SOME FAMOUS SINGERS 
 OF THE XIXIH CENTURY 
 
 Francis Rogers
 
 SITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 MANUEL GARCIA 
 1775-1832
 
 WfflPMiMMMMMMMMl^ 
 
 SOME FAMOUS 
 SINGERS of the 
 19th CENTURY 
 
 By FRANCIS ROGERS 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 THE H. W. GRAY COMPANY 
 
 2 West Forty-fifth Street, New York 
 Sole agents for NOVELLO & CO., Ltd. 

 
 Copyright, 1914, by The H.W. Gray Co. 
 FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW MUSIC REVIEW
 
 LIBSARV 
 
 ■Rtos 
 Contents 
 
 The Two Manuel Garcias .... i 
 4g Manuel Garcia (father) 
 
 qJ, Manuel Garcia (son) 
 
 Maria and Pauline Garcia .... 15 
 
 Maria Garcia 
 Pauline Garcia 
 
 Catalani and Pasta 31 
 
 Angelica Catalani 
 Giuditta Negri Pasta 
 
 Luigi Lablache 46 
 
 Three Tenors 55 
 
 Giovanni Battista Rubini 
 Adolphe Nourrit 
 Gilbert Duprez 
 
 SONTAG AND LlND 73 
 
 Henriette Sontag 
 Jenny Lind 
 
 i Grisi, Mario and Tamburini ... 94 
 
 v Giulia Grisi 
 
 Mario de Candia 
 ft- Antonio Tamburini 
 
 Some Conclusions in
 
 Z5I)£ X3wo Mlanuel (Barcias 
 
 MANUEL GARCIA (FATHER), 1775-1832 
 MANUEL GARCIA (SON), 1805-1906 
 
 HE name of Garcia is written large 
 in the history of song. From 1808, 
 when the first Manuel Garcia made 
 his debut in Paris, till the death of 
 the second Manuel in 1906, these two men ex- 
 erted directly a potent influence on the art of 
 singing, the former as singer and teacher, the 
 latter as teacher. In addition, Maria Garcia 
 (better known to us under her married name, 
 Malibran) and Pauline Viardot-Garcia, daugh- 
 ters of Manuel, Senior, and sisters of Manuel, 
 Junior, had brilliant operatic careers, and 
 Pauline achieved also success as a teacher. 
 
 It is of great interest to us lovers of sing- 
 ing to recall the lives of these four astonishing 
 Spaniards, and to see how they, in especial 
 the father and the son, transmitted the tenets 
 and traditions of the golden age of Italian bel 
 canto even down to this very day and hour. 
 Indeed, we shall not be far from the literal 
 truth if we call Manuel Garcia, Senior, "the 
 father of modern singing." 
 1
 
 2 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Manuel del Popolo Vicente Rodriguez, only 
 known to us under his stage name of Manuel 
 Garcia, was born in Seville in 1775. He 
 began his career as a singer, at the age of six, 
 as chorister in the Cathedral, and must, even 
 as a child, have shown the remarkable quali- 
 ties of energy and musical talent that distin- 
 guished him in later years, for by the time he 
 was seventeen he was already well known as 
 singer, actor, composer and conductor, and his 
 musical pieces, mostly operettas, were popu- 
 lar all over Spain. 
 
 Opportunities for musical study in Seville 
 must have been extremely meager (there was 
 not one pianoforte in that city in 1775), but 
 young Garcia took advantage of whatever 
 facilities for education he could find, and in 
 1792 made his operatic debut in Cadix. His 
 voice, already a tenor of good quality, prom- 
 ised much better things for the future, but his 
 acting gave slight indication of his future pro- 
 ficiency in this branch of his art. His next 
 engagement was in Madrid, where he made a 
 great hit in an operetta of his own, "El Poeta 
 Calculista," in the course of which he intro- 
 duced, with soul-stirring effect, to the accom- 
 paniment of his own guitar, a popular national 
 song called "A Smuggler am I." 
 
 For a number of years Garcia contented 
 himself with the laurels to be won in his own 
 country, but his ambitions reached far be-
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS 3 
 
 yond the Pyrenees. In the first years of the 
 nineteenth century artistic life in Spain suf- 
 fered grievously by reason of the French in- 
 vasion, while Paris was the most brilliant and, 
 outwardly at least, the most prosperous capi- 
 tal in Europe. In 1808 Garcia signed an en- 
 gagement to sing at the Theatre Italien in 
 Paris. The fact that he had never sung in 
 Italian did not daunt him, and in February of 
 that year he made his entree in the now- 
 forgotten opera of "Griselda," by Paer. His 
 success was immediate. His vivacity and fire 
 carried all before them, distracting attention 
 from his weaknesses as actor and musician and 
 the inequalities of his voice. His inborn ani- 
 mation was infectious and aroused everybody 
 within reach of his dynamic personality. 
 Garat, a famous old French singer, spoke for 
 all Paris when he said, "I love the Andalusian 
 frenzy of the man. He puts life into every- 
 thing about him." 
 
 He stayed two years in Paris and then went 
 to Italy, where, after successful appearances 
 in Turin and Rome, he settled in Naples. 
 Murat, then in supreme power, made him lead- 
 ing tenor in the choir of his private chapel, a 
 position of some importance. Garcia now, for 
 the first time in his life, had the chance to 
 acquire a sound musical training, and went 
 zealously to work to overcome the defects in 
 his early education. He also took up the study
 
 4 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of voice emission under Anzani, a distin- 
 guished tenor, who was an able exponent of 
 the old Italian school of singing, and may 
 possibly have been a pupil in his early youth 
 of the greatest of all teachers, Niccolo Porpora 
 (1686-1766). By great good fortune, young 
 Rossini was in Naples at the same time and 
 was quick to recognize in Garcia the qualities 
 he needed for the proper interpretation of his 
 music. He wrote at once a part for him in his 
 opera "Elisabetta," and a little later the part 
 of Almaviva in "II Barbiere di Siviglia." 
 Garcia's star rose together with Rossini's; 
 Rossini was the new deity among operatic 
 composers, and Garcia was his prophet. 
 
 An anecdote characteristic of Garcia's self- 
 assurance, not to say spirit of bravado, is told 
 in connection with his arrival in Naples. At 
 his first rehearsal there with orchestra, in 
 order to make an instant and vivid impression 
 on the musicians, he began his opening air a 
 half-tone higher than they were playing the 
 accompaniment and held his pitch, without 
 deviation, through to the end. The or- 
 chestra thought at first that he had made 
 a bad entrance, but when they discovered that 
 he had performed successfully a difficult feat 
 of musicianship they gave him a hearty round 
 of applause. 
 
 In 1816 Garcia returned to Paris as first 
 tenor in the troupe of Catalani, one of the
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS 5 
 
 most brilliant of prima donnas. The Parisians 
 remarked at once the great progress he had 
 made as actor and singer since they had last 
 heard him, and straightway rated him as the 
 first tenor of the day. With consistent suc- 
 cess he sang in all the operas of the current 
 repertory, in Mozart and Rossini, as well as 
 in operas that survive now as names only; 
 but Catalani, who was never disposed to share 
 her triumphs with other singers, made his po- 
 sition so intolerable that he finally broke his 
 contract and went to London. 
 
 In London he sang in "II Barbiere" and 
 other operas with Fodor, an excellent French 
 soprano, and was most cordially received; but 
 he soon returned to Paris, where, in 1819, he 
 created a furore by his production of 
 Rossini's charming masterpiece. He spent the 
 greater part of the next five years in Paris, 
 singing, and establishing a school for singing 
 which achieved immediate popularity. In 
 1823 he returned to London for the opera 
 season, and accepted pupils there as he had 
 done in Paris. 
 
 The period between 1820 and 1825 marks 
 the very zenith of Garcia's career. In both 
 Paris and London he was held in the highest 
 honor both as artist and teacher. In four 
 roles he was considered to be without a 
 rival — Almaviva, Tancredi, Otello (Ros- 
 sini) and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni,
 
 6 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 though written for a baritone voice, was one 
 of his greatest impersonations, although it is 
 hard to understand how a tenor voice could 
 possibly encompass music of such low 
 tessitura. In 1825, the fiftieth year of his life, 
 the season in London, in the course of which 
 he produced and sang in two of his own operas, 
 brought him the very large salary (for those 
 days) of £1,250. 
 
 In the autumn of the same year he was 
 able to realize a project that had long been 
 in his mind. Some time in the month of Sep- 
 tember he set sail for New York with a com- 
 pany of singers which included his wife, his 
 son, his daughter Maria and four other sing- 
 ers of no great celebrity. His coming was an 
 epoch-making event in the musical history of 
 our country, for although performances of 
 light opera in English were more or less popu- 
 lar, and New Orleans had for a number of 
 years supported a fairly good French light 
 opera company, the real beginning of opera 
 in the United States was made by Garcia and 
 his troupe. An anonymous newspaper writer 
 of the day hailed Garcia as "Our musical 
 Columbus" ! 
 
 According to European standards, the little 
 band of singers was not a remarkable one — 
 except for Garcia himself and his daughter, 
 there were no great artists among them — but 
 it was quite strong enough to impress favor-
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS 7 
 
 ably the thoroughly inexperienced public of 
 provincial New York. 
 
 The season opened November 29, 1825, at 
 the Park Theatre,* with "II Barbiere di 
 Siviglia." To make the performance even 
 possible required a manager and a musician 
 of extraordinary qualities. Both the chorus 
 and the orchestra had to be selected from local 
 musicians, who knew nothing about Italian 
 opera or the Italian language, and drilled to at 
 least a decent degree of proficiency. But 
 Garcia was equal to the task and carried the 
 memorable evening through without notable 
 mishap and to the manifest pleasure of the 
 public. The elite of New York was there, 
 including James Fenimore Cooper and Fitz- 
 Greene Halleck, the author of "Marco Boz- 
 zaris" ; also Joseph Bonaparte, the ex-King of 
 Spain. The first performance of real opera in 
 New York was voted a great success. 
 
 During the next ten months seventy-nine 
 performances of a dozen operas were given 
 before responsive and encouragingly large au- 
 diences. That the public was considerably 
 puzzled by some of the incongruities and ab- 
 surdities of Italian opera is proved by the 
 newspaper comments of the day; but, on the 
 whole, it was open-minded and quite ready to 
 follow, more or less blindly, the musical taste 
 
 *The Park Theatre stood in Park Row, opposite 
 the site of the present Post-Office.
 
 8 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of Europe until it could develop some intelli- 
 gent taste of its own. Garcia must have 
 thought our ancestors for the most part a 
 horde of benighted barbarians, so far as music 
 was concerned; but he found a few Ameri- 
 cans who had traveled and imbibed a love of 
 art in Europe, and, in addition, a fair-sized 
 colony of Europeans who could discriminate 
 between good and bad in music. Of these 
 latter the most noteworthy was old Lorenzo 
 da Ponte, an Italian poet, who many years be- 
 fore had written the librettos for Mozart's 
 "Cosi fan tutti," "Le Nozze di Figaro" and 
 "Don Giovanni." He and Garcia had never 
 met in Europe, but at their first meeting in 
 New York they embraced enthusiastically and 
 danced about the room, singing at the top of 
 their lungs the "champagne song" from "Don 
 Giovanni." 
 
 The total receipts of the season were about 
 $56,000 — a goodly sum for those days — and 
 Garcia was tempted to prolong his stay in New 
 York, but he finally abandoned the idea, and 
 in the fall of 1826 left for Mexico. He took 
 all his troupe with him, except his daughter, 
 who had married a French merchant named 
 Malibran, whose business was in New York. 
 
 The journey from New York to Mexico 
 City ninety years ago was a long and diffi- 
 cult one, but Garcia accomplished it in the 
 course of a few weeks and arrived in the capi-
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS 9 
 
 tal ready, as he supposed, for business. But, 
 on overhauling his luggage, he found that 
 somehow and somewhere all his music had 
 been lost. The first performance was near at 
 hand and there was no source from which he 
 could replace the missing scores. Most im- 
 presarios would have sat down and torn their 
 hair, but Garcia was made of different stuff — 
 he sat down and did not rise till he had him- 
 self written out from memory all the neces- 
 sary parts for the first opera, "Don Giovanni." 
 Later he repeated the feat with other operas, 
 besides writing and producing several operas 
 of his own and translating all the Italian texts 
 into Spanish. I doubt if even Toscanini could 
 do this and, in addition, sing leading tenor 
 roles ! 
 
 Despite the raging of a political tempest 
 among the Mexicans, the season was a re- 
 munerative one, and at its close Garcia and 
 his colleagues left for Vera Cruz, where they 
 were to embark for Europe, laden with the 
 financial reward for their hard work, but they 
 had not gone far when they were intercepted 
 by brigands and despoiled of everything of 
 value, amounting to some $30,000. 
 
 Garcia finally reached Paris and resumed 
 his career, but his voice was no longer trust- 
 worthy, and after a few performances of some 
 of his most famous parts he gave up the stage 
 altogether and devoted himself to teaching. 
 He died in Paris in 1832.
 
 IO SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Garcia was not a lovable man. His auto- 
 cratic will and his fiery, domineering temper 
 won for him respect, but not affection. Even 
 his children he ruled by fear rather than love, 
 and many are the tales of his relentless treat- 
 ment of them and of those that came in close 
 contact with him. One legend has it that the 
 passers-by often would hear the sound of 
 weeping issuing from Garcia's house. If they 
 inquired the cause, the neighbors would tell 
 them, "Oh, that's nothing. It's only Mr. 
 Garcia teaching his pupils how to sing." 
 
 No singer ever had so full a life as he, or 
 possessed such a combination of talent, energy, 
 resource and will. He was a brilliant rather 
 than a moving singer, and, at a time when 
 ornamentation in singing was highly esteemed, 
 excelled all other singers in the ease and se- 
 curity with which he invented and executed 
 the most difficult ornaments. As a New York 
 critic put it: "He is not at home in the simple 
 melodies of Mozart. He must have a wide 
 field for display; he must have ample room 
 to verge enough for unlimited curvetings and 
 flourishes." 
 
 His musicianship was extraordinarily fine 
 for a singer. In the course of his career, he 
 wrote some forty operas, none of which sur- 
 vived his own day, but which amply attest his 
 musical facility and technical skill in compo- 
 sition.
 
 Copyright 1905, Photographisehe Gesellschaft 
 By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., New York. 
 
 MANUEL GARCIA (SON) 
 
 1805-1906 
 From tin: Sargent Portrait
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS II 
 
 His singing and sound musicianship were 
 greatly reinforced by his unusual skill as an 
 actor. His vivacity and dash in comedy and 
 his fire and intensity in tragedy were irre- 
 sistible. With such a multiplicity of gifts, it 
 is not surprising that he should have been con- 
 sidered the finest tenor of his time. The male 
 soprano had been the predominant operatic 
 figure of the eighteenth century, but when 
 Rossini was writing his early operas he found 
 about him a number of excellent tenors, for 
 whom he wrote his leading parts, and this 
 combination of circumstances resulted in a 
 change of public taste and the speedy and com- 
 plete obliteration from the operatic stage of 
 the male soprano. Garcia, by right of his 
 artistic qualities, was the first of the line of 
 great tenors whose sway has endured undis- 
 puted to the present day. 
 
 Manuel Garcia, the younger, was born in 
 Zafra, Catalonia, in 1805, and died in'London 
 in 1906. As his long life covered practically 
 the entire nineteenth .century, and as he was 
 intimately connected with singing in all its 
 branches from the cradle to the grave, his 
 century-long career is an interesting one, 
 though in no way spectacular. 
 
 From the very first his father was deter- 
 mined to make a singer of him, and gave him 
 indefatigably the benefit of his own great 
 artistry and experience. The boy was with
 
 12 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 his father constantly during the first twenty 
 years of his life, and if anything could have 
 made a great singer of him, this association 
 certainly would have done so ; but Nature had 
 given him neither a remarkable voice nor an 
 aptitude for the stage, although hcwas an ex- 
 cellent musician by instinct, as well as by 
 training. His bent was decidedly for the 
 tranquil life of the teacher and for scientific 
 research. 
 
 He accompanied his father to New York, 
 and sang constantly during that long and 
 arduous season. His voice was a rather high 
 baritone, but, in addition to his own roles, he 
 would often have to sing such heavy parts as 
 Leporello in "Don Giovanni," and also to sub- 
 stitute for his father, a tenor, in time of need. 
 But his distaste for the career was deep- 
 seated, and at the age of twenty-five, after 
 his return to Europe, he abandoned it alto- 
 gether, much to the elder Garcia's disgust, in 
 order to devote himself to the work he so 
 heartily loved and for which he was so well 
 qualified. 
 
 In 1829 he received an appointment to teach 
 singing in the Paris Conservatory. During 
 the ensuing years he made a profound scien- 
 tific study of everything that pertains to the 
 emission of the human voice, the results of 
 which he published in several authoritative 
 treatises. In 1848 he moved to London, which
 
 THE TWO MANUEL GARCIAS 1 3 
 
 he made his home during the remaining fifty- 
 eight years of his life. 
 
