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If there were a few more young singers like him the operatic problem might be considered solved, for it is the rarity of well-trained singers that causes all the financial embarrassment in our opera-houses.
When Mendelssohn travelled in Italy he noted that there were very few good singers at the opera-houses, and that one had to go to London and Paris to find them.
The poem which Chorley quotes from was inspired by the performance of the great Pasta in Simone Mayer's weak musical setting of the fable of the Colchian sorceress, which crowded the opera-houses of Europe. The life of the French classical tragedy, too, was powerfully assisted by Rachel.
The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the theatres from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing, down to the national drama of Pulchinello the pictures, the sea, the climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.
Outside the frontiers of his native land, Smetana was practically unknown until the Vienna Exhibition of 1890, when his opera, 'Die verkaufte Braut, was produced for the first time in the Austrian capital. Since then it has been played in many German opera-houses, and was performed in London in 1895, and again in 1907. The story is simplicity itself.
His dahlias bloom in June, and his birds sing in the autumn. He opens the opera-houses before Easter, and makes Parliament sit on a Wednesday evening. And then those terrible meshes of the Law!
In short, I had hitherto frequented gambling-tables just as I frequented ball-rooms and opera-houses because they amused me, and because I had nothing better to do with my leisure hours. But on this occasion it was very different now, for the first time in my life, I felt what the passion for play really was.
What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack.
Similar services were held throughout Europe, and everywhere the opera-houses were draped in black. Perhaps the death of no musician ever called forth such universal exhibitions of sorrow and reverence. Cherubini's life extended from the early part of the reign of Louis XVI. to that of Louis Philippe, and was contemporaneous with many of the most remarkable events in modern history.
Sometimes he hits it and sometimes he doesn't. After two hearings of Ariadne at Naxos in the smaller of the two new royal opera-houses at Stuttgart, I came to the conclusion that both composer and librettist, while greatly daring, had attempted the impossible, and therefore their work, despite its many excellencies, missed fire.
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