It is well that it was so, for to this fact we owe our grandest oratorios. Händel had trouble enough with opera, before he finally left it. He had a temper which was simply frightful (and an appetite which was the same), and when he came in contact with the conceited and irascible singers of his day, an explosion was sure to follow. Cuzzoni (who had the sweetest of voices, and the harshest of tempers), was the hardest of all for him to get along with. One day she refused absolutely to sing a part which he had assigned to her; his patience, small at the best, gave out totally, and he was going to throw her out of the window, when she hurriedly gave her consent to sing. Händel’s losses and trials as operatic manager, temporarily drove him crazy. Rossini also had his troubles in the operatic field. Once a manager, whose _libretti_ he was bound by contract to set to music, took offence at some action of the composer, and sought to revenge himself by writing a wretched opera for him. The result nearly brought both to ruin, for Rossini retorted by writing a terribly poor score to the words; in the overture, during an _allegro_ movement, the violins were arranged so as to stop at every bar, and tap the tin shades of their lamps with their bows. The audience nearly demolished the theatre. The “Barber of Seville” was a failure at its first performance. There is a note to be made here, of a passage in one of his operas, which is of interest to conductors. The overture to “William Tell” had been played from its first representation, August 3, 1829, for more than thirty years, with a major trill in the violincello at the cadence of the first part; (the andante at the beginning of the work), but on the 16th of November, 1861, the piece was played before the composer, who stigmatized as “a great fault,” the major trill in the third measure of the cadence.[289] “It should be minor” he said. And since that date it has been played so. But it is very uncertain whether the abrupt remark was not a mere whim of the composer. The trill is more satisfactory with G sharp, than with G natural; the earlier editions have none of them any mention of a minor trill and it is scarcely possible that “a great fault” like this, should have escaped notice so long. Meyerbeer, was in all respects, a person well calculated to popularize opera. He knew how to work up dramatic effects, in which he was well seconded by his French librettists, and he did not hesitate at any innovation to ask if it were classical, or belonged to pure art; and he succeeded far better than the martinets who condemned him.