 In 1854 he gave to the world his invention, 
 the laryngoscope, which has thrown much 
 light on the vocal processes and has been of in- 
 estimable value in medical practice. At first 
 it was thought that the laryngoscope would 
 have a beneficial effect on the art of singing, 
 but even Garcia himself soon discovered that 
 it was useful to him only in confirming the ac- 
 curacy of certain theories that he, in common 
 with many other good teachers before him, 
 had long held to be true. As a matter of fact, 
 the discovery of the laryngoscope has probably 
 been a detriment to the art of singing, because 
 it was the origin of the school of teaching that 
 believes, erroneously, that the human voice is, 
 after all, only a piece of ingenious mechanism, 
 susceptible of development and control by 
 purely physiological methods. 
 
 Garcia was unquestionably the greatest 
 teacher of the nineteenth century. His sister, 
 Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Jenny Lind, Johanna 
 Wagner (a niece of Richard), Mathilde 
 Marchesi, Stockhausen, Santley, Marie Tem- 
 pest and a host of others scarcely less re- 
 nowned were proud to call him master. As 
 he grew older and taught less assiduously, his 
 famous pupils, Marchesi and Stockhausen, 
 were training according to his methods many 
 of the singers who, like Melba and Eames and
 
 14 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Van Rooy, are great figures in the world 
 of song to-day. 
 
 On his hundredth birthday the sovereigns 
 of Spain, England and Germany sent deco- 
 rations and encomiastic messages to him, and 
 his admirers in London, including many peo- 
 ple great in the medical and the musical 
 worlds, gave him a banquet and presented him 
 with a portrait of himself painted by Sargent. 
 A year later he died. 
 
 Garcia's services to the art of singing were 
 inestimable. Inheriting from his father the 
 methods and principles of the old Italian 
 school of bel canto, he was able to add to them 
 the fruits of his own astonishingly long expe- 
 rience, and to pass them on by word of mouth 
 to the students of the beginning of the twen- 
 tieth century.
 
 3ttaria an6 Jpauline (Barcia 
 
 MARIA (MME. MALIBRAN), 1808-1836 
 PAULINE (MME. VIARDOT), 1821-1910 
 
 || 
 
 HAVE called Manuel Garcia, 
 Senior, "the father of modern 
 singing ;" he was also the progenitor 
 of two daughters, Maria and Paul- 
 ine, who had operatic careers of exceptional 
 brilliancy and wrote their names indelibly in 
 the Golden Book of Singers. From their 
 father they inherited musical and dramatic in- 
 stincts of the highest order; from him, too, 
 they derived a comprehensive and sound 
 musical education, as well as love and rever- 
 ence for their art. All these they possessed in 
 common, but disparity in age, temperament and 
 conditions of life led them into dissimilar 
 paths and accounts for the unlike memories 
 they left behind them. 
 
 Maria was born in Paris in 1808, a few 
 weeks after her father's arrival from Spain. 
 Three years later he took her with him to 
 Naples, and when she was only five years 
 old gave her a child's part to play in Paer's 
 15
 
 l6 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 "Agnese." In this case the child was certainly 
 mother to the woman, for one night, during 
 a performance, the little creature began of her 
 own accord to sing a third part to a duet, much 
 to the surprise and delight of the audience. As 
 a mere infant, she spoke French, Spanish and 
 Italian with complete ease, and a few years 
 later became equally mistress of English and 
 German. (Although purely of Spanish blood, 
 she always considered herself a French 
 woman.) Garcia had her taught the piano 
 and musical theory under the best masters, 
 and by the time she was eleven she could play 
 to him all the piano music of Bach, for which 
 he had a strong liking. 
 
 With all her extraordinary aptitude for 
 learning and a loving and lovable nature, she 
 was hot-tempered, impatient of discipline and 
 indolent. Her father, with characteristic zeal 
 and persistence, undertook to overcome these 
 weaknesses in her make-up, in order to bring 
 her great talents to their fullest possible de- 
 velopment. To subdue and educate so strong- 
 willed a child was an arduous task and produc- 
 tive of much suffering for the child, but 
 Garcia's will was indomitable, and in later 
 years Maria admitted freely that without her 
 father's stern discipline she never could have 
 become famous. 
 
 At the age of fifteen she began her vocal 
 studies under her father, an incomparable
 
 MARIA FELICITA MALIBRAN 
 1808-1836
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 1/ 
 
 master. There was much to do, because her 
 ear had never been accurate and her voice was 
 in some ways defective, but a year later, in 
 1824, Garcia felt that she was ready for a 
 public hearing. Her first appearance before 
 an audience was at a concert given in Paris 
 by a musical club under the direction of the 
 lion of the hour, Garcia's friend, Rossini. She 
 did credit to her father's teaching and was 
 received cordially, but made no profound im- 
 pression on her hearers. 
 
 A few months later she was with her father 
 in London. Owing to the sickness of an im- 
 portant singer at the opera, it was necessary 
 to find at short notice a substitute to sing the 
 part of Rosina in "II Barbiere di Siviglia." 
 This was Maria's opportunity and she seized it. 
 June 7, 1825, she made her operatic debut. Her 
 success was immediate and decidedly encour- 
 aging. Her youthful charm, fresh voice and 
 easy, spontaneous action were most winning, 
 although there were, of course, imperfections 
 in her performance. On the strength of this 
 debut she was straightway engaged for the re- 
 maining six weeks of the season for the goodly 
 sum of £500. Although she was associated 
 with some of the best singers of the day, in- 
 cluding Velluti, the last of the great male 
 sopranos to visit London, she won the approval 
 of the public and began to show signs of the 
 marvelous magnetism which, only two or three
 
 1 8 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 years later, laid musical Europe prostrate at 
 her feet. 
 
 A characteristic tale is told of her first per- 
 formance with Velluti. He, being a singer of 
 the old school, was accustomed to embellish 
 his melodies with such cadenzas and flourishes 
 as seemed good to him, but in rehearsal he 
 contented himself with humming through his 
 part without ornament. Consequently, Maria 
 had no idea what embellishments he planned to 
 use. At the performance, in the course of a 
 duet with her, he introduced a set of brilliant 
 vocal pyrotechnics much to the liking of his 
 hearers. What were their delighted amaze- 
 ment and his disgust when, a moment later, 
 Maria reproduced every flourish and ornament 
 he had employed, throwing in at the end, for 
 good measure, some dazzling skyrockets of her 
 own invention! 
 
 In the fall of 1825 she accompanied her 
 father to New York as leading prima donna of 
 his opera troupe. She was very young and 
 almost without experience, but it was she, 
 rather than he, that carried the musical burden 
 of America's first season of grand opera. 
 Garcia himself, having passed his prime, could 
 no longer count on good service from his voice, 
 and, as the other members of the company 
 had but slight artistic merit, Maria's load was 
 a heavy one. 
 
 New York had never seen a performance of
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 19 
 
 grand opera in the European style, but, de- 
 spite its inexperience, it was prompt to grasp 
 the fact that the young prima donna was a 
 remarkable and fascinating artist. The morn- 
 ing after the first performance the Evening 
 Post said: "Her voice is what is denominated 
 in the Italian a fine contra-alto, and her science 
 and skill in its management are such as to 
 enable her to run over every tone and semi- 
 tone of three octaves with an ease and grace 
 that cost apparently no effort. Her person is 
 about the middle height, slightly embonpoint; 
 her eyes dark, arch and expressive, and a play- 
 ful smile is almost constantly the companion 
 of her lips. She was the magnet who attracted 
 all eyes and won all hearts, ... a cunning 
 pattern of designing nature, equally surprising 
 us by the melody and tones of her voice and 
 by the propriety and grace of her acting." 
 
 Her popularity increased as the season went 
 on. Garcia realized her value as a drawing 
 card and gave her every opportunity to display 
 her qualities. He even wrote an operetta for 
 her, in which she had so much singing to do 
 that after the first two performances she 
 fainted away from fatigue. This drew from 
 one of the newspapers a protest to the man- 
 agement for subjecting a girl of such tender 
 years to so great a strain. 
 
 While Maria was thus basking in the sun of 
 public approbation, her life behind the scenes
 
 20 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 was full of hard work and tempest. With in- 
 creasing years Garcia had become more frac- 
 tious and exacting than ever and was con- 
 stantly quarreling with his high-spirited 
 daughter. "Cannot" was a word never per- 
 mitted in his household ; what he said must 
 be done must be done, no matter how diffi- 
 cult. On one occasion he told Maria to pre- 
 pare a new role within a very few days. When 
 she remonstrated that the time was too short, 
 he replied that if she did not learn it he would 
 kill her. She learned it! Again, after a hot 
 dispute behind the scenes, they were playing 
 the last act of "Otello." Suddenly Maria 
 noticed that the dagger in her father's hands 
 was a real one and that there was a murderous 
 look in his eye. Thoroughly frightened, she 
 fell on her knees before him, pleading hoarsely 
 in Spanish, "For God's sake, father, don't kill 
 me!" But murder was not in Garcia's mind, 
 and the dagger was only a hasty substitution 
 for a mislaid property weapon. 
 
 In March, 1826, Maria married a man of 
 French birth named Malibran, a naturalized 
 American doing business in New York. He 
 was well on in middle age, but reputed wealthy. 
 How the marriage came about is not known. 
 Perhaps Garcia forced it through because of 
 Malibran's apparent wealth ; or, perhaps, 
 Maria thought it the easiest way to free her- 
 self from an irksome paternal tyranny. The
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 21 
 
 marriage was a complete failure, for her hus- 
 band soon showed himself to be an unprinci- 
 pled rascal without either money or honor. 
 When Garcia and his troupe left for Mexico 
 in the fall of 1826, Madame Malibran stayed 
 behind in New York, very likely with the 
 idea that she could help her husband to 
 straighten out his tangled affairs. Occasion- 
 ally she sang solos in Grace Church and also 
 took part in some performances of English 
 operettas at the Bowery Theatre, but after a 
 long winter of domestic disillusion and futile 
 efforts to arrange an endurable life with her 
 husband, she decided to leave him finally and 
 to return to Europe. In the autumn of 1827 
 she arrived in Paris. 
 
 Her life during the nine years remaining to 
 her was an unbroken series of artistic triumphs 
 in Italy, France and England — she never sang 
 in Germany. Her year in America had trans- 
 formed her from a promising debuttante into 
 a full-fledged artist. Her voice had become 
 an organ of sympathetic timbre and extensive 
 range, contralto in quality, but reaching up- 
 wards easily into the soprano tessitura. The 
 middle part of it was inferior in quality to 
 the lower and the upper, but Garcia's excel- 
 lent schooling and Malibran's own instinct and 
 skill enabled her to minimize its weaknesses 
 and emphasize its beauties. 
 
 In person she was rather small, but well-
 
 22 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 proportioned ; charming, rather than beautiful. 
 On the stage she was always most becomingly 
 dressed, quite unlike the typical dowdy Italian 
 prima donna of those days. 
 
 As an actress she carried everything before 
 her. When we read in cold blood about her 
 histrionic methods it seems as if they must 
 have been extravagant and often bordering on 
 bad taste, but such was not the verdict of her 
 contemporaries, who found her acting both 
 sincere and powerful. Behind every note she 
 sang and every gesture she made were an au- 
 dacity, a fire and a passion that stirred the 
 emotions of her hearers to their very depths. 
 She was frankly hungry for applause and 
 would sometimes even stoop to meretricious 
 means in order to win it. Like her father, she 
 never doubted her ability to meet any emer- 
 gency, and her astounding versatility enabled 
 her to accomplish many seemingly impossible 
 tours de force. Only two failures are charged 
 to her account — one the impersonation of the 
 Moor himself in Rossini's "Otello" ; the other 
 an attempt to dance a mazurka on the stage. 
 In her brief career she took part in thirty-five 
 operas, in some of which she was able to sing 
 more than one role. Her mind was so ac- 
 quisitive that she could master a role in a few 
 hours, and her restless temperament was al- 
 ways urging her to add to her repertory. 
 
 In private life she was as bewitching as
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 23 
 
 she was in public. Everybody she met fell 
 instant captive to the charm of her warm, im- 
 pulsive, generous qualities. It is fatiguing 
 merely to read the story of this amazing 
 woman's activities. She was never still; she 
 never rested. Her days were so full that one 
 wonders how she could have lived through 
 even one of them — up at dawn for a long 
 gallop on horseback, rehearsals and social in- 
 tercourse all day long, the opera at night, fol- 
 lowed by suppers and dancing — the sturdy 
 flame that burned so strong in all the Garcias 
 and that brought her brother and her sister to 
 extreme old age, Malibran seemed determined 
 to consume in herself within a few years. 
 
 I shall not attempt to follow her in her 
 many tours — to-day in Paris, to-morrow in 
 London, then back to Paris by way of Brus- 
 sels; a month later a triumphal progress 
 through enraptured Italy; then England 
 again. 
 
 In January, 1828, she made her Parisian 
 rentree in "Semiramide" and finished the sea- 
 son there with ever-increasing success. When 
 her father returned from America she joined 
 forces with him for a few performances of his 
 favorite operas. His star was setting, but for 
 a little while it shone as brightly as ever it 
 had. The night he sang Otello it seemed that 
 all his youthful fire had come back to him. 
 No one was more delighted at this than his
 
 24 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 daughter. At the fall of the curtain on one 
 great scene, Desdemona lay pale and weeping 
 on the stage at the feet of the raging Moor. 
 When, in response to hearty applause, the cur- 
 tain rose a moment later she was seen standing 
 beside him, hand in hand, her face almost as 
 black as his. In the brief preceding instant 
 the happy girl had thrown herself into her 
 father's arms and kissed his sooty face ! 
 
 In 1829 she and the great German soprano, 
 Sontag, had all London at their feet. The 
 following year she met Charles de Beriot, a 
 Belgian violinist of note, with whom she 
 formed a happy and enduring liaison, and who 
 became the father of her two children. With 
 him she made a home for herself in Brussels, 
 to which she always returned in her brief and 
 infrequent holidays. In 1832, at a few hours' 
 notice, she started for Italy with her friend, 
 the mighty Lablache, and made a brilliant tour 
 through the principal Italian cities. The story 
 was always the same. Wherever she appeared 
 her audiences were limited only by the size of 
 the auditorium. Her fees increased by leaps 
 and bounds. In 1835 she received from the 
 London opera £2775 for twenty-four perform- 
 ances — not bad pay even for 1914! 
 
 In 1836 she succeeded in obtaining from the 
 French courts an annulment of her marriage. 
 This was brought about largely through the in- 
 fluence of our old Revolutionary friend,
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 25 
 
 Lafayette, now a very old man. He, like the 
 rest of the world, was the devoted slave of the 
 young prima donna, and used to say laugh- 
 ingly that she was both the latest and the last 
 sweetheart of his long life. As soon as Mali- 
 bran was free she married de Beriot. 
 
 In April, 1836, she was riding in the park 
 in London and had a bad fall from her horse. 
 She made light of her injuries, which in re- 
 ality were serious, and insisted on singing the 
 same night. If she had taken reasonable care 
 of herself it is likely that she would have re- 
 covered completely from the accident, but she 
 had never known how to spare herself and, 
 although in constant pain, continued her stren- 
 uous life without abatement. In the autumn 
 she was engaged to sing at a great festival in 
 Manchester, England. Although in no con- 
 dition to appear at all, she insisted on singing 
 not only what was on the programme, but also 
 all the encores that the greedy public demanded 
 of her. On the third day she collapsed com- 
 pletely and was carried from the stage to her 
 hotel in a dying condition. A few days later, 
 September 23, 1836, she died in the twenty- 
 ninth year of her age. She was buried in Man- 
 chester for a time and then taken to her final 
 resting-place in the cemetery of Laeken in 
 Brussels. 
 
 There was something so feverish, so meteoric 
 about Malibran's career that it is hard to esti-
 
 26 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 mate her real merit as an artist. She flashed 
 across the heavens, dazzling all beholders and 
 leaving them powerless to indicate coherently 
 the path she followed. Her personal mag- 
 netism was so powerful that it rendered dis- 
 passionate criticism of her art all but impos- 
 sible. Musically, she had some creative power, 
 as her improvisations and published songs at- 
 tested, but dramatically, despite her indisput- 
 able histrionic gifts, she created nothing. She 
 left behind her no worthy followers; her ar- 
 tistic influence ended with her brief life. And 
 yet so shrewd and competent a critic as Ros- 
 sini said: "I have met in my life only three 
 singers of real genius — Lablache, Rubini, and 
 that spoiled child of nature, Malibran." 
 
 To turn from the study of Maria Garcia's 
 career to that of her sister is like listening to 
 a symphony by Beethoven after "Tristan and 
 Isolde," or reading Wordsworth after Shelley. 
 
 Pauline Garcia was born in Paris in 1821 
 and came to America with her parents four 
 years later. All her long life she retained a 
 vivid memory of her father in the hands of 
 the Mexican brigands, who, after robbing him 
 of his all, compelled him, at the point of the 
 knife, to sing them a song. She was as pre- 
 cocious intellectually as Maria, but as docile 
 and amenable as her sister was impatient and 
 rebellious ; her father put it, "the one must 
 be bound by a chain ; the other may be led by
 
 PAULINE VIARDOT GARCIA 
 1821-1910
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 2"] 
 
 a silken thread." At an early age she could 
 speak five languages easily, and when she was 
 eight we find her perched on a high stool play- 
 ing accompaniments for her father's singing 
 lessons. Later she became a pupil of Liszt's. 
 She was only eleven when her father died — 
 too young to have had her voice trained by 
 him. She always held that her mother was 
 her teacher, but it is more likely that she her- 
 self and her brother, between them, were re- 
 sponsible for her excellent method of singing. 
 
