the tip of my nose, and to hear my wife. I had fixed for our co-operation at musical soirées the tolerably high price of 50l. We attended somewhere about sixty such soirées, and that was after all worth having. In London, too, musicians will do anything to get money, and some delicious facts came under my observation there. For instance, the first time that I undertook the task of accompanist at a soirée of this description, I was informed that Puzzi, the celebrated horn-player, and Dragonetti, the more celebrated contrabassist, would also be present. I thought they would perform solos; not a bit of it! They were to assist me in accompanying. "Have you then your parts to accompany these pieces?" I asked them. "Not we," was their answer, "but we get well paid, and we accompany as we think fit!"

'"These extemporaneous attempts at instrumentation struck me as rather dangerous, and I therefore begged Dragonetti to content himself with giving a few pizzicatos when I winked at him, and Puzzi to strengthen the final cadenzas with a few notes, which, being a good musician, he easily invented for the occasion. In this manner things went off without any very disastrous results, and every one was pleased.'"

"'Delicious!' exclaimed Hiller, 'still it strikes me that the English have made great progress in a musical point of view. At the present time a great deal of good music is performed in London – it is well performed and listened to attentively, that is to say, at public concerts. In private drawing-rooms music still plays a sorry part, and a great number of individuals, totally devoid of talent, give themselves airs of incredible assurance, and impart instruction on subjects of which their knowledge amounts almost to nothing.'

"'I knew in London a certain professor who had amassed a large fortune as a teacher of singing and the pianoforte,' said Rossini, 'while all he understood was to play a little, most wretchedly, on the flute. There was another man, with an immense connection, who did not even know the notes. He employed an accompanist to beat into his head the pieces he afterwards taught, and to accompany him in his lessons; but he had a good voice.'"

Many of the French composers, with about an equal proportion of critics, received Rossini with anything but cordiality. He was chiefly condemned as a seeker after new effects. But Berlioz some years later vituperated him from quite another point of view. He found his music heartless, unemotional, and written entirely for the singer, and for the sake of vocal, to the disregard of dramatic effect. "If," he afterwards said, "it had been in my power to place a barrel of powder under the Salle Louvois and blow it up during the representation of La Gazza Ladra or Il Barbiere, with all that it contained, I certainly should not have failed to do so."

The composer Bertin, less a contemporary than a predecessor of Rossini, wrote of him in the following terms: —

"M. Rossini has a brilliant imagination, verve, originality, great fecundity; but he knows that he is not always pure and correct; and, whatever certain persons may say, purity of style is not to be disdained, and faults of syntax are never excusable. Besides, since the writers of our daily journals constitute themselves judges in music, having qualified myself by Montano, Le Délire, Aline, &c., I think I have the right to give my opinion ex professo. I give it frankly, and sign it, which is not done by certain persons who strive incognito to make and unmake reputations. All this has been suggested only by the love of art, and in the interest of M. Rossini himself. This composer is beyond contradiction the most brilliant talent that Italy has produced since Cimarosa; but one may deserve to be called celebrated without being on an equality with Mozart."

It seems afterwards to have occurred to Bertin that music as good as Rossini's might be composed by machinery. He declares, indeed, in a pamphlet directed against Rossini, entitled "La musique mechanique et de la musique philosophique," that he once asked Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome, whether he could construct a machine to compose music; upon which Maelzel daringly replied that he could, but that his mechanically-made tunes would not be up to the level of Sacchini, Cimarosa, and Mozart, and would be worthy only of Rossini.

"M. Auber has told me," says M. Jouvin, in his Life of that composer, "how he met Rossini for the first time at a dinner given by Carafa in honour of his illustrious compatriot. On rising from table the maestro, at the request of his host, went to the piano and sang Figaro's cavatina, 'Largo al fattotum della cità.'

"'I shall never forget,' said M. Auber to me, 'the effect produced by his lightning-like execution.' Rossini had a beautiful baritone voice, and he sang his music with a spirit and verve which neither Pellegrini nor Galli nor Lablache approached in the same part. As for his art as an accompanist, it was marvellous; it was not on a key-board but on an orchestra that the vertiginous hands of the pianist seemed to gallop. When he had finished I looked mechanically at the ivory keys; I fancied I could see them smoking. On arriving home I felt much inclined to throw my scores into the fire. 'It will warm them, perhaps,' I said to myself; 'besides, what is the use of composing music, if one cannot compose like Rossini?'"

