Rossini, Composer and Gourmet

— The bringing out of Verdi’s Othello at the Paris Opéra, and the final closing up of the restaurant Magny, — both important events of the late autumn of 1894, — have stranded safely from the ebb tide of Rossini’s fame some noteworthy anecdotes.

It was in 1816 that Rossini wrote his Otello and brought it out in the Fondo theatre of Naples. Murat had just been driven away, and the people were celebrating the return of the Bourbons. Rossini’s director at that time was the "Prodigious impresario,” of whom Stendhal spoke so often, not always in good part, — a man who had risen from being messenger boy, horse jockey, café waiter, usurious money-lender on a small scale, farmer-out of the public gaming-tables, to be director, first of La Scala at Milan, and afterwards of San Carlo and the Fondo in Naples. Il Napoleone degl’ impresarii made a cast-iron contract with the composer, whose coming popularity he had scented, binding him to write two new operas a year, and to arrange suitably any old ones that he, Domenico Barbaja, might choose for either of his two theatres. This was to go on for several years, during which Rossini was to be paid annually twelve thousand francs, with an interest of some two thousand more in the gamingtables, not three thousand dollars in all.

Rossini made hay while the sun shone, in more senses than one. His first opera was on Elizabeth, queen of England, in which the title rôle fell to the singer Colbran, Barbaja’s special favorite and property. Rossini ended by running away with her and marrying her, to repent of his bargain later, so far as one of such ineradicable high spirits could repent.

Meanwhile San Carlo was burned, and the composer was allowed to go off to Rome to write the Barber of Seville. When his director demanded the opera for the Fondo, Otello was forthcoming. The libretto was contemptible as poetry, hut it followed in the main Shakespeare’s story, and the music won a great success. So the piece went traveling through the Italian cities. Lord Byron was present in Venice when it came out, and wrote : “ They have crucified Othello in opera. The music is good, but lugubrious. As to the words, all the real scenes of Iago have been cut out. They have substituted tor them the greatest nonsense conceivable ; the handkerchief has become a billet-doux, and the leading singer would not black his face.” In Rome things went worse yet. The audience would not hear of Desdemona being killed. So it was arranged that when Othello raised his cangiaro to strike her, she should fall on her knees, crying, “ 1 am innocent ! ” “ Is it true ? ” questioned the terrible Moor. “ I swear it ! ” was the answer. And Othello, taking Desdemona by the hand, led her to the front of the stage, where, both smiling, they sang the duo from the composer’s Armida — and the curtain fell.

In 1821 Otello was produced in Paris, and for a time nothing was hoard along the boulevard but the songs of the gondolier and the willow. Poets like Lamartine and the very young Alfred de Musset joined with musicians like Boieldieu in extravagant praise. Stendhal wrote : “ The glory of Rossini has no other bounds than those of civilization ; and he is not yet thirty years old.” Malibran took the part of Desdemona to her father Garcia’s Othello. The latter was so real in his tragedy that the daughter sometimes feared he would actually kill her. (The Roman softening of the plot had been abandoned.) In New York, where they were singing, the wicked squint-eyes of her father made so terrifying an impression on her, one night, that, seizing his uplifted hand, she bit it till the blood flowed. Garcia bellowed with rage, and the audience applauded frantically, not dreaming how real was the artists’ acting. Tt was in Rossini’s Otello that Tamberlick made his famous ut heard. The piece kept its vogue in Paris as long as it was sung in its original Italian. In 1844 a French adaptation was given at the Opéra proper, and the Romanticists, who prided themselves on knowing and appreciating their Shakespeare, indignantly organized a campaign against it. Théophile Gautier led the attack, with a criticism more delicious to present ears than the naïvetés of the piece itself.

First was the regulation compliment to Rossini, as to Wagner nowadays. “ All the Germans and all the Israelites [Meyerbeer, evidently] will vainly gnaw their nails and wear out their arms up to the elbow on their pianos, to find little phrases of three or four measures ; they will never succeed in producing one of those melodies which the maestro sends flying from his bedside without taking the trouble to gather them up.”

Next comes the serious head-shaking. “ When the poet is the great William Shakespeare, neither more nor less, the case is grave. ... It is very probable that Rossini, ignorant great genius that he is, had no knowledge of the real Moor of Venice.” And so on ad infinitum.

The piece did not survive the attack, and only fragments of it remained popular for concert music. Rossini himself, in a letter to “ a young composer ” who had asked him how to make an overture, amused himself long afterwards with remembrances of these earlier pieces.

“ 1. Wait till the eve of the day fixed for the representation. Nothing stirs up the spirit more than necessity, the presence of a copyist waiting for your work, and the importunity of a director in trouble who tears out his hair by the handful. In my time, in Italy, all directors were bald before they were thirty years old.

“ 2. I composed the overture of Otello iu a little room of Barbara’s palace, where that baldest and fiercest of directors had shut me up by force, with nothing but a dish of macaroni, and with the threat that I should not quit the room with my life until I had written the last note.

“ 3. I wrote the overture of the Gazza Ladra the day of its first representation, under the roof of La Scala, where I had been imprisoned by the director, and where I was watched by four stage carpenters, who had orders to throw my work down from the window, sheet by sheet, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of paper with music on it, they were to throw me out of the window.

“4. For the Barber of Seville I did better. I had not composed an overture, but I took one which I designed for an opera semiseria called Elisabetta. The public was highly pleased.

“5. I composed the overture of Comte Ory while fishing, with my feet in the water, in company of M. Aguado (the well-known Spanish hanker of Paris), and while he was talking to me about the finances of Spain.

“6. The overture of William Tell was written under very similar circumstances.

“ 7. As to Moses in Egypt, I made no overture at all.”

Rossini might treat his music lightly, but his dinners — never. One biographer says of him : “ I have seen him weep only twice in his life. . . . The second time was on Lake Leman, one day when a sudden swell caused to fall into the water a truffled pullet which he was making ready to carve.”

In 1842, a famous cook who had married the sister of Papa Brébant, restaurateur des lettres, opened the restaurant Magny in an old house in a narrow street of the Latin Quarter. It was as old as the first theatre of the Comédie-Française, which has left its name to the neighboring Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. This was the centre of the life of the schools before Baron Haussmann opened the wide Boulevard Saint-Michel. At the corner was the Rue Saint-Andrédes-Arts, which Du Maurier has thinly disguised in the very real romance of the unreal Trilby. Here were the Café Procope frequented by Voltaire, and La Belle Rôtisseuse, and many another nucleus of art, culinary and otherwise. One of the first clients of Magny was Rossini. The two respected profoundly each other’s art, as did Alexandre Dumas and Bignon later. Between them they invented an artistic triumph, which has so far lived as long as the master’s music. This was the “filet Rossini,” with the “purée Magny.” Rossini needed three saucepans for the preparation of the dish to which he has left his name. One was for the meat itself, the second for the foie gras with butter, the third for the truffles au Madère. The purée was made from potatoes baked in the oven, emptied out of their jackets with a spoon, passed through a sieve, and worked with an equal quantity of the freshest butter of Normandy.

These were Rossini’s golden days, when his patronage was good as gold. By the time of the first Paris World’s Fair in 1855, the little old place, with its miller’s ladder leading to the upper rooms for private dinners, could charge a boulevardier fifty francs for his special dish of “ chicken lights à la suprême.” It was in the later years of Rossini, and without his presence, that Sainte-Beuve and Gavarni the caricaturist organized the dinners at Magny’s, where Turgéneff met Théophile Gautier and Flaubert, and Renan held the indiscreet discourse reported by the Goncourt brothers.