Shakespeare was spot on when he described music as being the food of love, although the bard wrote it slightly more eloquently.
Music and food has always been a match made in heaven. The two go together like ham and cheese, lamb and mint sauce and roast beef and English mustard.
It’s a concept that some of the world’s greatest composers understood.
Being a musical genius can be every bit as appetite building as burning off the calories on a building site. There are scores of music loving epicureans who aren’t just remembered for what they wrote on the stave, but the lengths they often went to too stave off the hunger pangs.
Gioachino Rossini’s appetite was as epic as his operas. And his love of good food lives on to this day thanks to a number of still popular recipes that were named after him, including the opulent steak dish Tournedos Rossini topped with foie gras, black truffles and Madeira sauce, and the equally indulgent Eggs Rossini with chicken livers.
Rossini was so enamoured of food that he claimed only to have cried three times in his life: when his first opera failed, on hearing Paganini play and on witnessing his favourite treat, turkey stuffed with truffles, fall overboard while he sailed to a picnic lunch!
Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame liked the finer things in life and employed a French chef. The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, meanwhile, formed his own dining club where he would cook pasta with eels or roast fowl he had shot himself by his lakeside home.
It’s apt then that Rossini, Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan should be among the musical delights being served up next month as a popular festival combining the classics with good food makes a welcome return.
The fourth Northumberland Music Festival gets underway on November 14 and for three weekends will bring some of the most celebrated and talented musicians and singers to perform at three venues across the county – Doxford, Eshott and Guyzance Halls.
Among the highlights will be performances of Gilbert and Sullivan classics, Puccini’s Tosca and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.