y of the new setting from a
member of the orchestra and sent back to Hamburg a composition based on
Keiser's melodies "to show how such themes ought to be treated." Dr.
Chrysander, also, when he gave me a copy of Bertati's "Don Giovanni"
libretto, for which Gazzaniga composed the music, told me that Mozart
had been only a little less free than the poet in appropriating ideas
from the older work.

One of the best pieces in the final scene of "Fidelio" was taken from a
cantata on the death of the emperor of Austria, composed by Beethoven
before he left Bonn. The melody originally conceived for the last
movement of the Symphony in D minor was developed into the finale of
one of the last string quartets. In fact the instances in which
composers have put their pieces to widely divergent purposes are
innumerable and sometimes amusing, in view of the fantastic belief that
they are guided by plenary inspiration. The overture which Rossini
wrote for his "Barber of Seville" was lost soon after the first
production of the opera. The composer did not take the trouble to write
another, but appropriated one which had served its purpose in an
earlier work. Persons ignorant of that fact, but with lively
imaginations, as I have said in one of my books, ["A Book of Operas,"
p. 9] have rhapsodized on its appositeness, and professed to hear in it
the whispered plottings of the lovers and the merry raillery of Rosina
contrasted with the futile ragings of her grouty guardian; but when
Rossini composed this piece of music its mission was to introduce an
adventure of the Emperor Aurelianus in Palmyra in the third century of
the Christian era. Having served that purpose it became the prelude to
another opera which dealt with Queen Elizabeth of England, a monarch
who reigned some twelve hundred years after Aurelianus. Again, before
the melody now known as that of Almaviva's cavatina had burst into the
efflorescence which now distinguishes it, it came as a chorus from the
mouths of Cyrus and his Persians in ancient Babylon.

When Mr. Lumley desired to produce Verdi's "Nabucodonosor" (called
"Nabucco" for short) in London in 1846 he deferred to English tradition
and brought out the opera as "Nino, Re d'Assyria." I confess that I
cannot conceive how changing a king of Babylon to a king of Assyria
could possibly have brought about a change one way or the other in the
effectiveness of Verdi's Italian music, but Mr. Lumley professed to
have found in