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BENEDICT AND BALFE |
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for it. And so, after some discussion, she returned to Boucicault and said, " Balfe has an idea! If you call to-morrow or the next day he will have the song ready for you." Whether her strategy resulted to Balfe's financial advantage is not recorded, but it may be presumed that it did.
The librettos of many of Balfe's operas were written by Edward Fitzball, who, as already mentioned, was also closely associated with Bishop in his operatic work. Fitzball was a great admirer of Balfe's. " There is nothing Balfe could not do," he declared once. " I have heard it said that when he was directing some composition of his own abroad, the tenor on the stage asserted that he (Balfe) had composed an impossible note, at which the composer stoutly asserted that he could sing it himself, and leaping like a greyhound out of the orchestra on to the stage, he sang the note with the greatest ease and felicity, at which the distracted tenor, tearing off his hair" (a wig, perhaps!), "rushed out of the theatre."
The two men were great friends. Fitzball was once the means of patching up what might have been a serious quarrel between Balfe and his family. What the cause of the quarrel was is unknown, but Balfe had left the house highly indignant, and though said to be entirely in |
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