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The Germans themselves were contentedly jogging on with the hybrid music of Spontini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn; and Wagner never tired of telling them to create an art of their own, or really he would have to do it for them. He did as well as talked and wrote; he produced the nearest thing he could find to pure German opera for instance, Marschner's Adolph von Nassau in 1845.
Yet curious to say, he could not do anything without a small ivory scraper by his side, though never using it. It was given him by his father when commencing his career, with the injunction that, as he was determined to become a musician, he should make up his mind to write as little rubbish as possible, advice which Donizetti sometimes forgot.
As a matter of fact, we tried a few outside players of whom the most promising was a certain Signor Morini, and I really felt so depressed and so desirous of furthering my work at any price that I attended a performance of Luzia by Donizetti with my friend Cornelius to see if I could extract from him a favourable judgment of the singer.
"Donizetti," the same writer informs us, while at the Bologna Lyceum, "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 afterward, he wrote so rapidly that the word 'improvise' 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.
True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most part free. "Aïda" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.
All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the Dutchman is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are communicated to us.
There was scarcely an opera or an overture, from Mozart to Donizetti, that he did not insist upon singing a scene from; and wound up all by a very pathetic lamentation over English insensibility to music, which he in great part attributed to our having only one opera, which he kindly informed me was "Bob et Joan."
For five minutes it rent and shook him, the nurse bending fruitlessly over him; but at its wildest he signed to his visitor not to go, and when at last it lulled he went on calmly: "Donizetti ended mad in a gala dress, but I end at least sane enough to appreciate the joke a little long-drawn out, and not entirely original, yet replete with ingenious irony.
The opera was a great success, no little of which was due to the neglected song which Donizetti had almost forgotten. It was not till 1846 that Mario took the really exalted place by which he is remembered in his art, and which even the decadence of his vocal powers did not for a long time deprive him of.
Petersburg, and Vienna showered her with their bravas and their gifts, and her native Italy went wild at her approach. Her last great public performance was at Milan in 1832, when, in company with Donizetti the tenor and the then inexperienced Giulia Grisi, she sang the rôle of Norma, in Bellini's opera, which was then given for the first time under the baton of the composer himself.
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