H. Sutherland Edwards

“ The intention, however, of the composer must count for something, and one cannot accept as comic music which is simply played or sung very much out of tune. Many persons disbelieve altogether in comic music. Lively, brilliant music is admirable, and commends itself to every taste. But comic music is for the most part as objectionable as comic women, than which nothing much more objectionable can well be imagined. It is the province of music to charm, to fascinate, to call up visions of delight, but not to cause fits of laughter. ”

“ But he is also a singer of warmth, verve, expression, energy and musical sentiment; alone he can fill up and give life to a scene; it is impossible for another singer to carry away an audience as he does, and when he will only be simple he is admirable; he is the Rossini of song, he is a great singer, the greatest I have ever heard. Doubtless the manner in which Garcia plays and sings the part of Otello is preferable, taking it altogether, to that of Davide. It is purer, more severe, more constantly dramatic; but with all his faults Davide produces more effect—a great deal more effect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Giorgi-Righetti made her appearance in the balcony, she was, in her character of favourite singer, applauded; but having no air assigned to her in this not very suitable situation, the audience thought they were being robbed of the expected cavatina, and uttered murmurs of disapprobation. The brilliant and melodious duet for Almaviva and Figaro was sung in the midst of hisses and derisive shouts. When, however, Rosina reappeared and sang the first notes of "Una voce" the audience became silent; a chance was given to the composer for the sake of the singer. ”

“ For a time the public smiled at Rossini's pleasantry, until at last it occurred to some one that the composer was taking liberties with his audience. Then hoots and hisses were heard from every part of the theatre, and the end of Rossini's practical joke was that the practical joker had to rush from his post at the head of the orchestra and seek safety in flight. ”

“ There are elements of beauty in the work, as in everything that Mozart composed; but the humour of the piece is akin to that of those American humourists of whom one of the most remarkable was not ashamed to complain of "Mr. Chaucer" that he could not spell. A composer may easily produce a laugh if he will only condescend to an absurdity so easy to realise, by causing a pretentious introduction to be followed by a trivial tune; or he may produce a genuine burlesque effect by imitating with characteristic exaggeration the style of some other composer ”

“ But before he had reached these extremes, before he had in Semiramide brought an entire military band on to the stage, and had in the same opera written for four horns a beautiful and beautifully harmonised melody which does not in any way suggest the chase, he raised the mortal anger of one of his adversaries and actually placed his life in danger by beginning the overture to La Gazza Ladra with a duet for drums. A young enthusiast on the side of stagnation went about armed with the proclaimed intention of slaying the ruthless innovator. ”

“ Mercadante was a better musician than Bellini. But he possessed far less creative power; and his creations or inspirations in the shape of melodies are seldom comparable in beauty to those of which the scores of La Sonnambula, Norma, and I Puritani are so full. The tenor's love-song in Il Giuramento, and the highly dramatic duet which brings that opera to a conclusion, will be remembered by all who have once heard this masterpiece of a composer who did not produce masterpieces. Opera-goers of the last thirty years cannot altogether forget him ”

“ Of the music suitable to comedy Rossini was undoubtedly a master; and in such music the Barber of Seville abounds. But though the most characteristic air in the whole opera, Figaro's "Largo al fattotum," is bright, gay, joyful, impulsive, one cannot say that it is comic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He never leaves you cold, and when he does not move you he astonishes you; in a word, before hearing him, I did not know what the power of singing really was. The enthusiasm he excites is without limits. In fact his faults are not faults, for Italians who in their opera seria do not employ what the French call the tragic style, scarcely understand us when we tell them that a waltz or a quadrille movement is out of place in the mouth of a Cæsar, an Assur, or an Otello. ”

“ It is difficult to understand the mood of one, having ears to hear, who, whatever he might think of Norma as a specimen of the highest kind of tragic opera, could fail to "like it." Rossini, together with a mass of opera-goers in all countries, was of those who not only "liked" but greatly admired Norma; and he gave the composer the benefit of his counsels when the still young Bellini (he was even now only thirty years of age) undertook to write an opera for the Italian Theatre of Paris, with Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache in the principal parts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To amateurs of the present day its melodies appear of old-fashioned, or at least of antique cast. The recitatives seem long, and they are interminable compared with those by which Verdi connects his musical pieces. But when Tancredi was first brought out opera seria consisted almost entirely of recitative, relieved here and there and only at long intervals by solo airs. For much of this declamation Rossini substituted singing; for endless monologues and dialogues supported by a few chords, concerted pieces connected and supported by a brilliant orchestral accompaniment. ”

