I well remember my first introduction to Madame Rossini in April 1854. I was sitting with the Maestro in his study one morning whilst he was finishing his toilet; his valet had selected one of two brown wigs, and adjusted it on his illustrious master\'s head, leaving the other, placed on a little stand, to ornament the mantelpiece. Next he brought him a silver bowl full of milk and one or two of those cunningly-twisted rolls or crescents, the very thought of which conveys to the appetite\'s memory a whiff of dainty Paris.
Rossini liked to be informed of the latest news, meaning the up-to-date incidents in Paris society, and to be told what the wicked world was saying, and what bons-mots the clever ones had made; so we young fellows were expected to drop in occasionally at an early hour in the morning and keep him posted up. His comments on our news were always much more spirituels than the best of bons-mots we could impart, and frequently a good deal more spicy than our versions of Parisian doings. I dare say then I was carrying coals to Newcastle, and he was making them blaze, when the door was abruptly thrust open, and a bejewelled hand—it was Madame Rossini\'s—triumphantly appeared, flourishing a ham of unusual dimensions, that she had brought for the master to see and to rejoice over.
A pair of piercing dark eyes next swept the room to see who might be there. Finding there was nobody—a young man like myself not counting—the hand and the eyes were followed by the rest of her. She struck me as every inch a queen—a tragedy queen, off duty. Her black hair hung dishevelled over her shoulders, and she was clad in the style the French call "neglected." The upper part of her classical figure was more or less concealed beneath a loose white garment, which I have since learnt to associate with hair-combing. Her lower limbs showed off to great advantage under a heavy striped petticoat; that at least I think it must have been; if it was meant for a dress, it was certainly cut several inches too short.
Whilst I was contemplating her, she and her husband were examining the ham, and commenting upon it en amateurs. I was called upon to admire it, and incidentally introduced to Madame. Disgracefully ignorant as I was of pork-flesh, and being of those honest youths who call a pig a pig, I found nothing better to say than, "Voilà ce que j\'appelle un cochon." That seemed about as much as they expected, and I was allowed to pat it on the hip.
And here I cannot help leaping at a bound from 1854 to 1896, and from Paris to Venice. Just as I was sitting, pen in hand, and trying to conjure up a correct image of Madame Rossini, a living biographical dictionary, in the shape of an elderly lady, walked in, who had been sent round to show me some valuable old lace she had to dispose of. The grand race of the decaduti (the come-down in the world) is by no means extinct, and Signora Baldazzi was a pleasant representative of it. I welcomed her, and, having made the acquisition of some of her lace, I chanced to elicit, in further friendly conversation, that she was a teacher of music, and had studied for years at the Liceo Bologna, when Rossini was director there.
She had plenty of "I well remembers" to start with, so she was soon telling me how good and kind he was, and how brusque and rude, and how he spared neither teachers nor pupils. Even il maestro Cappeletti, il professore di timpani, she said, speaking of him with the greatest respect, came in for his share, when, in a rehearsal under Rossini, he made some blunder. "Asino," cried Rossini, "That sort of thing was not unusual," added my informant; "one always expected something hot from him." "Do I remember Madame Rossini, la Pelissier? Ma che! I see her now in her red corsage and many-coloured petticoat, leading her dog by a string. I knew la Collbran, too; his first wife, you know. They had been married a good many years, when he got tired of her; he told her so, and said he wanted a change. She did not mind the change, but she would not leave the house for him or for anybody else; so she lived in one apartment whilst la Pelissier and Rossini occupied another; but they all took their meals together, and la Collbran did the housekeeping." This lady, it will be remembered, was the famous singer who created some of the principal parts in Rossini\'s opera. I thought the story of the joint ménage so peculiar, that I subjected the good lady, my informant, to a severe cross-examination, but I did not succeed in shaking her evidence. Future biographers may further look into the matter if they care.
I return to that corner house of the Rue de la Chaussée d\'Antin, where the maestro lived. One morning I was there with my cousin, Ernst Jaques, when Rossini\'s old friend Scitivaux came in.
"There," said Rossini, "there is what I promised you, and I have written all you want to know inside." With that he handed a copy of the "Barbiere" to Scitivaux, who, at the sight of the gift and its precious dedication, broke into raptures of gratitude; I am not sure whether he wept or laughed on the other\'s shoulder; but I distinctly recollect he was immediately turned out. "Take it, but go," he was ordered; "I don\'t want you here. Mr. Jaques is just going to play to me. No; you can read that afterwards." A final continental hug, and he and the book were outside. So was I, for I thought it prudent not to await definite instructions, and I was dying to know what was the purport of the exciting inscription.