Apart from a little professional jealousy, Rossini met in Paris with the warmest possible reception; and the men in authority gave him substantial marks of their esteem. He was appointed director of the Théâtre des Italiens, with a salary of 20,000 francs a year; and when after eighteen months' service he resigned this post, the salary was continued to him in connection with another, of which the duties were purely nominal: that of "Inspector of singing." In granting Rossini this salary, the object of the government was to induce him to remain in France, and to compose a series of works for the Académie where, after producing Il Viaggio a Reims, at the Italian Theatre in honour of Charles X.'s coronation, he brought out in succession Le Siège de Corinthe,10 re-arranged from Maometto Secundo, an opera of the year 1820; Moïse, re-arranged from Mosè in Egitto, a Lenten opera oratorio of the year 1818; Le Comte Ory, re-arranged with many additions from Il Viaggio a Reims; and his greatest work Guillaume Tell.

Every one knows that after William Tell, Rossini wrote no more for the stage. But every one does not know that he for some little time afterwards entertained an idea of composing an opera on the subject of Faust. "Yes," answered Rossini, when Ferdinand Hiller questioned him on the subject, "it was for a long period a favourite notion of mine, and I had already planned the whole scenarium with Jouy; it was naturally based upon Goethe's poem. At this time, however there arose in Paris a regular 'Faust' mania; every theatre had a particular 'Faust' of its own, and this somewhat damped my ardour. Meanwhile the revolution of July had taken place; the Grand Opera, previously a royal institution, passed into the hands of a private person; my mother was dead, and my father found life in Paris unbearable because he did not understand French: so I cancelled the agreement which bound me by rights to send in four other grand operas, preferring to remain quietly in my native land, enlivening the last years of my old father's existence. I had been far away from my poor mother when she expired; this was an endless source of regret to me, and I was most apprehensive that the same thing might occur in my father's case."

Many explanations have been given of Rossini's reasons for abstaining from writing any more for the stage, when he had once produced William Tell– nor did he afterwards compose anything whatever of importance except his thoroughly beautiful Stabat Mater. Some of these explanations have been already referred to. The truth in this matter seems to have been that Rossini acted under the influence of a great variety of reasons. Without being hurt by the comparative coldness with which William Tell for a time was received, without being jealous of Meyerbeer's and of Halévy's success, which, according to some anecdote-mongers, caused him to exclaim: "Je reviendrai quand les Juifs auront fini leur Sabbat," without even having "written himself out," he may well have reflected whether such a strain as he had subjected himself to in composing William Tell was worth undergoing a second time. With the exception of Il Viaggio a Reims nothing that he wrote for Paris, until he undertook William Tell, was absolutely new. He had already lost the habit, if not the faculty, of composing rapidly; and this same Viaggio a Reims was the only original work he produced between Semiramide, 1823, and Guillaume Tell, 1829. Writing at Paris for as fine an orchestra as that of the San Carlo Theatre, and for a finer chorus, he paid particular attention to the choral and orchestral portions of his last great work. He also profited by the fact that at the Académie he was free to have as many rehearsals as he pleased; and to turn this advantage to the greatest possible account he gave himself infinite, and with him quite unusual pains, to secure a perfect execution of his opera. In writing for the voices moreover, he had completely changed his style. What indeed can be more different from the florid and frequently insignificant, – or, so to say, anti-significant – passages in the rich, soft, voluptuous melodies of Semiramide, than the simple, emotional, eminently dramatic strains given to the singers in Guillaume Tell? Heine speaks in his "Parisian Letters" of Meyerbeer's mother having once told him that her son was "not obliged to compose;" on which Heine remarks that a windmill might as well say it was not "obliged" to go round: though a windmill will turn if the wind blows, just as a composer will produce music if moved by the spirit. Talking on this most interesting subject of speculation to Ferdinand Hiller, Rossini himself confessed that "when a man has composed thirty-seven operas he begins to feel a little tired." Guillaume Tell, in any case, marks the end of Rossini's career as an operatic composer.

