“Who wrote that aria you just sang?”

I saw him three days afterwards and he hadn’t cooled off even then.

“I am fully aware,” he said, “that arias should be embellished.  That’s what they are for.  But not to leave a note of them even in the recitatives!  That is too much!”

In his irritation he complained that the sopranos persisted in singing this aria which was written for a contralto and did not sing what had been written for the sopranos at all.

On the other hand the diva was irritated as well.  She thought the matter over and realized that it would be serious to have Rossini for an enemy.  So some days later she went to ask his advice.  It was well for her that she took it, for her talent, though brilliant and fascinating, was not as yet fully formed.  Two months after this incident, Patti sang the arias from La Gaza Ladra and Semiramide, with the master as her accompanist.  And she combined with her brilliancy the absolute correctness which she always showed afterwards.

Much has been written about the premature interruption of Rossini’s career after the appearance of Guillaume Tell.  It has been compared with Racine’s life after Phedre.  The failure of Phedre was brutal and cruel, which was added to by the scandalous success of the Phedre of an unworthy rival.  Racine’s friends, the Port Royalists, did not hesitate to make the most of the opportunity.  “You’ve lost your soul,” they told him.  “And now you haven’t even success.”  But later, when he took up his pen again, he gave us two masterpieces in Esther and Athalie.

Rossini was accustomed to success and it was hard for him to run into a half-hearted success when he knew he had surpassed himself.  This was doubtless due to the extravagant phraseology of Hippolyte Bis, one of the librettists.  But Guillaume Tell had its admirers from the start.  I heard it spoken of constantly in my childhood.  If the work did not appear on the bills of the Opera, it furnished the amateurs with choice bits.

In my opinion, if Rossini committed suicide as far as his art was concerned, he did so because he had nothing more to say.  Rossini was a spoiled child of success and he could not live without it.  Such unexpected hostility put an end to a stream which had flowed so abundantly for so long.

The success of his Soirees Musicales and his Stabat encouraged him.  But he wrote nothing more except those slight compositions for the piano and for singing which may be compared to the last vibrations of a sound, as it dies away.

Later—­much later—­came La Messe to which undue importance has been attributed. “Le Passus,” one critic wrote, “is the cry of a stricken spirit.”  La Messe is written with elegance by an assured and expert hand, but that is all.  There are no traces of the pen which wrote the second act of Guillaume Tell.