So we stood in the hall reading it, and I was treated to the after-glow of Monsieur Scitivaux\'s raptures.
The dedication was in Italian, and related how Rossini had composed the "Barbiere" for the Duke Cesarini, the director of the Teatro Argentina in Rome, to retrieve for him the fortunes of a bad season. Rossini went on to say that he had written to Paisiello, who had previously treated the same subject, to assure him that he in no way sought to compete with that master, well aware as he was of his own inferiority, and that he had avoided as much as possible to use the same incidents in his libretto. "I thought," he worded it, "that, having taken this precaution, I might consider myself safe from the censure of his friends and his legitimate admirers. I was mistaken! On the appearance of my opera, they precipitated themselves like wild beasts upon the beardless maestrino, and the first performance was a most stormy one. I, however, remained unconcerned; and, whilst the public hissed, I applauded my performers. Once the storm blown over, at the second performance, my \'Barbiere\' had an excellent razor, and shaved the Romans so well that, to use theatrical language, I was carried home in triumph. There, my good friend, I have done what you desired. Be happy, and believe me, yours affectionately,
Giacomo Rossini.
"Paris, 22 Apr. 1860."
The facts related were well known, but here they were confirmed by the master\'s own narrative, and the recipient\'s happiness was unbounded.
The Jaques who was going to play to Rossini was my cousin, a partner in one of the old banking firms of Hamburg, and, besides, a thorough artist and virtuoso on that soul-stirring instrument, the violoncello. But it was not to have his soul stirred that Rossini gathered young musicians around him at that early hour of the day. They came to play his last compositions to him, and they remained to practise them at his house. You could often hear the sounds of various instruments proceeding from as many various rooms. The piano predominated, for at that time of his life Rossini was most assiduously composing for that instrument, labouring, as it seemed to me, under the fond delusion that he had discovered a new vein in the old mine which had produced such a fund of musical wealth. Sometimes he reminded one of Hummel\'s style, sometimes I thought I traced a Weber idea as it would be if filtered through the pen of a Mendelssohn. He would on no account allow his MSS. to leave the house. "Jamais," he said when my cousin expressed the wish to give the violoncello piece a day\'s practising at home, "Jamais; je ne veux pas dépendre du public." So the performers had to go to the Chaussée d\'Antin, and prepare themselves there for the Saturday evenings at which the latest works of the master were produced.
Amongst those privileged young musicians was the pianist, Georges Pfeiffer, who has since become so popular a composer. Rossini would give him such curiously named productions to study as "Cornichons," "Radis," and the like. There was also a "Boléro tartare," and a certain Rondo in the style of Offenbach, the famous composer of "La belle Hélène," "Orfée aux Enfers," and other operettas that for years drew all Paris to the "Bouffes." He was universally credited with exercising the baneful influence of the evil eye, and Rossini, being superstitious, had headed his manuscript with a drawing of a gettatura, which should act as a charm to protect him. Georges Pfeiffer, no less superstitious—he always asserted he had good reason to be so—had managed to play the opening theme of the Rondo with the two fingers which in the gettatura are supposed to lay the evil spirit; and Rossini so fully entered into this serio-comic solution of the difficulty, that he expressed his warm approval, and added Pfeiffer\'s fingering to the manuscript.
Henri Wieniawski, the violinist, and his brother Joseph, the pianist, were also great friends of Rossini\'s. He was present at Henri\'s wedding. The bride, Miss Hampton, was lovely, the guests distinguished, and the wedding breakfast sumptuous, and all would have gone well if the best man—or the next best—had not unfortunately made an eloquent speech to propose the health of a near and dear relative of the bride\'s who had been buried not so very long ago.
On those famous Saturday evenings I was a frequent visitor and attentive listener, but my own performances were reserved for those occasions when I was alone with the master.
He knew me to be the unworthy bearer of an honoured musical name, but he had by chance discovered that, however great my deficiencies, there was a little musical vein in me which he thought I might exploit. It is regrettable that one cannot write one\'s reminiscences without mentioning one\'s self. Things go so smoothly as long as one records the doings of others, but become so puzzling when one has to introduce the Ego. Between self-laudation and mock modesty there is not much to choose, and if you try to steer clear of the one, you are sure to fall into the other. I must take my chance though, and say that that vein of music, encouraged by the kind maestro, has many a time been a source of infinite delight to me, and to my friends too, or they would not have dragged me to the piano whenever they felt that they had had enough good music and now wanted the other thing. I would show them how easy it is to compose a masterpiece if you only know the secrets of the trade, and I would notably convince them that, if they would follow some very simple directions of mine, they could then and there write an Italian opera.
