Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/219

Rh Italian composer of opera seria in Germany, England, and Italy even. He had set to music all Metastasio's operatic libretti, with a single exception—some of them three or four times, and all at least twice; and although one could not possibly say that Metastasio worked slowly, Hasse did not find that he wrote quickly enough; and to pass the time he composed the music for various operas by Apostolo Zeno. The number of his works was so great that he confessed that "he might very well fail to recognise them if they were shown to him;" he derived more pleasure, he said, in creating than in preserving what he had written; and he compared himself with "those fertile animals whose offspring are destroyed in the act of birth or left to the mercy of chance. "