Opera has a distinct history in Italy, in France, and in Germany. For a considerable time it makes progress in Italy. Then Italian composers and Italian singers go abroad taking Italian opera with them. German composers, too, visit Italy, and after studying there return to their native land, to produce with modifications operas which must still be regarded as Italian in character. At last the Germans who have studied in Italy become the rivals of the Italian masters. Then Gluck and Piccinni contend with one another in presence of French audiences, and above all, of French critics. Finally it becomes the turn of the Italians to borrow from the Germans; for Mozart, so highly indebted for his melodic inspiration – or at least for his melodic forms – to Italy, was so much before the Italians in regard to the composition of his orchestra and the construction of his musical pieces, that when Rossini wished to introduce into Italian opera the important reforms which must always be associated with his name, he had nothing to do but to turn to Mozart as a model. Rossini was the first Italian composer who accompanied recitative with the full band, assigned leading parts to bass singers, made of each dramatic scene one continuous piece of music, and brought to perfection those highly varied, amply developed concerted finales, which form so striking a feature in modern Italian opera. All these innovations were simply adaptations from Mozart.

The history of Rossini's Italian career is the history of opera in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century; for Rossini caused the works of his predecessors to be laid aside, while his own works and those of his immediate successors, and in an artistic sense followers, continued to be played almost to the exclusion of all others until the Verdi period. And even Verdi, who in his latter works has studied dramatic consistency and dramatic effect more than Rossini studied them in his earlier works, must be regarded as belonging, more or less completely, to the school of Rossini.

CHAPTER XII.

DONIZETTI AND BELLINI

DONIZETTI, Rossini's immediate successor but not supplanter, composed from sixty to seventy operas ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Candide) of which to this day three at least ("c'est beaucoup" dirait Martin), are still played regularly every season in London: Lucia, Lucrezia, and La Favorita. Of his two charming works in the light style – comic operas in which the composer never approaches the farcical, never once ceases to be graceful – neither L'Elisir nor Don Pasquale can be compared to the much more vigorous Barber. Nor has Donizetti produced any work so full of melody as Semiramide, or so dramatic as William Tell. But he rises to unwonted heights in the last act of La Favorite; which, composed for the French Académie, became naturalised in due time on the Italian operatic stage under the title of La Favorita.

Although the career of Donizetti was very much longer than that of Bellini, whom he preceded and whom he survived, he produced in proportion to the number of his works fewer by a great deal which have kept the stage.

Donizetti brought out his first opera Enrico di Borgogna at Venice in 1818, when he was twenty years of age, and Catarina Cornaro, his sixty-third (not to count two or three that were never produced) at Naples, in 1844, when he was forty-six.

Bellini brought out the first of his works performed in public, Bianca e Fernando (he had previously composed a sort of pasticcio for the school theatre of the Naples Conservatorio) at the San Carlo in 1826, when he was twenty-five years of age; and his last, I Puritani, at Paris in 1835. He had a career then, of but nine years, during which he composed ten operas, of which five were played with great success, and of which three, La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani, forty-five years after their composer's death, still keep the stage. Stendhal (or perhaps it was Carpani) had foretold that Rossini, the composer of florid music, would be followed by a master whose melodies would be remarkable for extreme simplicity, and this prophecy was fulfilled in the case of Bellini.

Donizetti, like so many other composers, was not encouraged by his parents to adopt the career in which he was destined to obtain so much distinction. When, however, his father at last consented to his becoming a professional musician, he is said to have presented him with an ivory scraper, as if to impress upon him the necessity of practising the art of erasing. Probably no composer ever did less in that line than Donizetti; and though he wrote more accurately than many other Italian composers, one is frequently astonished to find in his works melodies of significance and beauty followed at haphazard by the merest trivialities. Donizetti never went to work without the paternal scraper by his side. The fluent composer, however, had no occasion to make use of it for scratching out notes; and it never seems to have occurred to him to strike out feeble passages, not to say entire pieces. What Donizetti's father should have given him was not a scraper but a pair of scissors.

