“They were all churning out operas of mine. It was clearly impossible for me to work under such conditions, so I hired the organs from their owners. It will cost me about 1,500 lire for the summer, but that is not too large a price to pay for peace.”
“Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.”