 In 1838 she made a concert tour in Germany 
 with her brother-in-law, de Beriot, and a year 
 later made her operatic debut in both London 
 and Paris as Desdemona and La Cenerentola. 
 Theophile Gautier promptly hailed her as "a 
 star of the first magnitude." Her girlish 
 charm, despite her plain features, won all 
 hearts at once, and her mezzo-soprano voice 
 of wide compass, though not of strictly beau- 
 tiful texture, had in it an unusual power to stir 
 the emotions. Within a short time this girl 
 of eighteen was singing first roles in the com- 
 pany with Lablache, Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini 
 and Persiani. 
 
 In 1840 she married Louis Viardot, a 
 Frenchman who had made some name for him- 
 self in letters and the dramatic world, and with 
 whom she lived happily for more than forty 
 years. 
 
 A grand tour of the Italian opera houses of
 
 28 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Europe soon made her well and favorably 
 known in Madrid, Vienna, St. Petersburg, 
 Moscow, Edinboro and Dublin, although she 
 never sang publicly in Italy. Everywhere she 
 was accepted as an artist of the highest rank. 
 Meyerbeer's vogue was at its zenith, and 
 Pauline soon became famous for her im- 
 personation of the heroines in "Robert le 
 Diable" and "Les Huguenots." She was, too, 
 the inspiration and creator of the great role of 
 Fides in "Le Prophete," which was first pro- 
 duced in 1849, and with her interpretation of it 
 made a great sensation in the word of opera. 
 This was one of the greatest of her roles, sung 
 by her in all some two hundred times, but per- 
 haps not greater than that of Orphee in Gliick's 
 undying opera, which was revived for her in 
 i860 at the Theatre Lyrique in Paris, and in 
 which she sang more than a hundred times. In 
 1861 Gliick's "Alceste" afforded her another 
 opportunity to display her splendid art. 
 
 She retired from the operatic stage in 1863 
 and lived in Baden till 1871, when she returned 
 to Paris. There she gathered about her many 
 pupils and friends, with whom she passed use- 
 fully and happily the remaining years of her 
 life. She died in 1910, nearly three-quarters 
 of a century after her sister. 
 
 Madame Viardot-Garcia's appeal was always 
 to the cognoscenti rather than to the unthink- 
 ing public. Neither her face nor her tall, lean
 
 MARIA AND PAULINE GARCIA 29 
 
 figure were ingratiating at first sight, and her 
 voice, despite its range and technical facility, 
 always had a somewhat thin, harsh timbre. 
 But the noble artistic nature of the woman, 
 her superb musicianship, her great skill as an 
 actress and the vivid expressiveness of her in- 
 terpretations won the praise of the best mu- 
 sicians in Europe. Liszt wrote of her: "In all 
 that concerns method and execution, feeling 
 and expression, it would be hard to find a name 
 worthy to be mentioned with Malibran's 
 sister. In her, virtuosity serves only as a 
 means of expressing the idea, the thought, the 
 character of a work or a role." 
 
 Schumann, in token of his great admiration, 
 wrote for her the cycle of songs, Opus 24, and 
 Wagner has recorded his approbation of the 
 masterly fashion in which she sang for him at 
 sight a whole act of Isolde. 
 
 She was an exemplary artist in all her roles, 
 but was exceptionally fine in the operas of 
 Gliick and Meyerbeer, and left the operatic 
 world appreciably richer by means of her su- 
 perb interpretation of them. As a teacher of 
 singing, after her retirement from the stage, 
 her influence was not so great, but she was 
 able to pass on worthily to the present genera- 
 tion the great traditions and experience of her 
 family. 
 
 Maria Garcia belonged to the romantic 
 school of singing, poignant, exuberant and per-
 
 30 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sonal, making a quick appeal to the emotions 
 and dependent, in great part, on the moods and 
 impulses of the hour ; the art of Pauline Garcia 
 was of the classic order, impersonal, restrained, 
 striking deep, but not less moving and all the 
 more satisfactory because of its serenity and 
 reposeful power.
 
 Catalan! an6~pasta 
 
 ANGELICA CATALANI (1780-1849) 
 GIUDITTA NEGRI PASTA (1798-1865) 
 
 WO stars of the first magnitude 
 were shining brightly in the musi- 
 cal heavens in the early part of the 
 last century — Angelica Catalani and 
 Giuditta Pasta. Nature had bestowed on 
 Catalani every physical gift that could con- 
 tribute to her success as a singer, and, in ad- 
 dition, a lovable, wholesome disposition, but 
 had neglected to endow her with musical in- 
 stincts or serious artistic ambition. From 
 Pasta, on the contrary, Nature had with- 
 held beauty of voice and person, com- 
 pensating for this lack by a generous endow- 
 ment of lofty artistic ideals, sustained by un- 
 usual intelligence and perseverance. It is 
 both interesting and instructive, in view of this 
 absolute contrast in natural equipment, to 
 study simultaneously the lives of these two 
 women and to reassure ourselves once again 
 that the race is not always to the swift, and 
 that, without a great voice, one can sometimes 
 become a great singer. 
 3i
 
 32 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Angelica Catalani was born in Sinigaglia, 
 Italy, in 1780. Her father was, at the time 
 of her birth, a well-to-do man with social 
 ambitions, and, in order to give her the proper 
 start in life, he sent her early to school at the 
 fashionable convent of Santa Lucia at Gubbio. 
 Music was an important feature in the school 
 curriculum, and the singing of the choir en- 
 joyed considerable celebrity in the neighbor- 
 hood. It was not long before Angelica, with 
 her lovely voice and person, became the cen- 
 tral figure in the choir, and people came from 
 far and near to hear and look at her. 
 Sometimes she would sing a solo so ex- 
 quisitely that the congregation would break 
 into applause, much to the horror of the 
 bishop, who remonstrated solemnly thereat 
 with the mother superior. The good lady 
 hearkened dutifully to his words, and with- 
 drew Angelica to the rear row in the choir, 
 where she was less visible, even if no less 
 audible. 
 
 Everybody advised an operatic career for 
 the gifted girl, but her father was ambitious 
 to marry her brilliantly, and finally renounced 
 these worldly ideas only when business re- 
 verses forced him to yield. At the age of 
 fourteen Angelica was sent to Florence to 
 study singing under Marchesi, a male soprano 
 and teacher of great renown. She was with 
 him for about two years and undoubtedly
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 33 
 
 learned from him much that was worth 
 knowing, but also acquired the florid style 
 that, later, she developed to the point of ab- 
 surdity. In 1795 she made her operatic debut 
 in Venice in an opera by one Nasolini. Her 
 success was immediate with the general public, 
 who went into raptures over her beauty, her 
 noble bearing and her superb voice. The 
 cognoscenti alone took notice that she was no 
 actress and no musician. From Venice she 
 went to other large Italian cities, and every- 
 where w r as welcomed as a rising star of 
 transcendent brilliance. 
 
 As all through her long career she owed 
 all her success to Nature and practically noth- 
 ing to art, her singing must have been nearest 
 perfection in those early days, before too easy 
 triumphs, flattery and fatigue had tarnished 
 the luster of her unequaled gifts. Her voice 
 was powerful, rich and clear, nearly three 
 octaves in compass and extending upwards 
 easily to the G in altissimo. Such flexibility 
 was without precedent — runs, trills, roulades, 
 every vocal flourish, were accomplished with- 
 out apparent effort. Her chromatic scales, 
 both ascending and descending, adorned with 
 incidental crystalline trills, were simply awe- 
 inspiring. No singer before or since has car- 
 ried such a variegated and bewildering 
 box of vocal tricks. Knowing and cool- 
 headed critics observed that a curiously per-
 
 34 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sistent oscillation of the lower jaw in rapid 
 passages detracted from the perfection of her 
 coloratura, but her vocal excellences were so 
 many and so extraordinary that it seemed 
 hypercritical not to accept the voice as a prac- 
 tically perfect instrument. 
 
 In her early days she affected a sentimental 
 style of singing, which, as her voice was 
 neither passionate nor sympathetic in quality, 
 fitted her ill ; but later she was wise enough to 
 abandon her attempts at tenderness and be- 
 came what Nature planned her for — the great- 
 est of all bravura singers. To the end of her 
 days, she never learned to read music, to play 
 any instrument or to sing strictly in time. 
 
 In 1804 she went to Lisbon to sing, and 
 there fell in love with a French military man 
 named Valabregue. He was not in any way 
 a desirable match, but to all expostulation she 
 replied simply, "But what a fine-looking 
 man !" and before long married him. If 
 her husband had possessed some of the 
 worthy ambitions that she lacked, he might 
 have made a great artist of her, after all ; but 
 for art he cared not a fig — his only aim in 
 life was to fill and empty his pockets with all 
 possible celerity. To him his wife's voice was 
 merely a source of income. The result was 
 that, although Catalani remained before the 
 public for nearly a quarter of a century after
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 35 
 
 her marriage, the passage of years added not 
 an inch to her artistic stature. 
 
 In 1806 she gave three concerts at the Paris 
 opera before enraptured audiences. Napoleon 
 himself made her an offer that would keep her 
 in Paris on her own terms, but she took a dis- 
 like to him and stole away to London, never 
 to return to France so long as he was in 
 power. 
 
 She possessed every quality likely to please 
 the British public, including a hatred of 
 Napoleon, and from the very first was treated 
 by them as a goddess descended from Olympus 
 to delight them with her voice. In 1807 her 
 total profits in England were $80,000. For 
 singing "God Save the King" or Rule, Brit- 
 annia," she was sometimes paid as much as 
 $1,000, and for a festival $10,000 — there were 
 no phonographs a century ago to augment 
 these modest emoluments ! Sometimes, after 
 one of Napoleon's victories, His Majesty's 
 Government would engage her to sing patri- 
 otic songs in her best broken English at public 
 meetings, in order to instil new courage into 
 the hearts of the people. 
 
 In February, 1815, after the abdication of 
 Napoleon, she returned to Paris ; and, later, 
 during The Hundred Days, followed the 
 court into exile at Ghent. After Waterloo, 
 she made a triumphal progress through Ger- 
 many, Denmark, Sweden and Belgium. The
 
 36 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ensuing winter Louis XVIII granted her the 
 Theatre Italien in Paris, with a yearly sub- 
 vention of $32,000 and a free hand as 
 manager. 
 
 This arrangement was entirely to Vala- 
 bregue's taste, and he proceeded without delay 
 to squeeze the Parisian public for the bene- 
 fit of his own pocket. He held that his wife 
 and "four or five puppets" constituted a suf- 
 ficiently good opera company, and selected his 
 artists on this basis. He reduced the orches- 
 tra in size and quality, and mounted the 
 operas in most parsimonious fashion. In 
 every way he could devise he sought to gain 
 money with which to gratify his wife's and 
 his extravagant tastes. For a time everything 
 prospered with them and they were able to 
 live like millionaires. (The bill for their 
 servants' beer alone amounted in one year to 
 about $600!) It must be added, in Catalani's 
 favor, that all her life she was ready to sing 
 and to give her own money for charity. 
 
 Catalani's operatic repertory was a meager 
 one, and now was reduced to a number of so- 
 called operas, which were, in reality, nothing 
 but a hodge-podge of songs gathered from 
 all sources for the purpose of displaying her 
 vocal tricks. She paid little or no attention to 
 the action of the piece and wandered on and 
 off the stage at her own sweet will. It is not 
 surprising that such treatment did not wear
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 37 
 
 well with the Parisians and that before long 
 she was singing to empty houses. Within two 
 years the theatre was ruined and Catalani's 
 own fortune seriously impaired. 
 
 To refill her depleted purse, Catalani started 
 on a tour through the countries of Northern 
 Europe, which was destined to last about ten 
 years. Her voice had begun to lose some of 
 its finer attributes, but it was still a splendid 
 organ, and her beauty was as queenly as ever. 
 She sang mostly in concert, occasionally in 
 opera. In 1824 she reappeared in London, 
 where the most loyal of all publics gave her 
 a hearty welcome. She continued her wan- 
 derings, with ever-diminishing returns, till 
 1828, when, in Dublin, she appeared in public 
 for the last time. 
 
 The remaining twenty years of her life she 
 spent at her villa near Florence, active in 
 good works and her family life, a kindly, pious 
 woman. She died in 1849. 
 
 Of Catalani's voice I have said enough — 
 only a marvelous organ could have rendered 
 tolerable a style of singing and an attitude 
 towards a great art so meretricious and fan- 
 tastic. In her small repertory were two of 
 Mozart's operas, "Le Nozze di Figaro" and 
 "La Clemenza di Tito," but they were not 
 favorites with her, because in them she was 
 obliged to sing in time. She much preferred 
 operas, or arrangements of operas, in which 
 
 23-
 
 38 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 she was free to take such liberties with the 
 music as suited her momentary impulse. Al- 
 though a majestic figure in serious opera and 
 a charming one in light parts, she was com- 
 pletely at ease only in concert. 
 
 In both opera and concert she wished al- 
 ways to be "the whole show," and, to achieve 
 this end, did all in her power to prevent good 
 artists, who might win applause for them- 
 selves, from appearing on the same stage with 
 her. 
 
 Her most famous song was an air with 
 elaborate variations called "Son Regina" ("I 
 am Queen"), by Rode. In later life, when 
 her voice had lost something of its flexibility, 
 though not its power, she used to sing an ar- 
 rangement of the bass air in "Le Nozze di 
 Figaro," "Non piu andrai," in which her 
 clarion tones pierced the loudest orchestra with 
 thrilling effect. Another tour de force 
 was the imitation of the swell and fall of a 
 bell, which she would execute with super- 
 human clearness and control of power. Then 
 there was a sort of double falsetto in altissimo, 
 which enthusiasts likened to the highest notes 
 of a nightingale. 
 
 It may already have been surmised that she 
 was not attentive to criticism from any source. 
 Once, in Germany, a musician of standing 
 ventured to speak unfavorably of her musi- 
 cianship. "He is an impious man," she said,
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 39 
 
 "for when God has given to a mortal so ex- 
 traordinary a talent as mine, everybody 
 should honor and applaud it as a miracle. It 
 is profane to depreciate the gifts of Heaven." 
 
 A final pen-picture is worth reproducing. 
 It was written by a journalist contemporary 
 with her: 
 
 "When she begins one of the interminable 
 roulades up the scale, she gradually raises 
 her body, which she had before stooped almost 
 to a level with the ground, until, having won 
 her way with a quivering lip and a chattering 
 chin to the very topmost note, she tosses back 
 her head and all its nodding feathers with an 
 air of triumph; then suddenly falls to a note 
 two octaves and a half lower, with incredible 
 aplomb, and smiles like a victorious amazon 
 over a conquered enemy." 
 
 Just as extraordinary as the beauty of 
 Catalani's voice was Pasta's power as a dra- 
 matic singer. Catalani's life is a record of 
 great gifts unused or squandered ; Pasta's one 
 of mediocrity transformed into excellence. 
 
 Giuditta Negri, known in history as Pasta, 
 by reason of her marriage with an obscure 
 singer of that name, was born of Jewish par- 
 entage in Como; near Milan, in 1798. Little 
 is known about her early life and surround- 
 ings, except that she studied first under the 
 chapel-master in her native town and later in
 
 40 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the Conservatorio in Milan. In 1815 she 
 made her professional debut in Brescia, sing- 
 ing a little later in Parma and Leghorn, with- 
 out arousing any enthusiasm for her voice or 
 art. In 1816 she was in Paris as one of 
 Catalani's "puppets," and in 181 7 in Lon- 
 don with Fodor ; but she made no im- 
 pression in either city and returned to 
 Italy practically as unknown as when she 
 left it. 
 
 The cause of these early failures was not 
 far to seek. Her voice was coarse, inflexible, 
 inclined to huskiness and often off the pitch; 
 her features were commonplace and her figure 
 squat and awkward. It needed some years of 
 severe self-discipline to impart to her 1 person 
 that air which made her, like the diminutive 
 Garrick, seem six feet tall, and to render her 
 voice one of the most expressive and stirring 
 of which we have any record. In the young 
 Jewess was the consciousness of power, the 
 germ of the great artist ; her failures but fur- 
 nished her with the key to her own problems. 
 
 After two years of hard study, in 1819 and 
 1820, she sang in Milan and Rome with suc- 
 cess, and in 182 1 and 1822 reappeared in 
 Paris, where even the most critical now ac- 
 cepted her as the greatest dramatic singer of 
 the day. Her principal roles were in "Otello" 
 (Rossini), "Tancredi" (Rossini), "Romeo e 
 Giulietta" (Zingarelli) (in which she took
 
 GIUDITTA NEGRI PASTA 
 1798-1865
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 41 
 
 the part of Romeo), "Nina" (Paesiello) and 
 "Medea" (Mayer), in all of which she was 
 held to be incomparable. 
 
 The refractory voice was now a soprano 
 of good range, almost docile, almost beauti- 
 ful, wholly convincing and frequently thrill- 
 ing. In an epoch when singers strove to outdo 
 each other in opulence and fantasy of orna- 
 ment, Pasta created a new fashion by the re- 
 straint and chastity of her embellishments. 
 She never improvised. Whatever she did on 
 the stage had been conceived and elaborated 
 in her studio. The labor she had to expend 
 in order to master her music gave to her ren- 
 derings an authority and dignity quite her 
 own, while a fine instinctive sense of rhythm 
 furnished a solid foundation for the loftiest 
 musical superstructure. 
 
