all sorts of social sets rubbed elbows at his great soirees.  The most brilliant singers and the most famous virtuosi appeared at these “evenings.”  The master was surrounded by sycophants, but they did not influence him, for he knew their true worth.  He ruled his regular following with the hauteur of a superior being who does not deign to reveal himself to the first comer.  It is a question how he came to be held in such honor.

His works, outside of the Barbier and Guillaume Tell, and some performances of Moise, belonged to the past.  They still went to see Otello at the Theatre-Italien, but that was to hear Tamberlick’s C diesis.  Rossini was under so little illusion that he tried to oppose the effort to have Semiramide put into the repertoire at the Opera.  And, nevertheless, the Parisian public actually worshipped him.

This public—­I am speaking now of the musical public or what is called that—­was divided into two hostile camps.  There were the lovers of melody who were in the large majority and included the musical critics; and, on the other side, the subscribers to the Conservatoire and the Maurin, Alard and Amingaud quartets.  They were devotees of learned music; “poseurs,” others said, who pretended to admire works they did not understand at all.

There was no melody in Beethoven; some even denied that there was any in Mozart.  Melody was found, we were told, only in the works of the Italian school, of which Rossini was the leader, and in the school of Herold and Auber, which was descended from the Italian.

The Melodists considered Rossini their standard bearer, a symbol to rally around, even though they had just obtained good prices for his works at the second-hand shops and now permitted them to fall into oblivion.

From some words he let fall during our intimacy I can state that this neglect was painful to him.  But it was a just—­perhaps too just—­retribution for the fatality with which Rossini, doubtless in spite of himself, served as a weapon against Beethoven.  The first encounter was at Vienna where the success of Tancred crushed forever the dramatic ambitions of the author of Fidelio; later, at Paris, they used Guillaume Tell in combating the increasing invasion of the symphony and chamber music.

I was twenty when M. and Mme. Viardot introduced me to Rossini.  He invited me to his small evening receptions and received me with his usual rather meaningless cordiality.  At the end of a month, when he found that I asked to be heard neither as a pianist nor as a composer, he changed his attitude.  “Come and see me tomorrow morning,” he said.  “We can talk then.”

I was quick to respond to this flattering invitation and I found a very different Rossini from the one of the evening.  He was intensely interested in and open-minded to ideas, which, if they were not advanced, were at least broad and noble.  He gave proof of this when Liszt’s famous Messe was performed for the first time at St. Eustache.  He went to its defense in the face of an almost unanimous opposition.