BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thursday, March 21, 1822:

Carl Maria von Weber, aware that Rossini will be arriving in Vienna shortly, takes the opportunity to leave the city. According to Richard Osborne’s Rossini biography (2nd ed. 2007) at p.74, “His fear of Rossini, like his fear of Beethoven, bordered on paranoia, not least because there were qualities in the music to which he was drawn. He had heard La donna del lago in Dresden and is said to have fled from a performance of La Cenerentola after the Dandini-Magnifico duet, muttering ‘I’m beginning to like this stuff!’ According to his son, he feared that Euryanthe [the new opera commissioned for 1823] would be no more than ‘dreamy moonlight’ compared with the ‘bright day’ of Rossini’s writing. The two men did eventually meet when Weber, already a dying man, called on Rossini in Paris in 1826.”