 She had no capacity for comedy, but in 
 serious or tragic parts was thoroughly at home 
 and able to stir her audiences profoundly. 
 The majesty of her carriage and the sweep 
 of her gestures were superb. She was the 
 classic artist par excellence. In men's parts 
 she was especially convincing. Talma, the 
 great French actor, once watched her play 
 in "Tancredi" (an operatic setting of Voltaire's 
 tragedy) witih intense interest, and said to her 
 afterward : "You realize my ideal ; you pos- 
 sess the secret I have sought to discover. To 
 touch the heart is the aim of the true artist."
 
 42 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 For six years she alternated between Lon- 
 don and Paris and then returned to Italy. 
 The self-restraint of her style did not alto- 
 gether please the Neapolitans, but in the North 
 she was accepted at her real value and the 
 recipient of every possible honor. Bellini 
 wrote for her "La Sonnambula" (1831) and 
 Norma" (1832), in both of which she 
 achieved memorable successes. Into every 
 part she played she poured her creative power 
 so generously that her impersonations seemed 
 to be real people. Even Amina in "Sonnam- 
 bula," a role quite different from those that 
 had made her famous, was invested by her 
 with a grace and a girlish charm as delight- 
 ful as they were unexpected. 
 
 In 1833 she returned to Paris with an en- 
 larged repertory, including "Anna Bolena" 
 (Anne Boleyn), which Donizetti had written 
 for her. In this new work, with Lablache, a 
 superb Henry VIII, at her side, she won a 
 fresh triumph. 
 
 Since her departure for Italy, six years 
 ago, a new star had swung into the heavens 
 — on the lips of everybody now were the 
 names of Pasta and Malibran. The two 
 prima donnas sang the same serious roles 
 and each had her ardent and argumentative 
 partisans. Malibran had the better voice and 
 made a quicker appeal to the public by means 
 of her fervid talents, but she was the creature
 
 CATALAN I AND PASTA 43 
 
 of impulse, whose most striking effects were 
 often the fruit of sudden inspiration, and, con- 
 sequently, not, in the truest sense, creative. 
 Pasta, in contrast, created, because her in- 
 spiration was guided by premeditation. In- 
 spiration, when, left to itself, is often only a 
 flash in the pan; it needs the discipline of 
 premeditation to make its expression con- 
 sistently true. The singer must never trust 
 to chance for his effects. He should prepare 
 his interpretation line by line, note by note, 
 so that when, before the public, though every 
 external circumstance be against him, his offer- 
 ing shall clearly indicate the intention behind 
 the manifestation. This capacity always to 
 express the intention was Pasta's to an un- 
 usual degree and raised her above all the sing- 
 ers of her time, even above "the spoiled child 
 of Nature," Malibran. 
 
 Unfortunately, Pasta's prime was short — 
 scarcely more than ten years. So early as 
 1833 her voice was often untrue to pitch and 
 had lost something of its expressiveness, al- 
 though as an actress she was greater than 
 ever. Four years later, in London, the voice 
 was a mere wreck. Pasta was not yet forty, 
 and it is probable that the early failure of her 
 voice was due to the severe discipline to which 
 she had always had to subject it in order to 
 keep it obedient. Whatever the cause, the 
 voice had gone, and shortly afterward Pasta
 
 44 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 retired from the stage. A professional visit 
 to St. Petersburg in 1840 was a complete 
 fiasco. 
 
 In 1850 she returned to London for two 
 appearances, at which she essayed scenes from 
 her most famous parts. Many of her old ad- 
 mirers were on hand, and many younger peo- 
 ple, who* had come to hear for themselves the 
 great artist of whom they had heard so much 
 from others. Rachel, the French tragedienne, 
 was there, and Pauline Viardot-Garcia, 
 neither of whom had ever heard her. In the 
 voice itself survived no trace of its former 
 eloquence, but the old spirit and the old 
 artistic intention remained to delight those that 
 could penetrate the outward seeming. Rachel 
 saw only the ruin and was outspoken in her 
 ridicule ; but Manuel Garcia's daughter was 
 quick to separate the apparent from the real. 
 At the conclusion of the programme she 
 turned to her companion and, with tears in 
 her eyes, said : "It is like the Last Supper 
 of Da Vinci — a wreck, but still the greatest 
 picture in the world." 
 
 In 1829 Pasta had bought a villa near Lake 
 Como, which became her permanent home. 
 Here, surrounded by family, friends, pupils 
 and flowers, she lived quietly till her death in 
 1865. 
 
 Few great artists have left behind them as 
 few memories of their private lives as has
 
 CATALANI AND PASTA 45 
 
 Pasta. But, after all, it is the artist, not the 
 woman, that concerns us. We shall search 
 musical history in vain to find among female 
 singers her superior in serious roles. Viardot- 
 Garcia, in equipment and artistic point of 
 view, bears a certain likeness to her, for both 
 women, triumphing over physical disabilities, 
 rose to lofty heights by means of the strength 
 and truth of their artistic natures. 
 
 If Catalani had only had Pasta's artistic na- 
 ture; or if Pasta had only had Catalani's 
 glorious voice and beauty — but how vain it is 
 to hope for perfection in this imperfect 
 world !
 
 Xuigi Cablacfye 
 
 (1794-1858) 
 
 HO was the greatest singer that 
 ever lived?" "Don't you suppose 
 that Caruso is the greatest tenor 
 the world has known?" "Is Mel- 
 ba's voice as lovely as Patti's was?" One fre- 
 quently hears such questions as these, but one 
 never hears a satisfactory answer to them, for 
 the excellent reason that no satisfactory an- 
 swer is possible. Singers, like actors and ora- 
 tors, and unlike painters and sculptors, leave 
 no records of their art behind them. Their 
 song once sung may linger for a while in the 
 memory of their hearers, but it is, after all, 
 only a memory, pretty sure sooner or later to 
 fade into oblivion. The phonograph, wonder- 
 ful machine though it be, can never reproduce 
 anything more than the cruder and more ob- 
 vious qualities of a singer's voice and art, and 
 leaves unrecorded the personal magnetism and 
 the thousand subtleties that are the secret and 
 essence of a great singer's power over his audi- 
 ence. The only knowledge or opinion we can 
 have of a voice that we have never heard is 
 that derived from hearsay, and it has all the 
 vagueness and unreliability that is character- 
 istic of hearsay. 
 
 46
 
 LTJIG1 LABLACHE 
 1794-1858
 
 LUIGI LABLACHE 47 
 
 Nevertheless, it is interesting to rummage in 
 the dusty volumes of musical history and rem- 
 iniscence and to exhume the estimates of old 
 singers as recorded by their contemporaries. 
 Although a singer's fame is fleeting, we find in 
 musical history the names of a score or two of 
 singers who, by means of their voices and 
 their art, made upon their own generation such 
 a profound impression that their fame and tri- 
 umphs have come down to us with a com- 
 pleteness of description that enables us to form 
 for ourselves some sort of understanding of 
 their great qualities. 
 
 Of all the singers of the nineteenth century 
 none has left behind him such a fragrant and 
 delightful memory as has Luigi Lablache. 
 Big in voice, stature, mind and heart, rich in 
 musical and histrionic talent, he was the dom- 
 inating personality whenever and wherever he 
 sang. To hear him was to provide one's self 
 with a never-fading memory of complete musi- 
 cal satisfaction ; to know him personally was 
 to love and to admire him. 
 
 Lablache was born in Naples in 1794, and 
 died in the same city in 1858. His father, 
 a French merchant, had been driven from his 
 home in Marseilles in 1791 by the Revolu- 
 tion ; his mother was Irish. His musical gifts 
 showed themselves early, and as a child he 
 was taught the elements of music, as well as 
 singing, at the Conservatorio della Pieta dei
 
 48 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Turchini in Naples. In addition, he developed 
 considerable skill in the playing of stringed in- 
 struments, and might well have had a suc- 
 cessful career as a violinist or 'cellist, if his 
 voice had not led him into operatic paths. 
 The soundness and thoroughness of his early 
 musical training were of great value to him all 
 through his life. In 1809, when he was fifteen, 
 he sang the contralto solos in the performance 
 of Mozart's Requiem, given in Naples on the 
 death of Haydn. Shortly afterwards his voice 
 broke and within two or three years developed 
 into a truly magnificent bass. 
 
 As a boy, Lablache was full of mischief and 
 good spirits, and but little disposed towards 
 study and hard work. His great passion was 
 for the stage and no less than five times he 
 ran away from the conservatory, in order to 
 take part in operatic performances in small 
 theatres. Each time he was brought back in 
 disgrace, but in 18 12 he was graduated from 
 the conservatory and made his debut in "La 
 Molinara," by Fioravanti, at the San Carlino 
 Theatre in Naples, a small opera house where 
 they gave two performances a day. At this 
 time, too, he married Teresa Pinotti, the 
 daughter of an actor, who, in the course of 
 a long wedlock, not only bore him thirteen 
 children, but also exercised a thoroughly bene- 
 ficial influence on his life. Perceiving the ex- 
 cellence of his natural parts, she awakened
 
 LUIGI LABLACHE 49 
 
 in him a whole-hearted ambition to develop 
 them to their utmost, which within a very 
 short time placed him on the very pinnacle of 
 operatic success, and kept him there until old 
 age. 
 
 Just a hundred years ago, in 1813, he made 
 his real professional debut in Palermo in the 
 now forgotten opera of "Marc Antonio" by 
 Pavesi. It is a delight to pause for an instant 
 at this point and to try to picture to ourselves 
 this radiant youth on the threshold of a career 
 in which every early promise was fully real- 
 ized in the mature artist. At his birth only 
 good fairies had presided; the bad ones all 
 stayed away ! Lablache was very tall and nobly 
 proportioned. His head was large and well- 
 shaped ; his features clean-cut and expressive. 
 His voice, both powerful and flexible, ranged 
 from the E-flat below the bass staff to the 
 E-fiat above. It could be dramatic or tender, 
 majestic or humorous, a trumpet or a 'cello. 
 As a comedian Lablache was inimitable. His 
 laugh alone, full-throated and hearty, was 
 enough to put a theatre in lasting good humor. 
 His comic play, while never descending to buf- 
 foonery, was incomparably laughable. On the 
 other hand, he could play tragic parts with 
 true pathos and Olympian dignity, his superb 
 physique lending itself perfectly to such im- 
 personations. What wonder that, with such a 
 combination of natural gifts and cultivated tal-
 
 50 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ents, his career during the next forty years 
 should have been but one long series of tri- 
 umphs in all the great opera houses in Europe ! 
 
 After several years in Italy he filled his first 
 operatic engagement in Vienna, where, inci- 
 dentally, in 1827 he sang the solo bass part 
 in Mozart's Requiem after the death of 
 Beethoven — the work in which he had sung as 
 a child, eighteen years before, when Haydn 
 died. In 1830 he sang for the first time in 
 both Paris and London. During the next 
 twenty years it was his custom to pass a por- 
 tion of each year in these two cities, visiting 
 between times some of the other important 
 European opera houses. For several seasons 
 he sang in company with Malibran, Pasta, 
 Grisi, Rubini and Tamburini — a quartet of 
 singers never equalled in the interpretation 
 of the music of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. 
 
 Voice, physique, musicianship and histrionic 
 talent seem never to have been blended so hap- 
 ily in any singer as they were in Lablache. If 
 there were weak spots in his equipment I do 
 not know what they were — his contemporaries 
 do not appear to have discovered any. His 
 most famous roles were in "L'Elisir d' 
 Amore," "Don Pasquale," "La Rinegata," "La 
 Cenerentola," "II Matrimonio Segreto," "Se- 
 miramide,""La Gazza Ladra," "Norma," "Anna 
 Bolena," "Zaira," "II Barbiere di Siviglia," 
 "Moise," "I Puritani," and "Don Giovanni."
 
 LUIGI LABLACHE 5 1 
 
 Most of these operas are merely names to us 
 nowadays, but we can easily picture him in 
 the still familiar "Don Pasquale" and "II Bar- 
 bire," as well as in what was one of his most 
 famous impersonations, Leporello in "Don Gi- 
 ovanni." If he had been born forty years 
 later what a Hans Sachs, what a Wotan and 
 what a Falstaff he would have made ! 
 
 Lablache retained his voice practically unim- 
 paired till he was quite sixty years of age, 
 although he grew so corpulent as to become 
 towards the end all but immovable. Indeed, 
 in his later days he used to sit in a capacious 
 chair placed in the center of the stage and sing 
 his music without attempting to rise to his 
 feet. The incongruity of a basso buffo singing 
 his part from a fixed point on the scene must 
 have been striking, but Lablache was a privi- 
 leged person with the public and at liberty 
 to sit or stand, just as he pleased, provided 
 only that he would lend the luster of his voice 
 to the musical performance. His death was 
 mourned universally, and left vacant in the 
 operatic world a place that has never been 
 completely filled. 
 
 The size and sonority of Lablache's voice 
 were its most obvious characteristics, of which 
 many stories are told. Once, it is said, his 
 wife was awakened at night by the sound of 
 what she took to be the notes of the fire- 
 tocsin — it was only her husband uttering in his
 
 52 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 sleep the staccato notes in a duet from "Puri- 
 tani," which he had been singing with Grisi 
 that same night. His upper D was a stu- 
 pendous note, with which, in great dramatic 
 climaxes, he used to split the ears of the 
 groundlings. But he never used the full 
 strength of his voice at inappropriate times ; 
 with unerring taste and skill he always ad- 
 justed its power and quality to the artistic ne- 
 cessities of the situation. 
 
 This trumpet-like D of his used to recall to 
 the veterans the same note in the voice of 
 Cheron, the glory of the Paris Opera towards 
 the end of the eighteenth century. Cheron by 
 merely blowing into a glass goblet could crack 
 it; by singing into it his great D he burst it 
 into a thousand pieces. 
 
 Lablache was famous for his skill in select- 
 ing and wearing costumes and took the great- 
 est pains in regard to all the details of make- 
 up. On the stage he seemed to be a real per- 
 son and never had the unnatural, upholstered 
 look so common to opera singers in costume. 
 Whether in comedy or in tragedy, until his 
 size became excessive, his appearance was al- 
 ways harmonious with the ideal stage picture. 
 
 Although not an educated man in the usual 
 sense, he managed to acquire a great deal of 
 general information which, combined with his 
 innate good sense, geniality, humor and tact, 
 made him a welcome guest in the best society
 
 LUIGI LABLACHE 53 
 
 everywhere. Emperor Alexander II of Rus- 
 sia was most cordial in his relations with him, 
 and Queen Victoria, who at one time studied 
 singing with him, mentions him in her pub- 
 lished diaries with affection and esteem. Until 
 his day it had been the custom in England at 
 musical parties where professional musicians 
 performed to stretch a cord across the draw- 
 ing-room in order to separate the musicians 
 from their hearers of the social world, to 
 segregate, so to speak, the goats from the 
 sheep. One evening, after Lablache had sung, 
 he was talking with somebody on the other side 
 of the cord. Suddenly and unostentatiously he 
 reached down, untied the cord and dropped it 
 quietly on the floor. The tradition was 
 broken once for all. The cord was never 
 stretched again in London. 
 
 Of Lablache's great size and strength there 
 are innumerable stories. One day, in the 
 course of a wearisome rehearsal, he reached 
 lazily into the orchestra, seized a double bass 
 by the neck with one hand, lifted the instru- 
 ment from the ground at arm's length, held it 
 there for a minute or two, and then replaced 
 it gently, all as easily as if he had been playing 
 with a walking-stick. Often, as Leporello, he 
 would tuck the importunate and squirming 
 Masetto, though a full-sized man, under his 
 arm and carry him off the stage without the 
 least apparent effort.
 
 54 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 His sense of humor was delicious. He was 
 once lodging in the same hotel in London with 
 General Tom Thumb. A lady who was 
 anxious to make the midget's acquaintance 
 called one day at the hotel and, by mistake, 
 knocked at Lablache's door, which was opened 
 by the gigantic singer himself. Somewhat 
 startled, the lady said: 
 
 "I should like to see General Tom Thumb, 
 if you please." 
 
 "I am he," answered Lablache in his deepest 
 voice. 
 
 "Oh ! but I thought he was a very small 
 man?" 
 
 "So I am, Madam, when I am on exhibition, 
 but when I am at home I always make myself 
 comfortable." 
 
 Many men and women have been born well 
 equipped for a singer's career, but have been 
 content to win the easy successes that come in 
 youth to such as they and cease when youth 
 ceases. Others, but poorly endowed by nature, 
 have, by means of unsparing, intelligent labor, 
 achieved for themselves honorable niches in 
 the musical Hall of Fame. Lablache is almost 
 unique in that, despite his royal inheritance of 
 talents, he never during his long career relaxed 
 his effort to bring his art to the full flower of 
 perfection, and, in consequence, attained to an 
 artistic excellence that has seldom been 
 equalled in the history of song.
 
