The Director of the Opéra met Rossini one evening on the Boulevard des Italiens, and accosted him jovially, like someone bringing a friend good news:

“What do you think, dear Maestro,” said he, “tomorrow we’re doing the third act of your Moïse!”

“Really?” replied Rossini. “All of it?”

It’s a splendid riposte—even more so because in fact not all of the third act was done. Such is the respect shown in Paris for the finest productions of the great masters.

Some works, indeed, seem predestined for the “palm leaves of martyrdom”. Few have suffered such a long and cruel martyrdom as Rossini’s opera William Tell. This would be hard to beat as an example for all composers of how little honour or respect is shown in our theatres to the most magnificently gifted and clever geniuses, however Herculean their labours, however immense their renown and however dazzling their glory. One might even say that the more indisputable and undisputed the superiority of great men who have deigned to write for the theatre, the more relentless and determined is the petty rabble in heaping insult on their works. I need only recall the treatment of Mozart’s dramatic works in France or Shakespeare’s in England, saying in Othello’s words, “They know’t, no more of that”.

But not even a musician with the liveliest imagination could have any idea of what is gradually happening to the works of Gluck in the theatres where they’re still put on (I except that of Berlin), in the concerts where fragments of them are sung, and in the shops where they’re sold in scraps. There’s not a singer left who understands their style, not a conductor who comprehends their spirit, feeling and traditions. They at least are not to be blamed, for it’s almost always involuntarily that they pervert and stifle Gluck’s most brilliant inspirations in these works. Arrangers, orchestrators, editors and translators, on the other hand, in various parts of Europe, have premeditatedly made of Gluck’s noble, antique visage a mask so hideous and grotesque that it’s already almost impossible to recognise its features.

A whole anthill of Lilliputians has swarmed over this Gulliver.