Of his works the opera "La testa di bronzo" is the best known.

I should have said "was," for nobody now knows anything of his.

That loud, shallow talker Count Stendhal, or, to give him his real name, Marie Henry Beyle, heard it at Milan in 1816, when it was first produced.

He had at first some difficulty in deciding whether Soliva showed himself in that opera a plagiarist of Mozart or a genius.

Finally he came to the conclusion that-- there is in it a warmth, a dramatic life, and a strength in all its effects, which are decidedly not in the style of Mozart.