already yielded in large degree to the energy and pomp of French
declamation, when Rossini poured into them afresh such exhilaration and
sparkle as again placed his country in the van of musical Europe.
With no pretension to the grand, majestic, and severe, his fresh and
delightful melodies, flowing without stint, excited alike the critical
and the unlearned into a species of artistic craze, a mania which has
not yet subsided. The stiff and stately Oublicheff confesses, with many
compunctions of conscience, that, when listening for the first time to
one of Rossini's operas, he forgot for the time being all that he had
ever known, admired, played, or sung, for he was musically drunk, as if
with champagne. Learned Germans might shake their heads and talk about
shallowness and contrapuntal rubbish, his _crescendo_ and _stretto_
passages, his tameness and uniformity even in melody, his want of
artistic finish; but, as Richard Wagner, his direct antipodes, frankly
confesses in his "Oper und Drama," such objections were dispelled
by Rossini's opera-airs as if they were mere delusions of the fancy.
Essentially different from Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, or even
Weber, with whom he has some affinities, he stands a unique figure in
the history of art, an original both as man and musician.

Gioacchino Rossini was the son of a town-trumpeter and an operatic
singer of inferior rank, born in Pesaro, Romagna, February 29, 1792. The
child attended the itinerant couple in their visits to fairs and musical
gatherings, and was in danger, at the age of seven, of becoming
a thorough-paced little vagabond, when maternal alarm trusted his
education to the friendly hands of the music-master Prinetti. At this
tender age even he had been introduced to the world of art, for he sang
the part of a child at the Bologna opera.

"Nothing," said Mme. Georgi-Righetti, "could be imagined more tender,