 'D^ree Oenors 
 
 GIOVANNI BATTISTA RUBINI (1795-1854) 
 
 ADOLPHE NOURRIT (1802-1839) 
 
 GILBERT DUPREZ (1806-1896) 
 
 ANUEL GARCIA, the elder, was 
 the first of the dynasty of tenors 
 that has ruled the operatic kingdom 
 for the past hundred years. We 
 of this day perceive his importance more 
 clearly than did his contemporaries, many 
 of whom were disposed to criticize cer- 
 tain imperfections in his voice and tempera- 
 ment and to overlook his superlative excellence 
 as an all-round artist. The second of the line 
 was Rubini, who was crowned "King of Ten- 
 ors" by his coevals, and whose name now, 
 seventy years after his retirement from the 
 stage, is still symbolic of a glorious vocal art. 
 At the time that Rubini was playing on the 
 heart-strings of the public through the me- 
 dium of Italian song Adolphe Nourrit, at the 
 Paris Opera, was developing and fixing the 
 standards of a noble art in harmony with the 
 55
 
 56 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 French artistic taste. He was succeeded by 
 Gilbert Duprez, who, after brilliant successes 
 in Italy, returned to his native Paris to carry 
 on the admirable work of Nourrit. These two 
 Frenchmen were in no sense rivals of Rubini, 
 for Rubini had no rivals, and the passing years 
 have dimmed the luster of their once great 
 renown, but they were, both of them, fine 
 artists whose services to vocal art are well 
 worthy of remembrance. 
 
 Giovanni Battista Rubini was born in 
 Romano, near Bergamo, Italy, in 1795. His 
 father, an obscure music teacher, had faith 
 in his son's future from the first and spared no 
 pains to bring to flower a talent that to the rest 
 of the world was at first scarcely perceptible. 
 At the age of eight Giovanni was able to 
 fiddle in an orchestra and sing in a choir. 
 His first singing teacher dismissed him for his 
 lack of promise, but, notwithstanding, the 
 boy, at the age of twelve, was given a girl's 
 part in the theatre at Bergamo. Then he be- 
 came a member of the chorus in the Bergamo 
 Opera and was allowed to fiddle between the 
 acts. On one occasion he substituted for a 
 solo singer and acquitted himself so well that 
 the manager added to his usual stipend the 
 munificent sum of one dollar. 
 
 Encouraged by this modest triumph, 
 Giovanni went to Milan to seek an engage- 
 ment, but was not found worthy of even a
 
 GIOVANNI BATTISTA RUBINI 
 1795-1854
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ $7 
 
 place in the chorus. A concert tour, in com- 
 pany with a violinist, was a complete failure. 
 These rebuffs must have been disheartening to 
 the young man, but he had faith in his own 
 powers and, like Pasta, utilized his early 
 failures as a foundation for a great career. 
 
 Finally, he obtained a small engagement as 
 solo tenor in the opera at Pavia at a monthly 
 salary of ten dollars. From there he passed 
 progressively to Brescia, Venice and Naples. 
 The opera at Naples under Barbaja's able 
 management was one of the most important 
 in Europe. It had been especially rich in 
 tenors, one of whom had recently been Garcia 
 himself, but, nevertheless, young Rubini made 
 a favorable impression on the difficult Neapol- 
 itan public. Even now Barbaja did not per- 
 ceive his potentiality and would only re-en- 
 gage him at a reduced salary. Rubini could 
 have returned to the smaller theatres at in- 
 creased rates, but was shrewd enough to see 
 that the development of his art needed just 
 such surroundings and opportunities for 
 study as Naples offered him. So he accepted 
 Barbaja's terms, promising him the while to 
 get even with him later. 
 
 Barbaja sent him to Rome, where he 
 achieved his first substantial success in Ros- 
 sini's "La Gazza Ladra." Not long afterward 
 Palermo confirmed the verdict of Rome. Little 
 is known about those early days and it was
 
 58 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not till 1825, when Rubini made his debut at 
 the Theatre Italien in Paris, that the Muse 
 of History began to take copious notes on his 
 doings. "La Cenerentola," "La Donna del 
 Lago" ("The Lady of the Lake") and "Otello," 
 all by Rossini, served to present him to the 
 French metropolis. His triumph was imme- 
 diate and undisputed, but Barbaja, to whom 
 he was still under contract, would yield him 
 to the Parisians for six months only and then 
 recalled him to Naples, Milan and Vienna. 
 
 Garcia was the greatest interpreter of Ros- 
 sini's operas and it was in the same repertory 
 that Rubini first made a name for himself, but 
 it was not till Rubini fell in with Bellini that 
 he found the perfect medium for his peculiar 
 gifts. On his return from Paris the two 
 men met for the first time, discovered a strong 
 mutual sympathy and retired together to the 
 country. There Bellini, with Rubini at his 
 side, composed "11 Pirata" ("The Pirate"). In 
 1826 Rossini's florid style was all the vogue, 
 but Bellini, probably prompted by the tenor, 
 incorporated in his opera a number of simple, 
 emotional melodies in the style by which he 
 is now remembered. 
 
 The opera was produced in 1827 with 
 Rubini in the cast and Rossini's star began 
 to set as Bellini's rose above the horizon. 
 The older man was the greater musician, but 
 Bellini's skill as a melodist outweighed with
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 59 
 
 the public his weaknesses as harmonist and 
 dramatist. Rubini's exquisite voice and art 
 in such tuneful music were irresistible and the 
 production of this now obsolete opera marked 
 the beginning of a new school of singing. 
 Within a few years "La Sonnambula," 
 "Norma," "I Puritani," and Donizetti's 
 "Anna Bolena" (written for Pasta and Ru- 
 bini) brought it to its fullest growth. 
 
 In 1 83 1 Rubini was free from his contract 
 with Barbaja and sang in England for the first 
 time. From then till his final retirement, a 
 dozen years later, he divided his time between 
 Paris and England. He was as popular in 
 the English provinces as in London and much 
 in demand for concerts and festivals, as well 
 as for opera. He added to his repertory the 
 Donizetti operas as they appeared and scored 
 characteristic successes in "Lucia," "Lu- 
 crezia Borgia" and "Marino Faliero." 
 
 During these twelve years he was constantly 
 associated with what was probably the most 
 wonderful group of singers ever assembled — 
 Malibran, Grisi, Persiani, Viardot-Garcia, 
 Tamburini and Lablache, not to mention others 
 who in less brilliant company would have been 
 considered remarkable. Perhaps the most 
 perfect cast of all was that of "I Puritani" 
 (1835), Bellini's last opera, written for Grisi, 
 Rubini, Tamburini and Lablache and sung by 
 them over and over again in London and
 
 60 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Paris. Ah, those were the golden days of 
 purely lyric singing! 
 
 In 1843 Rubini sang in London and Paris 
 for the last time. His voice was beginning to 
 show signs of wear, and, with a wisdom too 
 rare among singers, he decided to retire before 
 it should fail him altogether. But many of 
 the large cities of Northern Europe had never 
 heard him and he was persuaded to undertake 
 a concert tour with Liszt, then in his early 
 prime, through Holland and Germany. They 
 parted company in Berlin and Rubini went 
 on to St. Petersburg. At his first concert in 
 the Russian capital he cleared over $10,000. 
 Every honor was heaped on him and Czar 
 Nicholas appointed him not only "Director of 
 Singing," but also a Colonel in the army ! 
 
 The following year, after a tour through 
 Italy and Vienna, he returned to Russia, but 
 the climate did not agree with his voice and 
 he announced his immediate and final retire- 
 ment as a singer. He was a rich man. During 
 his last active years he is said to have derived 
 from his singing an annual income of $40,000, 
 and from these large receipts he had thriftily 
 laid by a capital of something like $600,000. 
 He passed his last years on his estate at 
 Romano, where he died in 1854. 
 
 In all respects but one Rubini was insig- 
 nificant. He was short, rather stout, and 
 awkward ; his features were plain and dis-
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 6l 
 
 figured by small-pox. He had no taste in 
 dress and would wear anything his costumer 
 chose to put on him. He had neither skill nor 
 ambition as an actor and strolled about the 
 stage much as Catalani had done, regardless 
 of his fellow-singers and their doings. His 
 delivery of recitative and dialog was slov- 
 enly, although he took some pains with con- 
 certed pieces. But when it came time for him 
 to sing a substantial solo, this commonplace 
 little man was transformed into an angel of 
 song, Israfel himself. Then, indeed, the whole 
 world held its breath and listened, for none 
 could resist the emotional appeal of his sing- 
 ing. 
 
 Rubini's voice ascended from E of the bass 
 clef to high B in chest quality, and then in a 
 thrilling falsetto to the F or G above. His 
 breath control was so complete that even the 
 observant were often unable to detect when 
 he replenished his lungs. His mastery of the 
 florid school of vocalization, acquired as an 
 interpreter of Rossini, contributed to the per- 
 fection of his delivery of Bellini's melodies. 
 Every resource of technique was at his com- 
 mand. One of his most characteristic effects 
 was a sudden passage from loud to soft, or 
 from soft to loud — an effect that in later years 
 he much overworked. He was the first to use 
 the vibrato for the expression of emotion, 
 and the first, too, to employ the sob that ap-
 
 62 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 peals so irresistibly to the many admirers of 
 Caruso. 
 
 Other tenors have had voices as beautiful 
 as Rubini's and, possibly, technical skill as 
 great as his, but none has equaled him in his 
 ability to move the hearts of his hearers. By 
 means of his voice alone he could crowd into 
 his rendering of a song a whole world of love 
 and pathos. For this reason he was remem- 
 bered not by his roles but by his songs, and 
 was just as effective in concert as in opera. 
 Toward the end of his career his style be- 
 came full of mannerisms and exaggerations, 
 but, despite them all, he never lost his power 
 over the public. His singing spoke to the 
 hearts of both the simple-minded and the 
 sophisticated. He sang his last note seventy 
 years ago, but his power to stir the tender 
 emotions that too often lie dormant in our 
 breasts seems still to live to prove to us what 
 Talma said to Pasta — "The aim of the true 
 artist is to touch the human heart." 
 
 A hundred years ago the art of singing 
 among the French was at a low ebb. The in- 
 stinctive love of the Frenchman for drama had 
 developed a vocal style noisy, exaggerated and 
 quite neglectful of the amenities of bel canto. 
 Fifty years later some of the most perfect 
 performances of opera in all Europe were to 
 be heard at the Paris Opera. This ameliora-
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 63 
 
 tion was due, in large measure, to the art of 
 two French tenors, Adolphe Nourrit and Gil- 
 bert Duprez. 
 
 Nourrit was born in Montpellier, in the 
 south of France, in 1802. His father, Louis 
 Nourrit ( 1780- 1 831), was first tenor at the 
 Paris Opera, a position that he held for a 
 number of years, despite a complete lack of 
 imagination and fervor, because of his excel- 
 lent voice and reliable habits. Through all his 
 operatic career he carried on a business in 
 diamonds and was determined that his son 
 should be a man of affairs and not a singer. 
 The boy was sent early to a reputable school, 
 where his intelligence and love of study made 
 a good record for him ; then, after some train- 
 ing in bookkeeping, he became a clerk in a 
 life insurance office. 
 
 But Adolphe had the artistic temperament, 
 as well as a tenor voice, and, unknown to his 
 father, began the study of music outside of 
 office hours. One day he was practicing in 
 his room at home when Manuel Garcia, who 
 was a friend of Louis Nourrit's, chanced to 
 hear him. Garcia talked with him and was 
 so much impressed by his earnestness that he 
 undertook to persuade the father to allow his 
 son to follow his natural bent. His plea was 
 reluctantly granted and Adolphe became the 
 pupil of Garcia himself. 
 
 The young man made such good prog-
 
 64 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 ress that in 1821, through his father's influ- 
 ence, he made his debut at the Paris Opera in 
 a small role in Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride." 
 He was received cordially by the public, who 
 discovered in him all his father's good qual- 
 ities, plus the artistic instincts that the older 
 man lacked. The physical resemblance be- 
 tween father and son was so exact that in 
 1824 Mehul wrote for them "Les deux Salem," 
 the plot of which turned upon this likeness. 
 The opera was withdrawn shortly, but better 
 opportunities to test Adolphe's mettle soon 
 presented themselves. 
 
 Rossini divined the young tenor's talent and 
 wrote for him a part in his new opera, "Le 
 Siege de Corinthe." With Garcia to coach 
 him, Adolphe was able to make a success in 
 this, his first good role, and when, in 1826, 
 his father, said to be jealous of his son's first 
 triumph, retired permanently from the stage, 
 he was appointed first tenor of the Paris 
 Opera. 
 
 He was only twenty-four years of age, but 
 he made his value felt at once. During the 
 next ten years, in addition to singing in all 
 the standard repertory, he was the creator and 
 often the inspiration of no less than eight 
 great roles. He was the original Arnold in 
 Rossini's "William Tell" (1829), Robert in 
 "Robert le Diable" (Meyerbeer) (1832), 
 Eleazar in "La Juive" (Halevy) (1835), and
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 65 
 
 Raoul in "Les Huguenots" (Meyerbeer) 
 (1836) — all creations of first-rate importance. 
 Only a man of substantial gifts and accom- 
 plishments could have borne such responsibil- 
 ities, but Nourrit's voice, head and heart 
 equipped him well for the task. 
 
 His figure was short and rather too rotund 
 for comeliness, but he carried himself with 
 dignity and grace and dressed with rare taste. 
 His face was sympathetic and expressive. As 
 an actor he was equally skilful in both com- 
 edy and tragedy. His voice was not so full 
 or rich or flexible as the best Italian voices, but 
 it was under admirable control and unusually 
 effective in the head and falsetto registers. His 
 style was energetic, without being vociferous; 
 elegant and resourceful, rather than impas- 
 sioned. Indeed, Nourrit was the embodiment 
 of all that the French still consider most de- 
 sirable in a singer. 
 
 But what made him exceptional in his pro- 
 fession were his intellectual versatility and his 
 attitude toward his art. He was a serious 
 student of literature and philosophy and a 
 capable critic of painting. He had poetic gifts 
 and wrote librettos for ballets danced by 
 Fanny Ellsler and Taglioni. He was an ac- 
 knowledged authority on stagecraft, to whom 
 the composers of the time, especially Meyer- 
 beer, were indebted for much valuable con- 
 structive criticism. He was the first French
 
 66 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 singer to recognize and publish the beauty of 
 Schubert's songs. 
 
 His art was a religion, of which he was a 
 priest, bound to serve it with affection and 
 reverence. He ordered his private life in ac- 
 cordance with this point of view and tried 
 to ennoble the lives of his associates. He was 
 in sympathy with the ideals of the Revolution 
 of 1830 and when the crisis came went about 
 the city singing patriotic songs on the barri- 
 cades and in the theatres. Most singers have 
 been singers and nothing else — Catalani and 
 Rubini, for instance; Nourrit, quite aside 
 from his art, was a useful and brilliant mem- 
 ber of society. 
 
 We have now reached the year 1837. Till 
 then nothing had happened to give warning of 
 the pathetic end of this admirable artist and 
 worthy man. Since 1826 his supremacy at the 
 Paris Opera had been unshared, undisputed ; 
 no rival or serious hostile influence had crossed 
 his path; he had been spared the battle for 
 recognition that most opera singers have to 
 fight. It would have been better for him, 
 probably, if his nerves and will had undergone 
 the toughening influence of strife and hard- 
 ship. He was only thirty-five years old ; his 
 powers gave no sign of deterioration ; he was 
 the idol of the public ; his future seemed full 
 of rich promise. 
 
 But the management of the opera had begun
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 6/ 
 
 to think that an institution as important as 
 theirs had grown to be ought to have more 
 than one tenor of first rank in its employ. 
 Gilbert Duprez, a young Parisian, had been 
 making a name for himself in Italy. One day 
 Nourrit was told that Duprez had been en- 
 gaged to share with him his onerous duties. 
 He made no remonstrance, but his spirit 
 seemed utterly broken. A few nights later, 
 in the midst of a performance, he suffered a 
 nervous collapse when he saw Duprez enter 
 the theatre. The next day he sent in his resig- 
 nation. Every argument was used to dissuade 
 him from this step, but to all expostulation he 
 replied that the mere thought of competition 
 on a stage where for so long he had been free 
 from all rivalry was intolerable. His decision 
 was final and on April i, 1837, he sang in 
 Paris for the last time. An overflowing and 
 enthusiastic public testified heartily to its love 
 and admiration for the retiring artist, with 
 whom it was sincerely grieved to part. 
 
 Nourrit wished to quit the stage altogether, 
 but the love of it was so deep in him that 
 before long he undertook a tour through 
 Belgium and the French provinces. Every- 
 where he was welcomed cordially, but one 
 night, while he was singing in Marseilles, his 
 voice, probably because of a cold, broke. Com- 
 pletely unnerved, he rushed from the stage and 
 in a frenzy tried to kill himself. His friends
 
 68 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 managed to control him, but it was evident that 
 his fine, sensitive mind had become perma- 
 nently unbalanced. 
 
 In 1838 he was sufficiently recovered to go 
 to Naples, where he undertook to alter his 
 method of singing according to the Italian 
 taste. He also wrote the book and Donizetti 
 the music for an opera in which he himself 
 was to sing, but the performance was, for 
 political reasons, prohibited by the censor. He 
 made a few appearances in some of his old 
 roles, and sang as well as ever he had, but 
 he persuaded himself that the public applauded 
 him only to deride him. One night, after sing- 
 ing at a charity concert, he went home and 
 either fell or jumped from the roof of his 
 house. Such was the pitiable end, at the age 
 of thirty-seven, of one of the most versatile 
 and creative of all operatic tenors. 
 
