himself in a position to grapple with the largest undertakings. And yet he stopped.[1]
After him the decadence of Italian opera was rapid—to us it seems heart-breaking. Rossini's early musical education had been, as I have said, poor. But from the very beginning his spirit had found itself carried on a stream of free and happy civilisation; from it he had drawn a grace, a natural aristocracy which, if it did not always preserve him from the sin of negligence and improvisation, at any rate saved him absolutely from the vice of vulgarity and slackness. Rossini, in spite of the date of his birth (1797), is like his contemporary Stendhal, a man of the older Europe, of Europe as it was before Rousseau and before romanticism. His sensibility is sane, live and joyous, his intellect clear and decided. He belongs to a time when genius could only be thought of as a participation in the qualities of the gods.
I shall be told that it is certainly an exaggeration or at least inappropriate, to talk of romanticism in connection with Bellini and Donizetti, especially as those musicians, who do not appear to have possessed more general culture than the clarinettist in their orchestra, must have been to a large extent strangers to the movement of ideas in their own day. But they were also sensitive natures and very impressionable, and as such became impregnated with the atmosphere of their time. It is easily perceptible (when one hears, for example, Lucy of Lammermoor) that the contagion of the harmful fashions of romantic sensibility contributed largely to that weakness and languor with which, in their hands, Italian opera was afflicted.
- ↑ There was something ironical in this. Meyerbeer was in the ascendant. And in Meyerbeer's style Rossini's defeat was a foregone conclusion. But Rossini's own style was better.
