Anecdotes of Great Musicians/Anecdote 282
282.—PROLIFIC COMPOSERS.
If it is true that of the making of books there is no end, it would seem to the student of musical history that the same might be said of operas. Nearly every young composer, at one time or other in his career, feels called upon to inflict an opera on an already long-suffering world. But we should not object to this, for it does the composer "a power o' good," and doesn't harm the world any, for but a small percentage of the operas ever reach the point of a public presentation.
It will be noticed in the following list that the composers most celebrated for the value of their operas are not those who turned out the largest number. A great work must naturally represent a great brain, and long and intense application of it. It is not to be expected that he who does twenty things should do them as well as he who does two. So, other things being equal, we would naturally expect greater works where there has not been such a continuous flow of them.
Perhaps the composer most prolific of operas was Reinhart Keiser, who has 120 to his credit, although one authority claims that Piccinni wrote 133 operas. Alessandro Scarlatti composed 115; Pacini and Piccinni each 80; Donizetti, 70; Mercadante, 60; Auber, 50; Händel, 43; Coccia, 40; Rossini, 39; Halévy, 32; Verdi, 29; Ricci, 28; Haydn, 24; Mozart, 23; Meyerbeer, 15; Gounod, 13; Wagner, 13; and Bellini, 10; while from Beethoven's colossal mind there came but one lone opera.