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At that time, in his eighty-eighth year, Fétis was a fugitive from Paris, owing to the troubles of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Mickley's picture of the veteran littérateur and critic is an engaging one. He says, "Considering his great age, Mr. Fetis is very active. He climbed up the stepladder to get books and to show me such as he considered the most rare and interesting.
His daughter and his wife have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones, all will be well." Fétis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister.
In her musical studies the same tendency showed itself, and immediately on beginning her work in composition with Fétis, she commenced writing operatic airs and scenes. Apparently she was able to estimate her own talents justly, for success crowned her efforts. Her first opera, "Guy Mannering," was performed in private, but "Le Loup Garou" made a marked public success.
Rubini's voice was an organ of prodigious range by nature, to which his own skill had added several highly effective notes. His chest range, it is asserted by Fetis, covered two octaves from C to C, which was carried up to F in the voce di testa.
The riturnello of Sélika's aria, which should be performed with lowered curtain as the queen gazes over the sea and at the departing vessel far away on the horizon, became a vehicle for encores the last thing that was ever in Meyerbeer's mind. But the worst was the liberty Fétis took in retouching the orchestration.
Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fétis, Peri was very avaricious. Of noble birth himself, he grew rich on the favour of the Medicis, and added to his wealth by marrying a daughter of the house of Fortini, who incidentally brought with her a very handsome dot.
When, therefore, he made one of his most aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was, according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape notoriety.
This quarrel was afterward made up between them when they were engaged together in London the following year, 1828. This reconciliation was brought about by M. Fetis, who had accompanied them from Paris. He proposed to them that they should sing for one of the pieces at a concert in which they were both engaged, the duo of Semiramide and Arsace, in Rossini's opera.
According to Fetis and Castil-Blaze, he never had a superior in stage declamation, and the finest actors of the Comédie Française might well have taken a lesson from him. His first great success, which caused his engagement in grand opera, was the creation of Edgardo in "Lucia di Lammermoor" at Naples in 1835.
His contract of marriage was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage, Fétis says: "Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and the economy that reigned in her house.
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