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Updated: April 30, 2025
She could not accept the assistance of an attractive bodice!... Unfeminine, perhaps, but womanly. At twenty-five minutes to seven, she went into Mrs. Orgreave's bedroom, rather like a child, and also rather like an adult creature in a distracting crisis. Tom Orgreave and Alicia were filling the entire house with the stormy noise of a piano duet based upon Rossini's William Tell.
Patti was the pet of the gifted composer of "Guillaume Tell," and no one was ever more welcome at Rossini's beautiful villa at Passy, well known as the centre of a great musical and artistic circle.
In many of his works, especially in Otello, Rossini made a great step forward towards realism in opera. As Victor Hugo has victoriously demonstrated, such poverty is no obstacle to genius and wealth in them is only an advantage to mediocrity. I was one of the regular pianists at Rossini's.
Many, too, will recall his mot, spoken to a beauty standing between himself and the Duke of Wellington: "Madame, how happy should you be to find yourself placed between the two greatest men in Europe!" One of Rossini's adventures at Naples has in it something of romance.
He was, in fact, Moliere's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, Mathurin's Melmoth great allegorical figures drawn by the greatest men of genius in Europe, to which Mozart's harmonies, perhaps, do no more justice than Rossini's lyre.
Their resemblance is simply one of those imaginary things which the critics too often mistake for a reality. The critics once found local color in Rossini's Semiramide! Hans de Bülow once said to me in the course of a conversation, "After all Meyerbeer was a man of genius." If we fail to recognize Meyerbeer's genius, we are not only unjust but also ungrateful.
The overture to "William Tell," with its Alpine repose, its great storm-picture, the stirring "Ranz des Vaches," and the trumpet-call to freedom, is one of the most perfect and beautiful ever written, and is so familiar that it does not need analysis. Arnold enters, and a long duet, one of Rossini's finest inspirations, follows between Arnold and Tell.
Desdemona's agitated air, on the other hand, under Rossini's treatment, though broken short in the vocal phrase, is magnificently sustained by the orchestra, and a genuine passion is made consistently musical; and then the wonderful burst of bravura, where despair and resolution run riot without violating the bounds of strict beauty in music these are master-strokes of genius restrained by art.
It was not the first performance of Italian opera music in America, however, nor yet of Rossini's merry work. In the early years of the nineteenth century New York was almost as fully abreast of the times in the matter of dramatic entertainments as London. New works produced in the English capital were heard in New York as soon as the ships of that day could bring over the books and the actors.
The concert opened with Beethoven's Second Symphony, performed by the Philharmonic Society, and it was followed by Lablache, who sang Rossini's "Largo al factotum." "A breathless silence then ensued," writes Mr.
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