“You have a passion for industry; I always had a passion for idleness,” exclaimed Rossini.
“The forty operas you have composed are not a proof of that,” answered Neukomm.
“That was a long time ago. We ought to come into the world with packthread instead of nerves,” said the maestro, somewhat seriously; “but let us drop the subject.”
On several occasions Ferdinand Hiller seems to have asked Rossini point blank the great question—why, after “William Tell,” he ceased to write.
“Is it not one of the greatest of all wonders that you have not written anything for twenty-two years—what do you do with all the musical ideas which must be welling about in your brain?” asked Hiller, who was thinking perhaps of Heine’s windmill.
“You are joking,” replied the maestro, laughing.
“I am not joking in the least,” returned Hiller; “how can you exist without composing?”
“What!” said Rossini, “would you have me without motive, without excitement, without a definite intention, write a definite work? I do not require much to be excited into composition, as my opera texts prove, but still, I do require something.”
At another time Ferdinand Hiller succeeded in obtaining far more explicit reasons for Rossini’s premature retirement, which neither the want of a libretto, nor the plea of constitutional idleness, nor shaken nerves, sufficed to explain.
“Had you not the intention,” Hiller asked, “of composing an opera on the text of ‘Faust?’”