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
represen