Singing-masters, it is well known, never agree as to the best way of cultivating a voice entrusted to their care. One will work a mezzo-soprano downwards to a contralto, the other upwards to a high soprano. With me the wiseacres never could settle which of my voices I ought to have developed—my bass voice, my tenor, or my soprano. In the meanwhile I alternately used each, distributing them according to the dramatic needs of the situation created, the story, to be sure, being made up to suit the madness of the hour. In the front line came the love duets between tenor and soprano, with moon-light accompaniment; then peasants\' dances interrupted by thunder-storms, and drinking songs for the baritone, backed by an approving chorus. And so on and on till the tragedy business was reached: "Ye padre furioso e figlia infelice," as Du Maurier calls them, when he relates his performance at Blankenberghe "in imitation of his illustrious friend, Felix Bobtailo."
I must have been endowed with an extraordinary amount of boldness and recklessness in those days, or I never could have given the great maestro an insight into these my accomplishments. It came about in this way:—
Conversation had turned on the curious practice which prevailed formerly, to write the principal men\'s part in opera for an artificial male soprano, and that led to my remarking that Rossini and his contemporaries had done good service in banishing that incongruous personage from the stage, but that they had still left undisturbed some puzzling anomalies in the distribution of parts. There remained the fact that a man has a tenor voice as long as he is a bachelor and a lover, but, when he becomes a father, he develops into a basso profundo; and, by way of pointing to another anomaly, I wanted to know why, when the prim\'uomo and the primadonna, with whose affections we so warmly sympathised, have clandestinely met and resolved to fly from a tyrannic parent, they should compromise their safety by singing a duet of inordinate length: first warbling tender melodies, then shouting stern resolves, practising scales, shakes, and dangerous runs to illustrate the course of true love, and finally proclaiming their immutable determination to live and die together, in strains so wild and so powerfully backed by all the brass instruments of the orchestra, that the irate father is invariably brought on to the stage, naturally to wreck the lovers\' fondest hopes.
By way of illustrating my meaning, I struck a chord or two, and did my worst in imitation of the lovers\' cadenza, and more specially of the effect produced by overpowering brass instruments. That led to further developments, my brass gained me the maestro\'s sympathies, and of these he gave me a tangible proof in the shape of a composition.
I never much cared to make a collection of autographs, but I treasure the album I have previously spoken of, which Mendelssohn gave me as a godfather\'s first present. It took me upwards of fifty years to fill the little book, its pages being devoted only to those celebrities who were also personal friends of mine. So I had not asked Rossini for his autograph, as most people did on first acquaintance, and I had no reason to regret the delay. "I must compose something for your horn," he said one day; "I will write the notes; that is easy enough, but I can\'t draw the staves, you must do that." I answered that I was proud to collaborate, and so two pages of my album were filled. He composed an allegretto-moderato of about thirty bars for the "Cor en mi," heading it: "Thème de Rossini, suivi de deux Variations et Coda par Moscheles père," and signing it "Offert à mon jeune ami Felix Moscheles, G. Rossini, Passy, ce 20 A?ut 1860."
He sat down to the piano and spared no pains to teach me how to perform it on the imaginary French horn—my vibrating lips. I introduced one of those little hitches, not infrequent when moisture accumulates in the tubes of the real instrument, a hiatus which the master graciously approved of. "But," he said, "stand so that the audience cannot see how it is done; you must keep up the illusion, and besides, remember this, you must never show yourself at a disadvantage to the ladies." I have never blown that horn of mine without thinking of his advice, however little I have succeeded in acting up to it.
My father, responding to Rossini\'s invitation, wrote two brilliant variations and coda of considerable length, which it cost me not a little trouble to learn. Once that I had mastered their difficulties, the piece became my cheval de bataille, and whenever I performed it, accompanied by one of the two composers, I invariably made a.... But enough! Happily this is not a place where I am expected to blow my own trumpet.
I called one day to take leave of Rossini, when I was about to leave Paris for a short time on a visit to my parents in Leipsic. This was before Rossini had become personally acquainted with my father, and he enjoined me to deliver a message to him. "Tell him," he said, "that I am a pianist. I daresay he knows that I have written operas, but I particularly want him to understand that I am a pianist too, not, to be sure, of the first class as he is, but of the fourth."