 Gilbert Duprez, the involuntary cause of 
 the passing of Nourrit and his successor at the 
 Paris Opera, was born in Paris in 1806. His 
 father, a perfumer by trade, was a poor man, 
 and it would have been hard for the boy to 
 get an education if he had not early attracted 
 the attention of Choron, a distinguished musi- 
 cal pedagog, who discovered in him evidence 
 of a real musical talent, which he himself 
 undertook to develop. 
 
 Duprez's first attempts to win recognition as
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ 69 
 
 a singer were, like Pasta's and Rubini's, in- 
 effectual. At the age of fourteen he sang in 
 the chorus at a performance of Racine's 
 "Athalie," given at the Theatre Francais. A 
 visit to Italy somewhat later brought him no 
 renown and in 1825 he returned to Paris, 
 where he sang through a season at the 
 Odeon. The public continued apathetic to his 
 efforts, though Choron never lost faith in his 
 pupil. He was equally inconspicuous at the 
 Opera Comique in 1828. About this time, 
 despite his poverty, he took unto himself a 
 wife with a voice and once again crossed the 
 Alps. In Milan the two of them obtained an 
 engagement for four months for the sum of 
 $175 all told. 
 
 But the tide was about to turn. Duprez's 
 voice and dramatic skill were expanding rap- 
 idly and soon enabled him to make a brilliant 
 tour through Italy. For a time he was Mali- 
 bran's leading tenor and in 1835 Donizetti 
 wrote for him the tenor part in "Lucia." Tales 
 of his prowess reached Paris and in April, 
 1837, less than a month after Nourrit's re- 
 tirement, he made his debut at the Opera in 
 "William Tell." 
 
 It is not surprising that he did not win 
 immediate recognition from the Parisians, who 
 were accustomed to the grace and finesse of 
 Nourrit. Duprez's stature was insignificant, 
 his features plain, almost to ugliness. Besides,
 
 70 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the part of Arnold had been written to fit 
 Nourrit's high falsetto and, consequently, was 
 not thoroughly suited to Duprez's more ro- 
 bust organ. But, all the same, there were a 
 spontaneity and a fire in his interpretation that 
 worked in his favor, so that even the most 
 loyal admirers of Nourrit had to admit that 
 the debut was a promising one. 
 
 As time went on and Duprez was heard in 
 other operas, the Parisians came to the conclu- 
 sion that he was a worthy successor to their 
 former favorite. His Italian-trained voice was 
 more virile in quality than Nourrit's and in- 
 cluded in its range a robust high C. Where he 
 lacked in facility he gained in force. Nourrit's 
 style had been polished almost to the point of 
 affectation ; Duprez's had a broader and more 
 convincing sweep. Duprez could never achieve 
 the air of elegance for which Nourrit had been 
 famous, but his dramatic instincts were so 
 true that, as in Pasta's case, his bodily pres- 
 ence seemed to increase in majesty with the 
 crescendo of a dramatic situation. In mat- 
 ters of diction the two men were equal. 
 
 It is worth recording that Henry Chorley, 
 an admirable critic, who heard both singers 
 many times, considered Duprez the most sat- 
 isfactory of all contemporary tenors, not ex- 
 cepting Rubini. 
 
 For ten years Duprez was the dominating 
 singer at the Paris Opera, although his only
 
 RUBINI, NOURRIT AND DUPREZ Jl 
 
 really important creation during that period 
 was in "La Favorite," by Donizetti. His rule 
 was so absolute that Berlioz himself attacked 
 him in print, charging him (and all singers, 
 for that matter) with being unprogressive, 
 even reactionary. But his prime was a short 
 one. He was still young when his voice began 
 to fail him, probably for the same reason that 
 Pasta's had failed her prematurely — a too 
 severe discipline of a naturally refractory 
 organ. Before he was forty-five he retired 
 from the stage. 
 
 He had already had some success as a 
 teacher, and to teaching and the composition 
 of music of no especial value he devoted the 
 remainder of his days. His most famous pupil 
 was Madame Miolan-Carvalho, who later did 
 so much to illuminate and beautify the operas 
 of Gounod. Duprez published two treatises 
 on the voice, which, like most attempts to de- 
 fine the art of singing in words, accomplished 
 but little. He died in Paris in 1896. 
 
 Ruskin tells us that the art of painting 
 reached its perfection in the Raphael Rooms 
 in the Vatican, and that, following the uni- 
 versal law of growth, this attainment of per- 
 fection was the inception of decay. As 
 Raphael was the perfect painter, so Rubini 
 was the perfect singer — in Rubini mere vocal- 
 ism attained its highest possible development.
 
 72 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Rubini had many imitators, but as none of 
 them possessed his genius, the art of singing 
 according to his tradition soon tended to be- 
 come mannered and lifeless. Progress could be 
 made only along new paths. Nourrit and Du- 
 prez, though inferior to Rubini as singers, by 
 means of their versatility, energy and creative 
 power succeeded in establishing a new school 
 of operatic art, of which some of the best 
 features culminated, at the end of the century, 
 in the glorious achievements of Jean De 
 Reszke and Victor Maurel.
 
 Sontag att& Cin6 
 
 HENRIETTE SONTAG (1806-1854) 
 JENNY LIND fl820-1887) 
 
 OST of the world's best singers 
 have come of Latin stock, but a 
 few have belonged to the Germanic 
 race. Of these daughters o^ the 
 North none are more deserving of remem- 
 brance than Henriette Sontag, a German, and 
 Jenny Lind, a Swede, both of whom, after 
 many triumphs in Europe, made extensive 
 tours through the United States. 
 
 Sontag was born in Coblentz, on the Rhine, 
 in 1806. Both of her parents were actors and 
 at the age of six she made her theatrical 
 debut at the Darmstadt Theatre. Her musi- 
 cal talent declared itself early, and at the age 
 of eight the little thing is said to have sung 
 the great air of "The Queen of the Night" 
 for the delectation of her parents' guests. In 
 181 5 her mother, now a widow, took her to 
 Prague, where she came under the notice of 
 Weber, and where, despite the fewness of her 
 years, she was accepted as a student in the 
 73
 
 74 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 conservatory. She made rapid progress, and 
 when in 1821 she was unexpectedly substituted 
 for the prima donna in Boieldieu's "J ean de 
 Paris" she charmed everybody by her lovely 
 voice, her sure musicianship and her girlish 
 grace. 
 
 Shortly afterward her mother took her to 
 Vienna, where she sang for four years in both 
 German and Italian opera. The German 
 method of singing was not more admirable 
 in those days than it is now, but Sontag's 
 voice grew constantly in beauty and her op- 
 eratic style was greatly benefited by her asso- 
 ciation with Fodor, the French prima donna. 
 Weber took an interest in her, and in 1823, 
 though she was still only a slip of a girl, en- 
 trusted her with the soprano role in his new 
 opera "Euryanthe." Beethoven, too, was her 
 devoted admirer, and after the first per- 
 formance of Weber's opera, from which he 
 was absent, his first question was, "How did 
 little Sontag sing?" A year later he selected 
 her to sing the soprano parts in the first per- 
 formances of the Ninth Symphony and the 
 Mass in D. 
 
 By 1825 she had sung in Berlin and Leip- 
 sig, as well as in a number of the smaller 
 German cities, and had been accepted every- 
 where as a singer of exceptional quality. The 
 enthusiastic populace and students of Got- 
 tingen, when she left them, threw her car-
 
 HENRIETTE SONTAG 
 1806-1854
 
 SONTAG AND LIND /5 
 
 riage into the river, declaring that nobody was 
 worthy to occupy it after her. 
 
 Her growing fame had already crossed the 
 Rhine, and the Parisians, though somewhat 
 incredulous as to the possibility of any good 
 singing of German provenance, were anxious 
 to hear her. In 1826 they had a chance to 
 judge her merits for themselves. She made 
 her Parisian debut in the part of Rosina 
 and had not been on the stage five minutes be- 
 fore her audience was completely captivated. 
 
 Her figure was slender and graceful, her 
 features delicate, her eyes large and expres- 
 sive, her hair rather blonde, her smile bewitch- 
 ing, her hands and feet perfection itself. 
 Nature had molded her expressly to play the 
 part of a coquette. Her voice was a lyric 
 soprano of exquisite charm and sweetness, 
 encompassing two flawless octaves and able 
 to execute the most florid passages with 
 delicious facility. In vocal fluency, though 
 not in power, she surpassed even Catalani. 
 When one adds to these qualifications skill 
 as an actress and a musicianship that satis- 
 fied Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Weber and Bee- 
 thoven, it is not surprising that the Parisians 
 approved without reserve the verdict of the 
 Germans. 
 
 In parts requiring suavity, tender sentiment 
 and archness of expression Sontag was ador- 
 able ; as a singer of Mozart's lighter roles she
 
 j6 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 has probably never been equaled. Her phy- 
 sique and temperament precluded complete 
 success in portraying the deeper emotions, al- 
 though, as she matured in style, she added to 
 her repertory commendable impersonations of 
 Desdemona and Donna Anna. 
 
 In 1828 London heard her for the first 
 time and capitulated at once. A few months 
 later she was again in Paris battling with 
 Malibran for the crown of Queen of Song. 
 The Spaniard was all fire and passion, the 
 German mistress of a serene and perfect art. 
 The question of supremacy could of course 
 never be settled, because it was one of kind, 
 not of degree, but the rivalry was none the 
 less intense, even acrimonious, for a time. 
 Finally some tactful person persuaded the two 
 prima donnas, who were performing on the 
 same programme at a private concert in 
 London, to commingle their voices in a duo 
 from "Semiramide." The result of the com- 
 bination was so happy that Spain and Ger- 
 many declared peace on the spot and sealed 
 the treaty with a kiss. This was the first of their 
 many joint appearances in opera and concert. 
 In 1829 Malibran, Sontag and Damoreau, join- 
 ing forces for a benefit performance at the 
 Paris Opera, brought the receipts to the as- 
 tonishing total of $27,000. 
 
 As a captivator of the hearts of men Son- 
 tag was irresistible; Germans, French, Eng-
 
 SONTAG AND LIND JJ 
 
 lish, she enslaved them all. An English diplo- 
 mat in Berlin was known as Lord Montag, 
 because Montag always follows Sontag. In 
 1826 the aged but still susceptible Goethe 
 wrote, "I would gladly sit to-day and all day 
 to hear her. Her talent has more confused 
 than comforted me. The good that passes by 
 without returning leaves behind it a vacuum." 
 
 Offers of matrimony were of almost daily 
 occurrence, but to all her wooers the enchan- 
 tress said a kindly "no." It was thought that 
 her heart was impregnable, but early in 1830 
 her recent secret marriage to Count Rossi, a 
 young Italian diplomat, was announced. Of 
 course she had to give up the stage and, in 
 order that her humble birth might not jeopard 
 her husband's career, the King of Prussia 
 bestowed on her a patent of nobility. After 
 a few farewell performances she retired, ap- 
 parently forever. 
 
 For nearly twenty years the Countess 
 Rossi led the mundane life of a diplomat's 
 wife, accompanying her husband to Holland, 
 Germany and Russia, where he was succes- 
 sively accredited. Her innate gentility enabled 
 her to grace her new position as it had 
 enabled her to grace the stage. Occasionally 
 she sang in public for charity, and it was 
 noticed that her lovely art had in no way 
 deteriorated. Her domestic life was thor- 
 oughly happy and it is probable that Europe
 
 ?8 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 would never have heard her in opera again 
 and that America would never have heard her 
 at all, if it had not been for the revolutionary 
 movement of 1848. 
 
 Jenny Lind's retirement from the operatic 
 stage in 1849 ^ elt a v °id in London that 
 Lumley, the manager of Her Majesty's The- 
 atre, felt should be filled at once. The social 
 disorders of the previous year had played 
 havoc with Count Rossi's finances, so that 
 when Lumley made the countess an offer of 
 $30,000 for a six months' season, she decided 
 to accept it, though it necessitated her hus- 
 band's retirement from diplomacy. 
 
 Great was the interest of the public in the 
 return of the famous singer after so many 
 years of absence, and great was its delight to 
 find that, although the voice had lost a little 
 of its bloom, their former idol was the same 
 exquisite artist as of old. Time had dealt 
 kindly too with her beauty and added only 
 a little plumpness to her girlish figure. 
 
 She made her rentree in "Linda di 
 Chamonix," following it with several operas 
 from her old repertory. All went well and 
 before long she was winning new laurels in 
 "Don Pasquale," "I Puritani" and "La Figlia 
 del Reggimento," all of which had been writ- 
 ten since her retirement twenty years before. 
 After England Paris and Germany welcomed 
 her back into their hearts.
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 79 
 
 In 1852 she was called upon again to follow 
 in the wake of Jenny Lind. The Swedish 
 soprano, after two remunerative years in the 
 United States, sailed homeward from New 
 York, never to return. Some American man- 
 agers, feeling that a singer of Sontag's reputa- 
 tion could make a profitable tour through the 
 territory just covered by Lind, engaged the 
 German prima donna for a long season of 
 concert and opera. 
 
 Sontag landed in New York in September, 
 1852. On the night of her arrival she was 
 given a public serenade, according to the best 
 Barnum-Lind traditions, but the affair lacked 
 the strong guiding hand of Barnum and 
 quickly degenerated into a street riot, some- 
 thing on the order of the second act of 
 "Meistersinger." Sontag was so upset by the 
 uproar and excitement that she took to her 
 bed and had to postpone her first concert for 
 a week or two. 
 
 The attempt to tread in the footsteps of the 
 triumphant Swede might easily have resulted 
 in a disastrous anti-climax; besides, Alboni, 
 whose opulent voice and genial temperament 
 always made a strong popular appeal, arrived 
 in New York about the same time as Sontag. 
 But, despite these adverse circumstances and 
 uncertain health, Sontag was accepted at once 
 by the public at her real value. She made 
 her American debut September 27, 1852, in
 
 80 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Metropolitan Hall, a fine new concert audi- 
 torium, situated on Broadway, opposite Bond 
 Street, which had recently been inaugurated 
 by Lind. Later she appeared in several of 
 her favorite operas at Niblo's Theatre, and 
 although Alboni's simultaneous appearances 
 with another company must have divided a 
 public at best none too numerous, her affairs 
 continued to prosper. 
 
 From New York she made a number of vis- 
 its to- the nearer large cities and then left for the 
 West and South. Conditions of travel in our 
 country were the reverse of luxurious sixty 
 years ago and must have been especially tax- 
 ing to a woman as delicately constituted as 
 Sontag, who for so many years had led a 
 life of ease. But the little woman was de- 
 termined to restore the family fortunes and 
 continued her tour month after month. She 
 was offered an engagement in Mexico that 
 promised to be highly remunerative. She 
 knew there was danger in accepting, because 
 of the widespread prevalence of cholera, but 
 would not listen to the voice of prudence and 
 in the spring of 1854 set sail from New Or- 
 leans with her husband. Her engagement 
 opened auspiciously, but soon after her ar- 
 rival she was struck down by the disease and 
 died in Mexico City on the 17th of June. 
 
 Jenny Lind was born of humble parentage
 
 SONTAG AND LIND OI 
 
 in Stockholm in 1820. She began to sing al- 
 most as soon as she could speak and at nine 
 years of age was admitted to the singing 
 school connected with the Court Theatre. At 
 ten she was singing children's parts in public 
 and at eighteen made her debut as Agathe in 
 "Der Freischutz." Her performance was so 
 good that she soon became a regular member 
 of the company, singing leading roles in such 
 operas as "Euryanthe," "Robert le Diable" 
 and "La Vestale" (Spontini). In all she at- 
 tempted she acquitted herself well and was 
 assured of an honorable career in her native 
 city, but she was ambitious and perceived that, 
 if she was ever to become a great artist, she 
 needed a schooling much more comprehensive 
 than any she could find in Stockholm. She 
 was already a good pianist and thoroughly ac- 
 quainted with all the standard operas, ora- 
 torios and songs, but of the art of bel canto 
 she knew but little. 
 
 So in 1841, after three years as prima 
 donna, she resigned her position and went to 
 Paris to study singing with Manuel Garcia. 
 He told her that her voice had been sorely 
 fatigued, possibly permanently injured, by 
 reason of her ignorance of right methods and 
 would accept her as a pupil only after she 
 had taken several weeks of complete rest. 
 With characteristic energy and intelligence she 
 worked with Garcia for nearly a year, at the
 
 82 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 same time availing herself of the many oppor- 
 tunities of hearing the wonderful singers, 
 both French and Italian, who at just that time 
 abounded in Paris. The results of this year 
 of study were so substantial that Meyerbeer, 
 struck by her talent, arranged an audition for 
 her at the Opera. A number of musical 
 celebrities were there to listen to her, but the 
 manager himself failed to put in an appear- 
 ance and the hearing came to nothing. For 
 this discourtesy Lind bore Paris a grudge till 
 the end of her days and never again, even 
 when she was asked to write her own con- 
 tract, would she consent to sing there. 
 