“ Indeed the earliest musical dramas of modern Italy, from which the opera of the present day is directly descended, were mysteries differing only from the dramatic mysteries in having been written for the singing, not for the speaking voice. The opera, or drama in music, is not, compared with the spoken drama, a very ancient form of art. Persons afflicted with a rage for seeking in the distant past traces and origins of a form of art which was created and forced into existence in comparatively modern times, see the first specimens of opera in the Greek plays ”

“ It was of this period in Rossini's life that Heine was thinking when, in his well-known article on Rossini's Stabat Mater, he wrote: "The true character of Christian art does not reside in thinness and plainness of the body, but in a certain effervescence of the soul which neither the musician nor the painter can appropriate to himself either by baptism or by study; and in this respect I find in the Stabat of Rossini a more truly Christian character than in the Paulus of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy; an oratorio which the adversaries of Rossini point to as a model of the Christian style. ”

“ A CONTEMPORARY of Cimarosa and of Paisiello, his predecessors, but not, except at the very outset of his career, his models, and of Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi, his successors, and in an artistic sense his followers, Rossini is a central figure in the nineteenth-century history of Italian music.
Lives of Rossini have been published freely enough during the last fifty or sixty years. It but rarely happens, even to the greatest man, to have his biography written or his statue erected during his lifetime. ”

“ But meanwhile Cimarosa had been completely distanced by Mozart, who, himself a great inventor, and, so to say, anticipator, adopted moreover everything that was worth adopting in the methods of all his contemporaries and predecessors.
To resume, in as few words as possible, the history of opera in Italy up to the time of Rossini, this form of art was at first nothing but recitative, or recitative with a chorus at the end of each act. Then occasional airs were introduced, then duets; and it is not until the middle of the eighteenth century that we find an example of an operatic trio. ”

“ It may be questioned, moreover, whether laughter, or even the least tendency to laugh, can be provoked by music, so long as it is composed and executed according to the rules of art. A comic poem, a comic picture, may be a masterpiece of artistic expression, but it is difficult to imagine a perfect musical composition which would afford matter for merriment. Gounod's Funeral March for a Marionette is a graceful, melodious piece of music, in which there is nothing comic but the title. ”

“ Perhaps it occurred to the Abbé Carpani, the first of Rossini's biographers, that he was already approaching the critical age at which so many great composers—not to speak of painters and poets—had ceased not only to work but to live; Mozart, for instance, Cimarosa, Weber, Hérold, Bellini, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. It has been suggested, indeed, that Rossini might perhaps have wished his career to be measured against those of so many other composers whose days were cut short at about the age he had attained when he produced William Tell. ”

“ The life of Rossini divides itself, more naturally than most things to which this favourite mode of division is applied, into three parts. During the first period of his existence, extending from his birth to the year 1823 when Semiramide was brought out, he made his reputation. From 1823 when he visited London and Paris, until 1829 when he produced his great masterpiece in the serious style, and afterwards threw down his pen for ever, he made his fortune. Finally, from 1829, the year of William Tell, until 1869, the year of his death, he enjoyed his fortune and his reputation ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rossini had written for this personage a part in his Aureliano in Palmira (1814) , the most celebrated of his very few failures; and the composer soon found that the singer had no respect for his music, which he treated as so much substance for elaboration and pretended adornment; while the singer discovered that the composer was so narrow-minded as to require his melodies to be sung as he had thought fit to write them. In those days dramatic propriety and music itself were sacrificed to the vocalists, who, far from studying parts, do not seem, in any true spirit, to have mastered airs. ”

“ Nothing more need be said in this volume of Rossini considered as a composer of comic opera. He cultivated every style, including the ancient style of La Cenerentola which contains much comic with some serious music, and of La Gazza Ladra, which might well have been treated seriously throughout, though in some of the gravest situations of this work he is gay, in some of the severest, lively. ”

“ Meyerbeer, in his highly but sometimes almost grotesque orchestral effects, has approached the very verge of burlesque music such as Rossini, in the little opera referred to, deliberately wrote. The simple motive, for instance, of the march in Robert le Diable is given, when introduced for the first time, to four kettledrums. A four-note melody executed on four kettledrums would in a burlesque have excited roars of laughter. Jessica was "never merry when she heard sweet music." But sweet music is one thing, and grotesque music another. ”

“ 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. ”