"Très bien, Maestro," I answered. "Je ne manquerai pas."
"Yes; but mind you deliver my message correctly," he insisted. "My ear is exceptionally good, and I manage to hear what is said at a considerable distance. I was not at all satisfied with the way Rosenhain delivered a similar message I had entrusted him with."
I promised that I would scrupulously repeat what he had said, but I added that I could not take the responsibility of stating that he really was a fourth-rate one; he might be a third or a fifth rate pianist for aught I knew.
"Oh, if that is all," he said, "I will play you something, and you can judge for yourself." And with that he opened the small upright piano in his study and began improvising, whilst I settled down comfortably to listen to my own special fourth-class pianist. It was indeed interesting. His plump little hands moved over the keys with a delicate touch, suitable to the simple melodious vein in which he began. When presently he broke into a rapid movement, and the pianoforte player asserted himself, it was still with the touch of the good old legato school. His execution was masterly, but not brilliant; whenever he introduced passages or figures for the pianist as such, these seemed commonplace and hackneyed. But when, on the other hand, the musical thought sought expression, it flowed as from an inexhaustible store, and took the dramatic shape, reminding one of his best operatic style and his most brilliant orchestral effects.
His manner throughout was simple and unaffected. There was nothing showy or self-conscious about him, no by-play of any kind, no sudden pouncing on some ben marcato note, or triumphant rebounding from it. In fact, there was nothing to see but a benignant old gentleman playing the piano; one wouldn\'t have been surprised if he had worn a pigtail like those pianists his predecessors, who were not in a hurry, and treated their little set of crowquills with loving care.
Rossini came into the world three months after Mozart\'s death, a fact perhaps worthy to be considered by those who believe in re-incarnation. It would be interesting to learn what may have been the temporary abode of Mozart\'s spirit during those intervening three months. Perhaps it crossed the Alps and found its way to Rossini, for the Maestro, imbued as he certainly was with the spirit of his great predecessor, never lost an opportunity of acknowledging his indebtedness to him, and was always ready to talk of his favourite master.
"Beethoven," he said to me one day when conversation had turned on German music, "I take twice a week, Haydn four times, but Mozart I take every day of the week. Beethoven, to be sure, is a Colossus, and one who often gives you a tremendous dig in the ribs. Mozart is always adorable. But then he had the good fortune to go to Italy at a time when singers still knew how to sing."
In answer to my question what he thought of Weber, he said, "Oh, il a du talent à revendre celui là!" ("He has talent enough and to spare"). And then he went on to tell me that when the part of Tancred was sung in Berlin by a bass voice, Weber had written some violent articles, not only against the management, but against the composer, and that consequently Weber, when he came to Paris, did not venture to call on the Maestro; he, however, let him know that he bore him no grudge, and that led to their soon becoming acquainted.
I asked if he had met Byron in Venice. "Only in a restaurant," he said, "where I was introduced to him; our acquaintance, therefore, was very slight; it seems he has spoken of me, but I don\'t know what he says." I translated in a somewhat milder form Byron\'s words, which happened to be fresh in my memory: "They have been crucifying \'Othello\' into an opera; the music good but lugubrious, but, as for the words, all the real scenes with Iago cut out, and the greatest nonsense put in instead; the handkerchief turned into a billet doux, and the first singer would not black his face. Singing, music, and dresses very good."
The Maestro regretted his ignorance of the English language. He had been in London in his early days, had given concerts there, and had even taught aristocratic ladies, but nothing, he said, would ever induce him to cross the Channel again, and, for the matter of that, to trust himself to a railway. When he migrated from Italy to Paris, he made the journey in his carriage. He told me he had given much time to the study of Italian literature in his day. Dante was the man he owed most to; he had taught him more music than all his music-masters put together; and when he wrote his "Otello" he insisted on introducing the song of the Gondolier. His librettist would have it that gondoliers never sang Dante, but he would not give in.
"I know that better than you," he said, "for I have lived in Venice, and you haven\'t. Dante I must and will have."
A companion picture to the crucified "Othello" was the performance of "Fidelio," which all Paris was talking about at that time. One Sunday morning I spent an hour alone with Rossini, and I had to give him full particulars of the proceedings at the opera. These were characteristic of the taste of the day. The libretto of Beethoven\'s opera was completely changed, Florestan being replaced by Jean Galéas, Pizarro by Duke Sforza. The Minister becomes Charles VIII., and Fidelio the Countess Isabelle; the whole story turned into a political intrig............