 She now returned to Stockholm, where dur- 
 ing the next two years she was again a mem- 
 ber of the opera company. Her art was 
 growing rapidly, and when in December, 
 1844, through Meyerbeer's influence, she was 
 given a chance to sing "Norma" in Berlin, 
 she achieved an unqualified success. She 
 followed this up with performances of other 
 roles and then made a tour of some of the 
 principal German cities, including Leipzig, 
 where she made Mendelssohn's acquaintance. 
 
 Her fame by now had penetrated as far as 
 England and caused Bunn, an English im- 
 presario, to make her a tempting offer to sing 
 in London under his management. She ac- 
 cepted his terms and signed the contract. 
 The signature was hardly dry when Lumley,
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 83 
 
 another English manager, persuaded her to 
 sign a contract with him. Whatever the 
 rights of the question, the struggle between 
 Bunn and Lumley for the honor of presenting 
 "the Swedish nightingale" to the British pub- 
 lic, furnished most wonderful advance ad- 
 vertising for the songbird. Such lawsuits, 
 charges and recriminations, such backing and 
 filling, all duly reported in the newspapers, 
 never before or since have covered the pages 
 of musical history. Incidentally, all England 
 became acquainted with every detail of Lind's 
 private and public life, her virtues, her gen- 
 erosity, her voice, her musicianship — nothing 
 was left untold. The curiosity of the public 
 in regard to her grew to white heat. Finally, 
 the courts awarded to Bunn a forfeit of $12,500 
 and on May 4, 1847, under Lumley's manage- 
 ment, Jenny Lind made her London debut at 
 Her Majesty's Theatre as Alice in "Robert le 
 Diable." 
 
 Every inch of space in the auditorium was 
 occupied; every opera enthusiast in London 
 was there burning with expectancy. At first 
 Lind was a little unsteady, but she soon gained 
 confidence and sang her first air in her best 
 style. The last note had not ceased when a 
 mighty "Br aval" emitted from the throat of 
 Lablache himself, who was in a box, gave the 
 signal for a pandemonium of applause. From 
 that moment till the end of her life Jenny
 
 84 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Lind was the idol of the English public, its 
 incomparable singer, its standard of all 
 womanly virtues. In opera or concert the 
 story was always the same; the fever of ap- 
 probation never cooled. Those that could not 
 afford to enter the theatre stood for hours by 
 the stage door just to see her pass. Royalty 
 petted her, the populace adored her. 
 
 Her operatic career in London covered just 
 two years, during which she appeared in many 
 parts. Early in 1849, although she was not 
 yet thirty and the future seemed to promise 
 her a long vista of triumphs, she announced 
 her approaching retirement from the operatic 
 stage. Her last appearance on any operatic 
 stage took place May 10, 1849, in "Robert le 
 Diable." 
 
 The reasons for her early retirement from 
 opera have been much discussed, but never 
 clearly established. They are probably to be 
 found in certain temperamental peculiarities 
 which I shall touch upon presently. 
 
 Jenny Lind's voice was a soprano of wide 
 compass, a little husky and sometimes untune- 
 ful in the lower part, but increasing in power 
 and beauty as it ascended. Her breath-control 
 was exemplary. Her own intelligence and 
 industry, supplemented by the excellent in- 
 struction received from Garcia, made her so 
 completely mistress of her voice that even the 
 most difficult technical feats seemed well
 
 JENNY T.IXD 
 1820-1887
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 85 
 
 within her powers. Her musicianship was 
 above criticism, her artistic ideals of the 
 highest. 
 
 Her appearance was in no way striking. 
 Her eyes were, perhaps, her best feature and 
 imparted, especially when she was singing, a 
 pleasing expression to her plain features. 
 
 In physical gifts she was, therefore, not 
 above the level of a number of other female 
 singers, but in temperament she differed so 
 widely from all as to place her in a class 
 apart. Compared with such singers as Pasta 
 and Malibran her singing might be called cold, 
 but through this same coolness of style there 
 seemed to pierce a mystic flame that was 
 quite as emotional in its effect on her audi- 
 ences as the most glowing Latin fervor. 
 There was in her something of the moral in- 
 tensity that one discovers in the writings of 
 her compatriot Swedenborg. Like Nourrit, 
 she felt herself to be a priestess in the ser- 
 vice of her art and spared no pains to make 
 her service perfect. This determination to 
 give out only her best resulted often in ap- 
 parent self-consciousness and over-emphasis. 
 Further, she was always so intensely herself 
 that she had no capacity to enter into an op- 
 eratic part of which the general character was 
 not in harmony with her own nature. With 
 her keenness at self -analysis she must have 
 recognized this deficiency and have been
 
 86 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 anxious to abandon dramatic singing before 
 the public should perceive for themselves her 
 unfitness for it. Whatever the real cause of 
 her retirement — and I offer here one that is, 
 perhaps, not much more plausible than a 
 number of others — Jenny Lind after 1849 
 was heard in concert only. 
 
 The next chapter in the life of our prima 
 donna brings her to our own shores for the 
 most sensational and triumphal concert tour 
 ever made by anybody. Enter Phineas T. 
 Barnum, the world's greatest showman, past 
 or present. (The entrance of Barnum neces- 
 sitates the free use of superlatives!) He was 
 now in the prime of life, keen-witted, re- 
 sourceful and ambitious. He had already 
 made a tidy sum exhibiting Heth Joyce, a 161- 
 year-old ( ?) negress, who swore she had 
 been the mammy of George Washington him- 
 self, and a small fortune out of General Tom 
 Thumb. Now, looking about him for new 
 wonders to show, he bethought him of Jenny 
 Lind, whom he had never heard, but whose 
 renown had reached even his unmusical ears. 
 He also had heard of the purity of her pri- 
 vate life, of her piety and of the extraordinary 
 generosity with which she had always shared 
 her prosperity with her less fortunate fellow- 
 creatures. Barnum himself says that had it 
 not been for her virtues, especially her gen- 
 erosity, he never would have brought her to
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 87 
 
 America, and that his experience as a show- 
 man persuaded him that her voice and virtues 
 in combination would prove a gold mine for 
 all concerned. And he was right. 
 
 The contract was signed in England early in 
 1850. It called for a maximum of 150 con- 
 certs and guaranteed to the singer $1,000 a 
 concert, plus one-half the receipts in excess 
 of $5,500. To the singer was granted the 
 right to sing for charity, when she wished. 
 Barnum undertook to provide a musical con- 
 ductor, Julius Benedict, a baritone singer, 
 Belletti, both selected by Lind, and such other 
 musicians as should be required on tour. All 
 the expenses of advertising, travel, etc., were 
 assumed by Barnum. 
 
 In 1850 the great American public knew 
 little about musical doings in Europe and six 
 months before the arrival of Jenny Lind even 
 her name was almost unknown. But Barnum 
 had learned how to reach the public through 
 the newspapers and at once inaugurated a 
 campaign of education that soon familiarized 
 the entire country not only with the Swedish 
 singer's name, but also with every detail of 
 her life from her birth to the present moment, 
 her musical gifts and her love of giving. 
 
 When she arrived in New York early in 
 September, 1850, she was certainly the best 
 advertised woman in America and every- 
 body was on the qui vive to see and hear her.
 
 88 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Crowds were at the dock to meet her, although 
 it was already night. Banners of welcome 
 were displayed everywhere, and when she 
 finally reached her hotel about midnight she 
 was greeted by a band of 130 pieces, preceded 
 by 700 firemen — everything prearranged by 
 the ingenious impresario. Publicity continued 
 to be the watchword day and night. Every- 
 where that Jenny went the crowds and the re- 
 porters were sure to go. It is surprising that 
 she did not resent this constant intrusion 
 on her privacy, but, so far as we can judge, 
 she seems to have adapted herself easily and 
 without apparent annoyance to her circum- 
 stances. 
 
 Her first concert took place September 11, 
 1850, in Castle Garden (now the Aquarium). 
 The best seats cost nominally three dollars, 
 though the right of choice was sold at auc- 
 tion. The first seat had gone to one Genin, 
 a hatter, who paid a premium of $225, which 
 soon came back into his pocket through the 
 sale of hundreds of "J enn y Lind" hats. When 
 the overture began there were said to be 7,000 
 people in the house. There was an excellent 
 orchestra of sixty under the leadership of 
 Benedict; also Belletti, the baritone, and 
 Richard Hofmann, a young English pianist, 
 who afterward settled in New York as a 
 teacher of piano and died there only a few 
 years ago.
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 89 
 
 But the audience had ears only for Jenny 
 Lind. Her share of the programme consisted 
 of "Casta Diva," a duet with baritone, a trio 
 by Meyerbeer for two flutes and voice, an 
 echo song (in which she performed some as- 
 tonishing vocal feats bordering on ventrilo- 
 quism) and some Swedish melodies. She 
 sang also a "greeting to America," the words 
 of which had been written by Bayard Taylor 
 in competition for a prize of two hundred 
 dollars offered by Barnum and set to music 
 by Benedict. The audience applauded rap- 
 turously everything the singer did and also 
 called out the seemingly reluctant Barnum, 
 who announced that the prima donna had de- 
 termined to divide her share of the evening's 
 profits, $10,000, among a number of local 
 charities. The total receipts came to $26,000. 
 
 New York was now more than ever "Jenny 
 Lind" mad. During the next few months she 
 gave no less than thirty-five concerts in the 
 city. She also made a long tour that carried 
 her to all the large cities east of the Missis- 
 sippi and even to Havana. Her reception was 
 the same everywhere, except in Havana, where 
 the taste was all for Italian opera. Richmond, 
 Virginia, with only a few thousand inhabitants, 
 gave her a $13,000 house. Everywhere she 
 went she gave away liberal sums in charity. 
 In nine months she appeared in ninety-three 
 concerts, the total receipts of which were, ac-
 
 90 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 cording to Barnum, $700,000, of which her 
 net share was $175,000. The gross balance 
 went to Barnum. 
 
 In June, 185 1, Lind decided, for reasons 
 not altogether clear, to leave Barnum's man- 
 agement and, in accordance with a clause in 
 her contract, obtained her release from him 
 on payment of a forfeit of $30,000. She was 
 now her own manager and continued her 
 touring for another year with unabated suc- 
 cess. 
 
 It is a pity that no competent writer ever 
 undertook to describe the many interesting 
 and amusing adventures of these two wander- 
 years. The few sketches that have come down 
 to us make us long for something more de- 
 tailed and complete. Benedict, for instance, 
 used to tell how in remote parts of the coun- 
 try the troupe would follow a water-course 
 by steamer. When they came to a town of 
 sufficient size, they would disembark and send 
 through the streets men bearing banners an- 
 nouncing the arrival of the world-famous 
 Jenny Lind, who would within a few hours 
 give a concert in the principal hall of the 
 place. There would be an auction sale of 
 tickets, the musicians would arrive at the hall, 
 bringing the pianoforte with them. The con- 
 cert would be given and an hour afterward 
 all hands would be sailing down stream again 
 bound for the next port.
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 91 
 
 In 1852 she was married in Boston to Otto 
 Goldschmidt, the successor to Benedict in her 
 concert company. She was a Protestant, and 
 he a Jew, as were many of her most helpful 
 friends, including Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, 
 Moscheles, Lumley and Benedict. The mar- 
 riage was a happy one. 
 
 In 1852 she returned to Europe, where, it 
 is said, she distributed all the profits of her 
 American tour in charity. From 1852 to 
 1855 she lived in Dresden and then removed 
 to England, where she made her permanent 
 home. She continued to sing in concert, but 
 her appearances became gradually less fre- 
 quent and ceased altogether in 1883. Sur- 
 rounded by her growing family, she lived a 
 full and happy life, devoted to the good of 
 others and to the art she had served so nobly. 
 She died at Malvern, England, in 1887. 
 
 To make a just estimate of Jenny Lind's 
 worth as a singer is difficult. Though the 
 most described of all the great prima donnas, 
 her exalted reputation is the hardest to ex- 
 plain. In voice and in dramatic talent she 
 was certainly inferior to her contemporaries 
 Sontag and Grisi ; she was supreme only as a 
 concert performer. Cool, expert criticism was 
 never applied to her by the general public. 
 Her early successes in Sweden and Germany 
 mean little, because of the low standards of 
 singing in those countries. England and
 
 92 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 America never heard her till their critical 
 faculties had been numbed by the blast of 
 advance advertising that, in both cases, pre- 
 ceded her coming. The Parisian public, the 
 most knowing and sophisticated of all, never 
 heard her sing a note. She was only thirty- 
 five when she ceased to sing regularly and 
 resolved herself into a glorious tradition above 
 the reach of adverse criticism; after that her 
 infrequent appearances took place only before 
 the English, the most unquestioningly loyal of 
 all publics. 
 
 And yet the praise she won from such musi- 
 cians as Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Robert and Clara 
 Schumann, and Mendelssohn warns us that it 
 is not safe to apply to her the word "over- 
 rated." Mendelssohn wrote the soprano part 
 in "Elijah" for her and said, "In my whole 
 life I have not seen an artistic nature so 
 noble, so genuine, so true; natural gifts, study 
 and depth of feeling I have never seen united 
 in the same degree." This is certainly high 
 praise from a high source. Our own Theo- 
 dore Thomas, too, always maintained that of 
 all the great singers that sang in America 
 during his long lifetime, and he heard them 
 all, Sontag and Lind were certainly the great- 
 est. 
 
 Sontag won her victories by obvious means 
 — a lovely voice and person, combined with 
 a highly developed, exquisite art. Jenny Lind,
 
 SONTAG AND LIND 93 
 
 on the contrary, gained hers by means so little 
 obvious that we, who never heard her, cannot 
 quite account for the tremendous impression 
 she made on her own generation. The 
 careers of the other great prima donnas 
 can be explained and classified ; Jenny Lind's 
 puzzles the imagination and assigns to "the 
 Swedish nightingale" a unique place in the 
 Golden Book of Singers.
 
 (Brisi, Mlario anb 
 ^amburini 
 
 GIULIA GRISI (1811-1869) 
 
 MARIO DE CANDIA (1810-1883) 
 
 ANTONIO TAMBURINI (1800-1876) 
 
 N THE previous chapters I have 
 tried to revive the careers of some 
 of the stars in the great constella- 
 tion of singers that made the first 
 half of the nineteenth century especially 
 memorable in operatic history. All of these 
 artists, except Nourrit and, possibly, Pauline 
 Garcia, owed their fame in greater part to 
 their interpretations of the operas of Rossini, 
 Bellini and Donizetti. Rossini, whose first im- 
 portant opera, "Tancredi" (1813), marks the 
 passing of the old-style Italian opera and the 
 inception of the modern, produced his last 
 opera, "Guillaume Tell," in 1829; Bellini's 
 last, "I Puritani," was first given in 1835; 
 the last of Donizetti's sixty-three operas had 
 its first performance in 1844. The first of 
 these dates, 1813, is coincident with that of 
 Garcia's first meeting with Rossini ; the last, 
 1844, marks also the final retirement of 
 Rubini. 
 
 94
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI 95 
 
 For reasons that cannot be gone into here, 
 the popularity of the operas of this school 
 began to wane almost as soon as the singers 
 for whom they had been written retired from 
 active service. Most of them are now quite 
 dead and forgotten. Of Bellini's, not one sur- 
 vives ; of Donizetti's, "Lucia," "Don Pas- 
 quale," "La Favorita" and, perhaps, one or 
 two others are occasionally resuscitated for 
 a few performances, and found increasingly 
 old-fashioned and decrepit; of the whole 
 school there is only one, Rossini's "Barbiere" 
 (1816), whose still youthful vigor seems to 
 promise immortality. 
 
 In 1854, when Grisi and Mario visited the 
 United States, they were practically the only 
 survivors of the famous "Old Guard," which 
 for more than twenty years had been the de- 
 light of Western Europe. Through death or 
 voluntary retirement, Catalani, Pasta, Mali- 
 bran, Sontag, Garcia, Rubini, Nourrit and 
 Duprez were completely silent; Lablache and 
 Tamburini, although occasionally to be heard, 
 were all but superannuated; Jenny Lind had 
 left the operatic stage for good and all, in 
 order to devote herself to concert singing; 
 Pauline Garcia was focussing all her talents 
 on the interpretation of Meyerbeer and Gliick. 
 
 So it is fitting that we should bring this se- 
 ries of biographical sketches to a close with 
 brief studies of the careers of Grisi and
 
 96 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Mario, adding thereto a few paragraphs on 
 Tamburini, their colleague, who, after La- 
 blache, was the greatest bass of the period. 
 
 Giulia Grisi was born in Milan in 181 1. 
 Her father was a military engineer, who had 
 served under the great Napoleon. Her 
 mother had, in all probability, been a singer 
 before her marriage, and her mother's sister, 
 Josefina Grassini ( 1 773-1850), was one of the 
 best singers of her day. Giulia's older sister, 
 Guiditta, too, was a singer of some repute; 
 her cousin Carlotta a celebrated dancer. With 
 such a professional atmosphere about her, it is 
 not surprising that she, with an excellent 
 natural voice and dramatic instincts, should 
 have heard and accepted the call of the stage. 
 
