Music Paid by the Note

Some people can’t resist turning art into arithmetic. One writer even tried to calculate what famous musicians earned per note.

The claim goes like this: Rossini supposedly “made” eighteen pence for every note he wrote in his opera *Semiramide*. Not bad—until you remember that the singer can do even better. Each time Adelina Patti sang *Semiramide*, she was said to receive fifteen pence per note. And in *Lucia di Lammermoor*—where there are fewer notes in the big moments—“La Diva” allegedly pulled in as much as one shilling and ninepence for a single note at her best rate.

Then there’s Paganini, where the mathematics gets truly wild. At one Paris concert his proceeds were reported as 165,000 francs for about fifteen pages of violin music. A determined calculator turned that into nine shillings and threepence per bar. Broken down by time, it became four shillings and sevenpence for every quarter‑note (or even a quarter‑rest), half that for each eighth‑note, and so on.

That’s musical bookkeeping taken to the extreme. If it continues, someone will eventually try to price every note of Gabriel’s final trumpet blast.