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These were his questions in Tannhauser and Lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him for his equals the anchorite yearned for the number. But what were his feelings withal? Nobody answered him. Nobody had understood his question.
Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself... "She is right!
In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
A good deal of this care I should like to leave to you, not, you may believe me, from idleness, but because I feel convinced that the voice of a poor German composer of operas, compelled to devote his lifelong labour to the spreading of his works a little beyond the limits of his province, is much too feeble to be counted of importance for anything in the world.
"By the way, that is her half-sister, Marie Deschamps, who sings in your cousin's operas at the London Diana." "I have made the acquaintance of Marie a harmless little thing!" "Her half-sister isn't quite so harmless. She is the daughter of a Spanish mother, while Marie is the daughter of an English mother, a Cockney woman.
I do not think I ever talked with a wittier person than he is. I always wish I could remember what he says; but, alas! when he goes my memory goes with him. He says that he has never heard his operas seated in the audience; it makes him too nervous. He has his seat every night in the parquet of all the theaters in Paris. He only has to choose where to go.
But there were political as well as musical reasons for the instantaneous success of Verdi's early operas. Italy in the forties was a seething mass of sedition.
The opera and its Syrens were much like all other operas and women, but the subject of the said opera was something edifying; it turned the plot and conduct thereof upon a fact narrated by Livy of a hundred and fifty married ladies having poisoned a hundred and fifty husbands in the good old times.
Many of the serious operas performed here are exceedingly beautiful; they are got up, not perhaps at more expense, nor with more magnificence, than the spectacles in London, but certainly with more taste and knowledge of stage effect.
During the space of fourteen years he wrote no fewer than twenty operas, conceived upon a grand scale, and produced with great magnificence.
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