“Now which do you like best?” asked Rossini; “I have written two.”
He sang them both. The friend thought the character of the first was most in keeping with the dramatic situation. Rossini was of the same opinion, and decided to turn the second duet into a trio.
He finished his trio, got up, dressed, sent the two pieces to the theatrical copyist, and went out to breakfast.
This anecdote is often told in illustration of Rossini’s laziness, as if a really active man would have got out of bed to pick up the fallen duet rather than set to work, lazily, to compose a new one.
Many volumes might be written on this question. It will be sufficient, however, to point out that activity is mere liveliness of the body, as liveliness is activity of the mind. So laziness is dulness of the body, dulness laziness of the mind. Rossini had a lively mind in a lazy body. He could not have walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours; but he wrote the “Barber of Seville” in thirteen days.
CHAPTER VII.
ROSSINI’S REFORMS IN WRITING FOR THE VOICE.
ROSSINI encountered no serious obstacles in his career. He was never crossed in love like Beethoven—indeed, in his numerous affairs of the heart, he seems always to have been met half way; nor did his works ever remain unappreciated for more than about twenty-four hours at a time.
He was never lamentably poor, like Schubert; for though in the earlier part of his career he was badly paid, he could always earn twenty or thirty pounds, the price of an opera, by working for two or three weeks.
To tell the truth, he seems never to have been depressed or elevated by the aspirations of Mozart; and he had (to use a favourite word of his) the same “facility” in succeeding that he invariably manifested in producing.
He attacked no subject that he did not make something of. If, as occasionally happened, an opera of his fell to the ground, he literally picked up the pieces and turned the best of them to account in building up and adorning some new work. This great artist and practical philosopher had already, as we know, written a “Cyrus in Babylon” for Ferrara, when he was called upon to produce an “Aurelian in Palmyra” at Milan.