Donizetti, born at Bergamo in 1798, was but seventeen years of age when he commenced his studies in his native town under Mayer, who, before the appearance of Rossini, was one of the most popular composers in Italy; and he finished them (so far as studies can ever be finished) at Bologna under Pilotti and Mattei, the latter of whom had some years previously been Rossini's instructor. Finding that Mattei gave him very few lessons at the Bologna Lyceum, where he was professor, the youthful and ingenious Donizetti contrived to obtain supplementary ones by making himself very agreeable to his master and by turning the conversation as often as possible to musical subjects. He even went so far as to play at cards every evening with Mattei's aged mother, a piece of benevolence for which he was rewarded by much instructive talk from the grateful son. While at the Lyceum Donizetti occupied himself not only with music, but also with drawing, architecture, and even poetry; and that he could turn out fair enough verses for musical purposes was shown when, many years afterwards, he wrote – so rapidly that the word "improvised" might here be used – for the benefit of a manager in distress, both words and music of a little one-act opera, called Il Campanello, founded on the Sonnette de Nuit of Scribe.

No composer, with the exception of Mozart, possessed a more remarkable memory than Donizetti. After two hearings of Allegri's Miserere, Mozart remembered the whole work so as to be able to write it out note for note; and Donizetti, wishing to procure for Mayer a copy of an opera which was being performed at Bologna, and which the impresario had refused to lend, had such a lively recollection of the music after hearing it two or three times that he was able to put it down on paper from beginning to end. Unfortunately the tellers of these stories omit as a rule to say whether the possessors of such wonderful mnemonic powers make notes while hearing the compositions, which, in rather a literal sense, they propose to carry away with them. A prodigious memory for small things as for great would be necessary to enable a musician in the present day to write out, even after a dozen hearings, an opera by Meyerbeer or by Wagner with all the changes of harmony, all the details of instrumentation. The operas, however, of Donizetti's youth were much simpler affairs than these latter-day productions.

Already known by many pieces of instrumental and religious music, Donizetti produced his first opera, Enrico di Borgogna, at Venice in 1818. This work obtained so much success that the composer was requested to undertake at once a second one for the same city. After writing an opera for Mantua in 1819, Il Falignamo di Livonia, Donizetti visited Rome, where his Zoraïde di Granata procured him an exemption from military service, which would otherwise have carried him off, and the honour of being crowned at the Capitol. He now produced a whole series of operas which owed their success chiefly to the skill with which he imitated the style of Rossini. Strangely enough it was not until Rossini had ceased to write that Donizetti, his immediate successor, exhibited something like a style of his own. In 1830, however, the in many parts highly-dramatic Anna Bolena was produced; a work which was long regarded as its composer's masterpiece. Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena for Pasta and Rubini, and it was first represented for Pasta's benefit in the year 1831. In the tenor air, Vivi tu, Rubini made a striking success; and it was in this opera, as Henry VIII., that Lablache first gained the favour of the London public. Anna Bolena was destined soon to be eclipsed by other works from the pen of the same composer; and it is now but rarely, if ever, heard. Many years, indeed, have passed since it was last performed in London with Mdlle. Titiens in the principal character. It contains an unusually large number of expressive, singable melodies; and many of its scenes possess more dramatic significance than belong as a rule to Rossini's Italian works. It marks a step in fact, in the movement from the style of Rossini, as exhibited in his Italian operas, towards that of Verdi; a movement in which Bellini, standing by himself, cannot be said to have had any part. Neither in his earlier operas does Bellini, like Donizetti, resemble Rossini, nor in his later ones does he, like Donizetti, approach what was afterwards to be known as the style of Verdi.

