Indeed, as a purely theatrical part, a part for stage display, that of Rosina is quite unrivalled, and none is better adapted for the re-appearance of a favourite singer coming back to the scene of previous triumphs. Rosina makes her first entry on the balcony, as if only to receive the applause and congratulations of the public on her return. She has then to make a second entry, to sing a beautiful and very effective cavatina, and finally she has an admirable opportunity for gratifying the audience in the scene of the music lesson, by introducing some air which she knows, for national or sentimental reasons, or both, to be particularly agreeable to them.
Cenerentola, however, is far from being an insignificant heroine, and Madame Giorgi-Righetti sang the music admirably, as a year before she had sung that of Rosina. She was especially applauded for her brilliant delivery of the final rondo, “Non piu mesta.” This was the fourth and last time that Rossini concluded an opera with an air of display for the prima donna. It seemed to him, no doubt, that the device had now been sufficiently employed—which, however, did not force his successors to be of the same opinion.
As to the borrowed pieces in “Cenerentola,” the history of the air “Miei Rampolli” has been already traced through two operas. It belonged originally to “La Pietra del Paragone,” together with the duet “Un Soave non so che,” the drinking chorus, and the burlesque proclamation of the Baron. The sestet, the stretta of the finale, the duet “Zitto, Zitto,” were taken from “Il Turco in Italia.”
“Cenerentola” was the last of the great prima donna parts which Rossini composed for the contralto voice. He wrote nothing more, then, either for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, or for Madame Marcolini, the original Tancredi.
“La Cenerentola” seems to have been intended as a pendent to “Il Barbiere,” and at one time almost rivalled that work in popularity. Sontag, Malibran, Alboni, have appeared with brilliant success in the part of the heroine, which, like those of Rosina and Isabella, has often been sung by sopranos since the general dethronement of the contralto by the soprano voice in principal characters. But of late years this opera has seldom been played, and in England not since Madame Alboni’s last series of performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
CHAPTER IX.
“LA GAZZA LADRA”: THE CONTRALTO VOICE.
THE Patriarch of Moscow, arrayed in all his splendour, was about to lay the foundation stone of a new church, when his consecrated trowel, formed of massive gold, could nowhere be found. Dreadful things happened. No one could say what had become of the precious instrument. The question was put to the nobles, the merchants were put to the question, the peasants were knouted and sent to Siberia; still the golden trowel was not forthcoming.
At last the Tsar died of grief; the great bell of Ivan Velikoi, the sound of which is never heard except on the most solemn occasions, was about to be tolled, when the aged bell-ringer, on ascending the tower, was much startled at startling a magpie which had turned the sacred belfry into a receptacle for stolen goods. In the midst of the hoard accumulated by the thievish bird, which included a fur cap, a wooden spoon, a pair of goloshes, a hymn-book, and a tenpenny nail, the long-lost golden trowel was discovered.
The Patriarch, now advanced in years, laid the foundation stone of the new church. He then pronounced a curse, the terms of which are unfit for publication, on the magpies of Moscow, and forbad them to approach the holy city within a distance of forty versts. Accordingly, no magpie is ever seen in Moscow—except, of course, on the stage, when “La Gazza Ladra” is performed.
Wherever the legend on which the story of the Maid and the Magpie may have come from—and its birthplace is doubtless much further east than Moscow—the drama or melodrama of domestic, military, and judicial interest on which Rossini’s “Gazza Ladra” is founded, belongs, like the dramatic originals of “Il Barbiere” and “La Cenerentola,” to the French. The French playwrights, if not good librettists themselves, are certainly cunning contrivers of plots on which good libretti may be founded. “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” are both derived from Beaumarchais; “La Cenerentola” from Etienne; “La Sonnambula” from Scribe; “Lucrezia Borgia,” “Ernani,” and “Rigoletto,” from Victor Hugo. “Linda di Chamouni” is only “La Grace de Dieu;” “La Gazza Ladra,” “La Pie Voleuse” in another form. If there should ever be a recognised national division of literary labour in the world, England, considering how much the works of Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray have been read on the continent, may perhaps supply the novels; but the French already write plays in every shape for the whole world.