This story is sad enough, Heaven knows, without the melodramatic frills that have been put upon it.  You will read in certain sketches, and even Mr. Elbert Hubbard has enambered the fable in one of his “Little Journeys,” that Verdi’s wife was ill during the performance of the opera, that the first act was a great success, and he ran home to tell her.  The second act was also successful, and he ran home again, not noting that his wife was dying of starvation.  The third act, and he was hissed off the stage, and flew home, only to find his wife dead.  The chief objection to the story is the fact that his wife died on the 19th of June, 1840, and the opera was not produced until the 5th of September that same year.  But it is tragic enough that he should have been compelled to write a comic opera under the anguish that he felt at the loss of his two children and his wife, and that his reward should have been even then a dismal fiasco.

He was dissuaded from his vow to write no more, and it was in a driving snow-storm that his friend Merelli decoyed him to a field, in which so much fame was awaiting him.

This Merelli had first become interested in Verdi from overhearing the singer Signora Strepponi praising Verdi’s first opera.  This was before the failure of the comic opera and the annihilation of Verdi’s family.

When Merelli had at length decoyed Verdi back to composition, his next work, “Nabucco,” was a decided success, the principal part being taken by this same Strepponi.  She had made her debut seven years before, and was a singer of dramatic fire and vocal splendour, we are told.  Her enthusiasm for Verdi’s work not only fastened the claim of operatic art upon him, but won his interest in her charms also, and Verdi and she were soon joined in an alliance, which after some years was legalised and churched.  She shortly after left the stage without waiting to “lag superfluous” there.  Thenceforward she shared with Verdi that life of quiet retirement from the world in which he played the patriarch and the farmer, breeding horses and watching the harmonies of nature with almost more enthusiasm than the progress of his art.

So much for the Italian opera composers.  How do the Germans compare?

VARIOUS GERMANS

The old composer Hasse, like Rossini, being himself the most popular composer of the day, married one of the most popular singers of her time, and scored a double triumph with her.  This was the famous Faustina.

Mendelssohn’s friend, Carl Zelter, was a busy lover, as his autobiography makes plain.  One of his flirtations was with an artistic Jewess, with whom he quarrelled and from whom he parted, because they could not agree upon the art of suicide as outlined in Goethe’s then new work, “The Sorrows of Werther.”

Albert Lortzing was married before he was twenty, and lived busily as singer, composer, and instrumentalist, travelling here and there with a family that increased along with his debts.  It was not till after his death, and then by a public subscription, that his family knew the end of worry.