Il Crociato in Egitto - Naxos Music Library

friendship was struck up between the two composers. (Andrew Everett
suggests, in The Donizetti Society Journal 6, London, 1988, that Meyerbeer and
Rossini may have first met in Rome in December 1817, when Rossini was
preparing for the prima of his Cenerentola at the Teatro Valle the following
month. One imagines, however, that if a meeting with his idol had taken place
it surely would have featured in Meyerbeer’s correspondence at that time).
Flushed with his Italian successes, Meyerbeer returned home to Germany
where Emma was being given both in Italian (Dresden, 1820, conducted by
Weber) and in German with its original title, and also as Emma von Leicester
in Berlin, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna. No welcome awaited him.
In Berlin he was accused of prostituting the art he had learned in his
homeland. In Vienna he was called ‘a second-rate Rossini’. A revival of
Alimelek did little to change these opinions.
Hurt and disappointed, he returned to Italy, and to his first major
international success, Margherita d’Anjou, written to a libretto by
Felice Romani, and performed first at La Scala (November 1820), and
throughout Italy, and then in Munich, Dresden, Barcelona, Paris, London,
Lisbon and Budapest.
The illness of the famous singing actress, Carolina Bassi, who had already
created his Semiramide, prevented him from completing a third collaboration
with Rossi, L’Almanzorre, for the carnival season of 1821, at the Teatro
Argentina in Rome. But by this time his reputation was such that his name was
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