Lucrezia Borgia, written for Milan in 1834, was a distinct advance on Anna Bolena. This work, with Lucia and La Favorita, by which it was to be succeeded, must be ranked among Donizetti's most successful productions; and it has already been pointed out that the three operas just named are the only ones by which Donizetti is now represented regularly every year at our great lyrical theatres. Lucrezia Borgia is based on one of Victor Hugo's most dramatic plays; but the composer has not turned to so effective account as might have been expected, the great scene in which Maffio Orsini's drinking song is interrupted by the funeral dirge given to the procession of monks in the outside street. Like Verdi, some years afterwards, in Ernani and in Rigoletto, Donizetti counted too much on a musical effect which is naturally much more impressive in a spoken drama, where music, until this one scene, has not been heard, than in an opera which is sung throughout. Francis I.'s song, in the drama of Le Roi s'amuse, arrests the attention much more than does the Duke of Mantua's canzone in Rigoletto. The horn of Hernani is mysterious and terrifying in the play, while in the opera, heard after many other horns, not to speak of cornets, trombones, ophecleides, and all the instruments of the Sax family, it scarcely excites even a feeling of surprise. As regards Lucrezia Borgia, though the singers of the drinking-song and the chanters of the burial service have the scene entirely to themselves, yet the contrast between reckless life and inevitable death is less striking in a work where music possesses no special significance than in one where music has been introduced for the sake of impressiveness in the single scene where it is employed. Taking it, however, for what it is worth, Donizetti's successor, Verdi, would doubtless have made more of it than Donizetti himself has done. Maffio Orsini's brindisi is spirited, and characteristically voluptuous. But there is nothing very awe-inspiring in the chorus of monks at the back of the stage; and the two pieces bear no relation to one another – which they might perhaps with advantage have been made to do.

Lucrezia Borgia contains less recitative than belongs to the operas of Rossini, who himself dispensed with the endless monologues and recitatives cultivated by his predecessors. Indeed, the amount of measured talk in Lucrezia Borgia scarcely exceeds that which is to be met with in the most popular of Verdi's works. The brilliancy of the introduction, the series of dramatic scenes – for which the composer had, above all, to thank his librettist, who, in his turn, was indebted to Victor Hugo – and an unusually large number of tuneful themes for four leading personages among whom the interest is judiciously distributed, could not fail to secure for Lucrezia Borgia the success it in fact obtained.

The graceful Elisir d'Amore, which, owing to the prevailing taste for spectacular opera, is now but rarely heard, was given for the first time at Milan in 1832. Donizetti was now composing operas at the rate of about three a year. Many of them made but little impression and scarcely a twelfth part of them are performed in the present day.

In 1835, however, Donizetti produced an opera which was received with enthusiasm, which soon became popular throughout Europe, and which seems to possess as much vitality now as when it was first brought out. Lucia di Lammermoor, the work in question, contains some of the most beautiful melodies, in the sentimental style, that Donizetti has composed; and it is especially admired by musicians for the broadly conceived, well-constructed and highly dramatic finale which brings the second act to so effective a conclusion. The sudden appearance of Edgar of Ravenswood just as his devoted but despairing Lucy has been forced to sign the contract which gives her to another, is but the first of a series of situations, skilfully varied and contrasted, which the librettist has ably planned, and which have been admirably treated by the composer. The part of Lucia, beloved by every "light soprano" of the present day, was written for Persiani; that of Edgardo, which, in the days of the great tenors, was even more popular than the prima donna's part, for Duprez. Of the last act of Lucia, which, until the reign of the light sopranos set in, used to be considered the crowning glory of the opera, Donizetti wrote both words and music. It has already been mentioned that he once transformed a French vaudeville into an Italian opera or operetta; and it may be added that the libretti of Betly and of La Figlia del Reggimento are both from his pen. La Figlia del Reggimento, however, was only La Fille du Régiment translated into Italian; and the libretto of Betly is based, scene by scene, on Adolphe Adam's little opera of Le Chalet– known in English as the Swiss Cottage. In the case of the last act of Lucia, Donizetti not only wrote the words; he designed the scenes. In the novel Edgar loses himself on the seashore, and is drowned. In the opera, however, when so far as Lucia is concerned the story is at an end, he reappears in an appropriate cemetery to celebrate, in a lyrical lament, the virtues of his demented love; to be informed by a chorus of retainers that she has not only lost her reason, but has departed altogether from this world; and finally to stab himself while still singing the praises of his "bell' alma adorata." When the Lucia of the evening is Patti, Nilsson, or Albani, and the Edgardo is no one in particular, the final scene of course falls flat; no one, indeed, stops to hear it. But the case was quite different when the part of Edgardo was filled by a great dramatic vocalist, like Duprez, or in later days by Mario.