Anecdotes of Great Musicians/Anecdote 102
102.—MUSIC AT SO MUCH PER NOTE.
The statistician is never satisfied unless he has a thing represented in cold-blooded figures. Some have even gone so far as to estimate how much various artists earned for every note they sang or played. For instance, one mathematician tells us that Rossini got eighteen pence per note for each note he wrote in the opera of "Semiramide."
This is certainly "drawing one's note" for goodly figures. But it pays even better to be a singer than a composer; for we are told that every time Patti sings "Semiramide" she gets fifteen pence per note. In "Lucia di Lammermoor" the rate is still higher, as the notes are fewer. In this opera, when she gets her best rates, "La Diva" draws her one and ninepence per note.
But these are moderate figures, when we consider the prices at which Paganini used to draw the bow. At a certain concert in Paris, in which he played some fifteen pages of violin music and at which his proceeds were one hundred and sixty-five thousand francs, it was found by some patient figurer that the "Wizard of the Violin" received nine and threepence per measure. Divided on the basis of time, his receipts were four and sevenpence for every quarter-note or every quarter-rest, half that sum for every eighth-note or eighth-rest, and so on.
This is getting musical mathematics down to a pretty fine point. Soon we will have some fellow calculating the cost to the world of each note of Gabriel's final trumpet blast.