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Updated: June 4, 2025
Soon after this, she appeared as Julia in Spontini's "Vestale," and, as a long time had elapsed since its production, there was aroused the most alert curiosity to hear Cruvelli in a great part, in which but few singers had been able to make a distinguished impression.
In the same manner, the exceptional successes of Spontini's and Meyerbeer's own operas were enhanced by the special activity of their composers.
He relates the case of a young Provençal musician, who blew out his brains at the door of the Opéra after a second hearing of Spontini's "Vestale," having previously explained in a letter, that after this ecstatic enjoyment, he did not care to remain in this prosaic world; and the case of the famous singer Malibran, who, on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time, at the Conservatoire, "was seized with such convulsions that she had to be carried out of the hall."
But the genius of the singer was proof against the hostility of the Franco-Italian composer, and the immense audiences which gathered to hear her interpret the chef-d'ouvres of Weber, whose fame as the great national composer of Germany was then at its zenith, proved her strong hold on the hearts of the German people. Spontini's prejudice was generally attributed to Mme.
In Berlioz's Mémoires you can read about the enthusiasm, the tears, and the feeling, that the performances of Gluck's and Spontini's operas aroused; and in the same book one sees clearly that this musical warmth lasted until 1840, after which it died down little by little, and was succeeded by complete musical apathy in the second Empire an apathy from which Berlioz suffered cruelly, so that one may even say he died crushed by the indifference of the public.
Nothing remained after Spontini's departure but to modify and correct certain eccentricities and arbitrary features in his arrangements; and from that moment I attained a high level of success with my orchestra.
It must be admitted that for sheer theatricalism that gentleman beat any composer who preceded him. Bellini's, Auber's and Spontini's scores are thin compared with his; even Auber's grandest ensembles lack his sham magnificence. Wagner's artistic conscience had not ripened to the point at which conscience is an absolute, unfailing, unerring touchstone.
Suddenly turning towards them he called in a sepulchral tone, 'Are the violas dying? The two pale and incurably melancholy old men who held on tenaciously to their posts in the orchestra, notwithstanding their right to a pension, stared at Spontini with real fright, reading a threat in his words, and I had to explain Spontini's wish in sober language in order to call them back to life.
This feeling swelled by degrees to open anger, in the blindness of which every fresh suggestion of Spontini's appeared but frivolous fault-finding, to which he bluntly responded in the coarsest German.
In this very important and scientific treatise it was proved that without Spontini's invention of the suspension of the sixth in his Vestalin, the whole of modern melody would not have existed, and that any and every form of melody that had been used since had been borrowed from his compositions.
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