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Dante is the man I owe most to; he taught me more music than all my music-masters put together, and when I wrote my 'Otello, I would introduce those lines of Dante you know the song of the gondolier. My librettist would have it that gondoliers never sang Dante, and but rarely Tasso, but I answered him, 'I know all about that better than you, for I have lived in Venice and you haven't.
This seemed outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes."
They were Robert Fairfax, a young actor in musical comedy, Peter Jacks, a cinema producer, Gerald Morse, a dress designer, and Sidney Voss, a musical composer and librettist, all habitues of the place and members of the little circle towards which the dead man had seemed, during the last few weeks of his life, to have become attracted.
We do not hear much of the Jewish community in London in the days of Handel, and it cannot have been a very large one, but they appear to have been worth Handel's consideration. It may be mentioned that Handel's early librettist in London, Nicolo Haym, must have been a Jew, to judge from his name.
But she had no time to study ways and means for sending a message to him, either through Sholto, her father, who always waited patiently for her behind the scenes, or through Paul Zouche, who, though as librettist of the opera, and as a poet of new and rising fame, was treated by everyone with the greatest deference, still made a special point of appearing in the shabbiest clothes, and lounging near the side-wings like a sort of disgraced tramp all the time the performance was in progress.
But it is no use. The librettist is inexorable: the stage is wanted for some one else; and the watchman's song merely acts as a soporific, and at last the poor fellow snores. In the distance appears the ship of the Flying Dutchman "blutroth die Segel, schwarz der Mast" she nears rapidly, enters the fiord and casts anchor hard by Daland's boat, and Vanderdecken comes ashore.
Yet it is worthy of note that during the composition of what Rossini's admirers commonly regard as his best and most characteristic work the "Barber of Seville" he lived in the same house with his librettist.
Georg Friedrich Treitschke was manager and librettist for Baron von Braun, and he became Beethoven's collaborator. The revision of the book was completed by March, 1814, and Beethoven wrote to Treitschke: "I have read your revision of the opera with great satisfaction. It has decided me to rebuild the desolate ruins of an ancient fortress."
The close of the opera is certainly inferior to the earlier parts, but the introduction of Hercules is a great improvement upon the original version of the last act, in which the rescue of Alcestis is effected by Apollo. The French librettist did not treat the episode cleverly, and indeed all the last scene is terribly prosaic, and lacking in poetical atmosphere.
The librettist, Planché, in a tribute to Weber, gives the origin of the story of "Oberon." It appeared originally in a famous collection of French romances, "La Bibliothèque Bleue," under the title of "Huon of Bordeaux." The German poet Wieland adopted the principal incidents of the story as the basis of his poem, "Oberon," and Sotheby's translation of it was used in the preparation of the text.
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