“La Cenerentola” and “La Gazza Ladra” were written in quick succession for Naples and Milan.  The former of these works, based on the old Cinderella myth, was the last opera written by Rossini to illustrate the beauties of the contralto voice, and Madame Georgi-Righetti, the early friend and steadfast patroness of the musician during his early days of struggle, made her last great appearance in it before retiring from the stage.  In this composition, Rossini, though one of the most affluent and rapid of composers, displays that economy in art which sometimes characterized him.  He introduced in it many of the more beautiful airs from his earlier and less successful works.  He believed on principle that it was folly to let a good piece of music be lost through being married to a weak and faulty libretto.  The brilliant opera of “La Gazza Ladra,” set to the story of a French melodrama, “La Pie Voleuse,” aggravated the quarrel between Paer, the director of the French opera, and the gifted Italian.  Paer had designed to have written the music himself, but his librettist slyly turned over the poem to Rossini, who produced one of his masterpieces in setting it.  The audience at La Scala received the work with the noisiest demonstrations, interrupting the progress of the drama with constant cries of “Bravo!  Maestro!” “Viva Rossini!" The composer afterward said that acknowledging the calls of the audience fatigued him much more than the direction of the opera.  When the same work was produced four years after in London, under Mr. Ebers’s management, an incident related by that impresario in his “Seven Years of the King’s Theatre” shows how eagerly it was received by an English audience.

“When I entered the stage door, I met an intimate friend, with a long face and uplifted eyes.  ’Good God!  Ebers, I pity you from my soul.  This ungrateful public,’ he continued.  ’The wretches!  Why! my dear sir, they have not left you a seat in your own house.’  Relieved from the fears he had created, I joined him in his laughter, and proceeded, assuring him that I felt no ill toward the public for their conduct toward me.”

Passing over “Armida,” written for the opening of the new San Carlo at Naples, “Adelaida di Borgogna,” for the Roman Carnival of 1817, and “Adina,” for a Lisbon theatre, we come to a work which is one of Rossini’s most solid claims on musical immortality, “Mose in Egitto,” first produced at the San Carlo, Naples, in 1818.  In “Mose,” Rossini carried out still further than ever his innovations, the two principal roles—­Mose, and Faraoni—­being assigned to basses.  On the first representation, the crossing of the Red Sea moved the audience to satirical laughter, which disconcerted the otherwise favorable reception of the piece, and entirely spoiled the final effects.  The manager was at his Avit’s end, till Tottola, the librettist, suggested a prayer for the Israelites before and after the passage of the host through the cleft waters.  Rossini instantly seized the idea, and, springing from bed in his night-shirt, wrote the music with almost inconceivable rapidity, before his embarrassed visitors recovered from their surprise.  The same evening the magnificent Dal tuo stellato soglio ("To thee, Great Lord”) was performed with the opera.