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82 National Music of the World. |
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possible to conceive false exaggeration carried further by fickleness. Cimarosa is hardly known by name. Paisiello is totally defunct as a celebrity : his charming ' Nina Pazza,' in which Pasta was as charmingly pathetic as she was awful in ' Medea,' having been reset by the inefficient Signor Coppola, whose setting is already deservedly forgotten; Signor Rossini tolerated as rococo, or else miserÂably misrepresented by a crew of the incompetent bawlers, who have replaced the splendid vocalists of past times; Bellini the graceful, and Donizetti the fertile (and more than fertile, as his operas 1 La Fille du Regiment,' ' Don Pasquale/ and the final act of 'La Favorite/ show) shelved; because fashion, or dilettantism, or Italian sympathy, or call it whatever the world pleases, has run riot to bray from trumpets or to thump on drums, that Signor Verdi is the one prophet of Italian opera. And since this paragraph was penned, the waning of the coarse light of his star is pretty distinctly to be observed. It is hardly possible to imagine his violence outdone by any successor; yet this would seem to be the law of Italian movement in such 'shows of art as are to be popular.
I have now to advert to a potent influence of |
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