The Life of Rossini. Edwards Henry Sutherland

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СКАЧАТЬ of 1813 – the year of “Il Figlio per Azzardo,” with its obbligato accompaniment for lamp-shades, of “Tancredi,” and of “L’Italiana in Algeri” – that Rossini was writing one morning in bed, when the duet on which he was engaged fell from his hands.

      “Nothing easier,” an ordinary composer would say, “than to pick it up again.”

      “Nothing easier,” said Rossini, “than to write a new one in its place.”

      Rossini would not get out of bed for a mere duet. He set to work and composed another, which did not resemble the original one in the least.

      A friend called. “I have just dropped a duet,” said Rossini, “I wish you would get it for me. You will find it somewhere under the bed.”

      The friend felt for the duet with his cane, fished it out, and handed it to the composer.

      “Now which do you like best?” asked Rossini; “I have written two.”

      He sang them both. The friend thought the character of the first was most in keeping with the dramatic situation. Rossini was of the same opinion, and decided to turn the second duet into a trio.

      He finished his trio, got up, dressed, sent the two pieces to the theatrical copyist, and went out to breakfast.

      This anecdote is often told in illustration of Rossini’s laziness, as if a really active man would have got out of bed to pick up the fallen duet rather than set to work, lazily, to compose a new one.

      Many volumes might be written on this question. It will be sufficient, however, to point out that activity is mere liveliness of the body, as liveliness is activity of the mind. So laziness is dulness of the body, dulness laziness of the mind. Rossini had a lively mind in a lazy body. He could not have walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours; but he wrote the “Barber of Seville” in thirteen days.

      CHAPTER VII

      ROSSINI’S REFORMS IN WRITING FOR THE VOICE

      ROSSINI encountered no serious obstacles in his career. He was never crossed in love like Beethoven – indeed, in his numerous affairs of the heart, he seems always to have been met half way; nor did his works ever remain unappreciated for more than about twenty-four hours at a time.

      He was never lamentably poor, like Schubert; for though in the earlier part of his career he was badly paid, he could always earn twenty or thirty pounds, the price of an opera, by working for two or three weeks.

      To tell the truth, he seems never to have been depressed or elevated by the aspirations of Mozart; and he had (to use a favourite word of his) the same “facility” in succeeding that he invariably manifested in producing.

      He attacked no subject that he did not make something of. If, as occasionally happened, an opera of his fell to the ground, he literally picked up the pieces and turned the best of them to account in building up and adorning some new work. This great artist and practical philosopher had already, as we know, written a “Cyrus in Babylon” for Ferrara, when he was called upon to produce an “Aurelian in Palmyra” at Milan.

      “Ciro in Babilonia,” though it contained some very beautiful pieces, had not, as a whole, been particularly successful; and Rossini probably thought that in its oratorio form it was not likely to be repeated. At all events, he extracted from it a magnificent chorus for his “Aureliano;” to be thence transplanted in another shape – when “Aureliano” in its turn had failed – to the “Barber of Seville.” He also wrote for “Aureliano” an admirable overture, which a year afterwards was taken to Naples to serve as introduction to “Elisabetta,” and the year after that (“Elisabetta” having perished) to Rome, where it got prefixed to the immortal “Barber” – from whom may it never be separated!

      Beethoven, for one opera, composed three overtures. Rossini made one overture serve for three operas; and it is remarkable that of these, two were serious, the third eminently comic.

      Rossini’s life, as has just been observed, presents no dramatic interest. Such interest as it does possess belongs entirely to the composer’s artistic career, and consists in the reforms that he introduced into operatic art.

      After “Tancredi,” in which we notice Rossini’s first innovations in opera seria, and “L’Italiana in Algeri,” which holds a corresponding place in the history of his comic operas, came “Aureliano in Palmira,” which marks another step in advance, not, as in the two previous instances, by reason of its success, but through failure.

      In “Aureliano,” Rossini had written a part for the celebrated sopranist, Velluti (“non vir sed veluti”). Rossini did not like Velluti’s singing, and Velluti did not like Rossini’s music; or, at least, did not like the composer’s objecting to his music being so disfigured under the pretext of embellishment as to be rendered absolutely unrecognisable.

      The result of this disagreement was that “Aureliano” was not played after the first night, and that Rossini worked no more for sopranists. “Velluti,” the last of his order, went on singing for a dozen years afterwards, and Rossini from that time wrote his own ornaments for the singers, and so elaborately, that with the best will they were not likely to add much of their own.

      We hear a great deal of the decay of singing as an art; but that art was thought so much of when Rossini began to write that more important things – dramatic propriety and music itself – were sacrificed to it. What would Italian singers of the year 1813 have thought of “William Tell?” and how would their highly-decorative style have suited that simple, energetic, thoroughly dramatic music? The development of Rossini’s dramatic faculty was, no doubt, delayed by his having often to write for singers so accomplished, that they could think of nothing but the exhibition of their own voice.

      In spite of the praise lavished by contemporary writers on the vocalists of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it can be shown by the very terms in which the praise is sounded that these artists possessed a most undesirable talent, or, at least, exhibited their talent in a most undesirable way.

      In the present day, many singers who have come before the public with considerable success, are said never to have studied singing systematically at all. They have learned under a skilful professor so many parts – as amateur pianists learn particular pieces, without attempting to master the whole art of pianoforte playing.

      The great singers of the eighteenth century acquired their facility of execution, which was what chiefly distinguished them, by a very different method. Far from studying parts, they sometimes did not even learn airs. To take an oft-quoted case, in which the extreme of the system seems to have been reached, Caffarelli was kept practising scales and a few exercises for five years; after which his master, the celebrated Porpora, is reported to have said to him, —

      “Now go, Caffarelli; you have no more to learn! You are the first singer in the world.”

      Yet, with all respect to Porpora, what, after such meagre, mechanical instruction as this, would Caffarelli have been able to make of a great dramatic part? What would a vocalist, taught as Caffarelli had been taught, make in the present day of the part of Arnold in “Guillaume Tell,” or of Raoul in “Les Huguenots”?

      Meyerbeer would certainly not have allowed such a singer to take the part of Vasco di Gama in “L’Africaine,” which he reserved (in Germany) for Wachtel – by no means a Caffarelli!

      Rossini would have quarrelled with Caffarelli, as he did with Velluti, and would have told him not to overload his music with absurd embellishments.

      Stendhal, СКАЧАТЬ