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"She has more than voice; she has intelligence and le feu sacre un rossignol double de velours; and more than all, she sings my music as I have written it. Every one likes to add a little of their own. Auber asked me, "Do you know what Rossini said about me?" "No," I answered, "I know what he ought to have said. What did he say?"
And then Padre Ignazio repeated Auber's remark in French: "'Est-ce le bon Dieu, on est-ce bien le diable, qui me fait tonjours aimer les coquins? I don't know! I don't know! I wonder if Auber has composed anything lately? I wonder who is singing Zerlina now?" He cast a farewell look at the ocean, and took his steps between the monastic herbs and the oleanders to the sacristy.
Many declare that the meltings ebb and flow with the sea-tide, and others recount that lead and lines of many fathoms failed to touch bottom. We are told about the normal dog which fell in and found its way to the shore through the cave of Ycod de los Vinos. In the latter a M. Auber spent four hours without making much way; in parts he came upon scatters of Guanche bones. Mr.
Auber, Halévy, Berton, Boïeldieu, Méhul, Spontini, and Adam, who were so intimately associated with him, speak of him with words of the warmest affection. Halévy, indeed, rarely alluded to him without tears rushing to his eyes; and the slightest term of disrespect excited his warmest indignation.
He determined, therefore, to test him, and thus provide amusement, at any rate, for himself. So, at the end of the second course, he suddenly said from his end of the table, "Monsieur le comte, you are too young, of course, to have known Gustavus III., whom Scribe and Auber have set in opera, while the rest of us glorify him in a galop."
The more public and facile music and the independent pieces of the old operas hardly interested him; the wretched trills of Auber and Boieldieu, of Adam and Flotow and the rhetorical commonplaces of Ambroise Thomas and the Bazins disgusted him as did the superannuated affectations and vulgar graces of Italians.
A little girl, as Sarcey relates, once presented herself at the Paris Conservatoire in order to pass the examination for admission. All she knew was the fable of the "Two Pigeons," but she had no sooner recited the lines "Deux pigeons s'aimaient d'amour tendre, L'un d'eux, s'ennuyant au logis" than Auber stopped her with a gesture. "Enough," he said. "Come here, my child."
Some prided themselves on being stars in fashion's gayest circle others, whom he had hardly known, were fathers for their families were educating in England -he now found surrounded by children, on whose provision they were wholly intent. These were off at a tangent, "to see Peter Auber, at the India House," or, "could not wait an instant; they were to meet Josh: Alexander precisely at two."
But we must remember that the thing had been quite as well done by Auber in Masaniello: even the energy is not the true Wagnerian energy divine: it does not show itself through the stuff of the music, but in the common rumty-tumpty rhythms of the day, often offensively vulgar, and in the noisy instrumentation.
Life is well worth beginning seriously, but gaily." I stammered out a few words of thanks, and just as I was making my exit a fine-looking woman knocked against me. She was heavy and extremely bustling, though, and M. Auber bent his head towards me and said quietly: "Above all things, don't let yourself get stout like this singer. Stoutness is the enemy of a woman and of an artist."
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