 She studied under various masters, includ- 
 ing her sister, and at the age of seventeen 
 made her debut in Rossini's "Zelmira." De- 
 spite her youth and inexperience, her voice, 
 beauty and innate aptitude for the career won 
 for her the applause, not only of the public, 
 but also of Rossini himself, who predicted for 
 her a brilliant future. Bellini, too, was so fa- 
 vorably impressed by her performance that he 
 wrote for her the part of Adalgisa in 
 "Norma," which she had the honor of singing 
 in the company with Pasta, the first Norma. 
 
 Grisi's success brought her engagements in 
 other cities, and all Italy was soon open to her,
 
 GIULIA GRISI 
 1811-1869
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI 97 
 
 but at this point she took a step which, seem- 
 ingly rash, proved in the event to be most 
 beneficial to her career. Before she could 
 realize that wealth and fame were already 
 within her reach, she had signed with a per- 
 spicacious manager a contract for several 
 years, on terms sufficiently liberal to satisfy 
 an untried debutante, but quite dispropor- 
 tionate to the important position that she 
 soon began to occupy in the operatic world. 
 She tried to release herself from this contract, 
 and when the manager undertook to hold her 
 to the letter of her bond, escaped across the 
 frontier and posted to Paris. Never again 
 did she sing in Italy. 
 
 Her aunt Grassini and her sister Giuditta 
 were in the French capital just then, and, what 
 was even more fortunate, Rossini, who gave 
 her at once the chance to sing the title role 
 in "Semiramide" at the Theatre des Italiens. 
 The debut was completely successful, and 
 from that year, 1832, till 1849, without a break, 
 Grisi sang every winter in the same theatre. 
 
 London heard her first in 1834 in "La 
 Gazza Ladra," and found her to its liking; a 
 little later, when she sang Anna Bolena, one 
 of Pasta's best parts, it proclaimed her a dra- 
 matic singer of the first order. From 1834 
 till 1861, excepting only 1842, she was en- 
 gaged every season as a member of the Royal 
 Italian Opera.
 
 98 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In 1835 Grisi was one of the famous quar- 
 tet for whom Bellini had written "I Puritani," 
 and showed herself worthy to be associated 
 with her celebrated colleagues. In the follow- 
 ing year she married a Frenchman, from 
 whom she was divorced after a brief and un- 
 happy union. 
 
 Grisi's voice was a clear, sonorous soprano, 
 homogeneous throughout and under excellent 
 control. It was somewhat lacking in sym- 
 pathy, but splendidly effective in dramatic 
 scenes. Her musical taste was good and en- 
 tirely free from trickery and affectation. She 
 was a resourceful and spirited actress in both 
 comedy and tragedy, but unquestionably at her 
 best in such dramatic parts as Norma and 
 Lucrezia Borgia. It was said that she owed 
 much to her early association with Pasta, of 
 whose art she was a reverent admirer. She 
 was short in stature, but was well propor- 
 tioned and carried her handsome head so nobly 
 on her shoulders that she gave the impression 
 of being much taller than she really was. 
 Taken all in all, she was richly equipped for 
 her long and resplendent career. Heinrich 
 Heine, who heard her in Paris in 1840, called 
 her "a rose among nightingales, a nightingale 
 among roses." 
 
 Grisi and Mario first met in London in 
 1839 as members of the Italian Opera, 
 and each recognized at once in the other a
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI 99 
 
 twin soul. Marriage followed soon after and 
 the affinity proved to be a thoroughly happy 
 one. As their professional association was 
 constant during the next thirty years, and the 
 story of one now becomes the story of the 
 other, it seems best at this point to narrate 
 the principal events of Mario's previous life. 
 
 We do not know with certainty either 
 Mario's full name or the exact time and place 
 of his birth. This uncertainty is all the more 
 curious because he was of noble family. Some 
 authorities hold that his name was Giovanni 
 and that the name of Mario, under which he al- 
 ways sang, was wholly assumed; others aver 
 that Mario was really his name and that when 
 he went on the stage he merely dropped his 
 patronymic, de Candia. Whatever his exact 
 name, he will always be remembered under 
 that of Mario, without title or surname. He 
 was born somewhere in Piedmont, probably 
 in Turin, in or about 1810.* 
 
 His father was a general in the army of 
 Piedmont and Mario, too, after an educa- 
 tion suitable to his high social position, en- 
 tered the army. In 1836, piqued by his pun- 
 ishment for an escapade of no great serious- 
 ness, he resigned from his regiment, and, when 
 the authorities refused to accept his resigna- 
 tion, hied him boldly to Paris. There his good 
 
 •Mario's daughter fixes these points as follows: Giovanni 
 Matteo de Candia, born October i8, 1810, in Cagliari, Sardinia.
 
 IOO SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 breeding, his beauty and his great personal 
 charm opened for him every door. To com- 
 plete his equipment as a captivator of hearts 
 he possessed a tenor voice, untrained, but of 
 exquisite suavity and mellowness. 
 
 His qualifications for the lyric stage were 
 so many and so obvious that on all sides he 
 was urged to appear in opera. All his fam- 
 ily traditions were against such a step, and for 
 two years he withstood the blandishments and 
 offers of the managers, but finally gave his 
 consent, and in 1838 made his debut in "Robert 
 le Diable" at the Paris Opera, singing in 
 French. He had had no systematic training 
 in music or singing, his acting was amateurish 
 and the French language somewhat impeded 
 his utterance, but his radiant person and his 
 lovely voice more than counterbalanced his 
 shortcomings. In 1839 he made his London 
 debut with Grisi in "Lucrezia Borgia" (in 
 Italian), and the following year joined the 
 Italian company in Paris. 
 
 At the age of thirty Mario could have 
 played the part of Orpheus to perfection. He 
 was of medium height, graceful in line and 
 carriage. His features were clean-cut and 
 noble, his hair and beard glossy black. His 
 eyes were large and dark, full of fire and 
 passion. His voice was a ringing tenor, even 
 in quality throughout, and including in its com- 
 pass the high C. It was equally eloquent in
 
 MARIO DB CANDIA 
 1810-1S83
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI IOI 
 
 the expression of both the fire and the passion 
 that shone in his eyes. One French critic re- 
 cords that the emission of the upper notes was 
 not quite free, but, with this possible excep- 
 tion, the voice must have nearly approached 
 perfection. 
 
 Happily, Mario was as conscientious and 
 ambitious as he was gifted, so that, despite his 
 lack of early training, the record of his career 
 is one of constant artistic growth. His asso- 
 ciation with Grisi was most influential in this 
 development, for she was born into the tra- 
 ditions of the stage, and, besides, was as ambi- 
 tious for him as he was for himself. 
 
 As an actor he never attained the skill and 
 versatility of such innate histrions as the 
 Garcias and Lablache, but his elegance of bear- 
 ing and a taste for costume equalled by that 
 of Lablache alone made his stage presence 
 always a delight to the eye. No other tenor, 
 not even Nourrit, was so successful as he in 
 playing the high-born gentleman — it was in- 
 stinct with him, both off and on the 
 stage. 
 
 He was matchless, too, as a stage lover and 
 as a drawing-room singer. His personality 
 and voice were profoundly disquieting to the 
 peace of mind of unattached ladies. It is re- 
 lated that once he was singing in a salon in 
 Paris. The last line of his song was, "Come, 
 love, with me into the woods." As he uttered
 
 102 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the final syllables a young woman, who had 
 been listening in a state of semi-hypnosis, rose 
 to her feet and tottered toward him, murmur- 
 ing, "I am coming." 
 
 After the retirement of Rubini, Mario suc- 
 ceeded to the position so long held by the older 
 man. As a singer he was not Rubini's equal 
 in poignancy of expression or in technical re- 
 source, but he surpassed him in sweetness and 
 elegance of style and was immeasurably his 
 superior as an actor. His art was at its 
 best in "La Favorita" and in the fourth act 
 of "Les Huguenots," but he was almost as 
 successful in a number of other operas. His 
 turn of mind was not originative, and the 
 only "creation" credited to him in all his long 
 career was the small tenor part in "Don 
 Pasquale." 
 
 After their marriage, Grisi and Mario 
 divided their time between Paris and London, 
 in both of which cities they continued to be 
 great favorites. Mario never sang in Italy. 
 Grisi was most conscientious in her attitude 
 toward the public, always seeking its appro- 
 bation and proud of her reputation for relia- 
 bility. Mario was much more sensitive by 
 temperament, and reserved to himself the 
 tenor's privilege of giving out at the last 
 moment. 
 
 For two such eminent singers to live and 
 work together for thirty years without a trace
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI 103 
 
 of artistic jealousy gives to our two artists a 
 unique place in operatic history. This ele- 
 ment of domestic felicity was a considerable 
 factor in their popularity, especially in Eng- 
 land. Grisi adored her husband and received 
 from him in return a loyal affection undis- 
 turbed by the feminine adulation of which he 
 was always the object. His greatest pleasure 
 was to stay at home with his wife and chil- 
 dren ; his only weaknesses were an inordinate 
 love of tobacco and a dread of the number 13. 
 According to all rules of vocal hygiene, smok- 
 ing ought to have ruined his voice, for he was 
 never without a lighted cigar, except when 
 singing, sleeping and eating ; but as he was still 
 singing at the age of sixty, we shall have to 
 write him down as an exception beyond the 
 law. Nor did the dreaded 13 ever seem to 
 work him serious injury. 
 
 Six daughters were the fruit of the mar- 
 riage, of whom three only lived to maturity. 
 One day, when Grisi was walking in the park 
 with them, she met a lord of high degree 
 whom she knew. He stopped and said, 
 jocosely : "These, madam, are, I suppose, 
 your little grisettes?" "Oh, no, sir! These 
 are my little marionettes." 
 
 For fifteen years Grisi and Mario sang only 
 in Europe. In 1842 they, with Albertazzi 
 and Tamburini, formed the first quartet to 
 sing Rossini's "Stabat Mater." Rubini's re-
 
 104 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 tirement gave Mario ample scope for his tal- 
 ents, and no new prima donnas of power ap- 
 peared to imperil Grisi's supremacy ; but as 
 time went on they began to yearn for new 
 worlds to conquer, and in 1854 completed ar- 
 rangements for a visit to America, which had 
 recently shown itself so hospitable to Jenny 
 Lind and Sontag. 
 
 In August, 1854, they arrived in New York, 
 under contract for six months for the sum of 
 about $85,000. In September they opened 
 their season at Castle Garden with "Lucrezia 
 Borgia," best seats three dollars. In the sup- 
 porting company were Susini, an excellent 
 bass, and Barili, the mother of Adelina Patti. 
 The performance went off smoothly and the 
 company was accepted as thoroughly compe- 
 tent, but there was a coolness on the part of 
 the public, quite different from the hearty 
 welcome accorded to Jenny Lind and, after 
 her, almost as generously to Sontag. 
 "Norma," given in the course of the second 
 week, was received a little more cordially. 
 
 In October the company was engaged to in- 
 augurate the present Academy of Music on 
 the corner of Irving Place and Fourteenth 
 Street. October 2, 1854, was the date, 
 "Norma" the opera. The best seats were two 
 dollars. It would seem as if New York would 
 have been keen to hear a performance of one 
 of the most popular operas of the day by the
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI 105 
 
 best opera company that had ever come to 
 town, especially in a theatre as handsome and 
 commodious as it was new. But all signs 
 failed, and the two most famous singers of 
 Europe had to sing one of their favorite 
 operas to a half -empty house. Richard Grant 
 White, who was there, thought it, on the 
 whole, rather a dull evening ; Mario and Grisi 
 had passed their prime, both of them, he de- 
 cided, and had nothing striking or novel to 
 offer the American public. 
 
 The success of the season did not increase 
 as time went on, but there was a financial guar- 
 antee to ensure the completion of the tour. 
 The company visited other cities, but no de- 
 tailed account of the winter is available. One 
 amusing story, however, has survived, to the 
 effect that a performance of "Norma" was 
 given in Washington during a heavy rain- 
 storm, and that the roof was so leaky that 
 Norma (Grisi) had to clothe herself in a 
 heavy fur coat, while Pollione (Mario) war- 
 bled his loveliest beneath the shelter of a huge 
 coachman's umbrella. After seventy per- 
 formances, all told, Grisi and Mario returned 
 to Europe. 
 
 Twenty-five years of hard and continuous 
 service had by now decidedly impaired the 
 freshness of Grisi's voice, and Mario's powers, 
 too, were on the wane; it was time to think 
 of retirement. So they bought them a com-
 
 106 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 fortable villa near Florence, in which to pass 
 their declining years. Rubini said, when he 
 retired: "It is time to retire, because it is 
 too soon," and never sang in public again. 
 But Grisi and Mario were less firm in their 
 resolution to withdraw. They had grown to 
 love the stage too well to be able now to resist 
 the call of the footlights and the craving for 
 the applause of the public; besides, although 
 they had made a great deal of money, they 
 were extravagant in their way of living and 
 always had hard work to keep their outgo 
 within the limits of their income. 
 
 So they continued to sing wherever they 
 saw a chance to turn an honest penny. In 
 1 86 1 Grisi signed an agreement with a man- 
 ager not to sing again in London for five years. 
 For a woman of her age, such a pledge seemed 
 tantamount to a final farewell, but in 1866 
 she was singing "Lucrezia" once more at Her 
 Majesty's Theatre. Her voice was gone, but 
 not her ambition and zeal. In 1869 she died 
 suddenly in Berlin, while Mario was singing 
 in St. Petersburg. 
 
 In 1872 Mario came again to the United 
 States to sing in concert. He was now old 
 and all but voiceless; the tour was a pitiful 
 failure. Poor and broken, he retired, first 
 to Paris, and then to Rome, where he died in 
 1883. 
 
 Although Grisi and Mario sang much too
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI IO7 
 
 long for the good of their reputations, the 
 very length of their careers serves as an in- 
 teresting link with a remote past. Many 
 elderly people still living heard in their youth 
 Grisi, the colleague of Pasta and Malibran, 
 and Mario, the immediate successor, almost 
 the contemporary, of Rubini. 
 
 There is no denying to Grisi a very high 
 place among the galaxy of prima donnas of 
 her era. She was inferior to Pasta in dra- 
 matic instinct, to Malibran in versatility and 
 spontaneity, to Sontag as a vocalist and mu- 
 sician; but her talents were, on the whole, 
 so considerable and so well balanced that her 
 achievements will bear comparison with those 
 of any singer in history. 
 
 The name of Mario, too, will always be 
 held in honorable memory. Inferior to Garcia 
 and Rubini in creative qualities, he became, 
 nevertheless, by virtue of his powers to charm 
 and delight, the legitimate heir to their laurels 
 and prolonged worthily the traditions that they 
 had created. The sun itself set with Rubini ; 
 Mario was the mellow afterglow, which is 
 quite as lovely in its way as the radiance of 
 day itself. With Mario the line of great lyric 
 tenors came to an end. 
 
 Between 1825 and 1850, no bass in Europe, 
 except Lablache, was held in higher esteem 
 than Antonio Tamburini. He was born in
 
 108 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Faenza in 1800. His father was a band- 
 master, who aimed to make a horn-player 
 of him, but his aptitude for singing an- 
 nounced itself early and made him, at twelve 
 years of age, a member of the opera chorus, 
 which took part also in the choral music of 
 the church. 
 
 The boy had many opportunities to hear the 
 great singers of the day, and profited by them 
 so well that at eighteen he was engaged to 
 sing bass parts in the opera in Bologna. This 
 led to an engagement at Naples, which, in turn, 
 paved the way for Florence, Venice, Trieste, 
 Rome, Milan and Vienna. At Vienna he and 
 Rubini were awarded the Order of the 
 Saviour, an honor hitherto granted to no for- 
 eigner but the Duke of Wellington. 
 
 Tamburini's voice was a noble basso 
 cantante of two evenly developed octaves, and 
 of such extraordinary flexibility as to win for 
 him the title of "the bass Rubini." We may 
 judge of its power from the fact that it was 
 able to hold its own with "the human 
 ophicleide," Lablache, in the popular duet for 
 two basses in "I Puritani." Rossini, writing to 
 a friend in Italy about the first performance 
 of this opera, said: "I need not describe to 
 you the duo for two basses — the sound of it 
 must surely have reached your ears." 
 
 Tamburini was a handsome man and an 
 excellent, though not an inspired, actor. He
 
 GRISI, MARIO AND TAMBURINI IO9 
 
 was chiefly celebrated as a singer of Rossini's 
 music, but he was almost equally successful in 
 other operas of the repertory, including "Don 
 Giovanni." 
 
 As an instance of his versatility, an amus- 
 ing story is told. He was singing in Palermo 
 during the Carnival. The theatre was full of 
 merrymakers, much more intent on making a 
 noise themselves than on listening to music 
 made by others. Tamburini's first at- 
 tempts to make himself heard were vain. 
 Suddenly he ceased to use his natural 
 voice and began to sing in a falsetto 
 so shrill and clear that it surmounted 
 the racket made by the roysterers. The crowd 
 was delighted with the novelty and received 
 the prima donna on her entrance with such 
 an uproar of enthusiasm that she lost her 
 nerve completely, rushed out of the back door 
 of the theatre, and was seen no more that 
 night. The manager was in despair — no prima 
 donna, no opera ! But Tamburini was equal 
 to the occasion. Clothing himself in as much 
 of the soprano's costume as he could find and 
 squeeze into, he returned to the stage, where 
 he sang all her music in falsetto and played 
 her part with mirth-provoking fervor. He 
 played and sang both parts in a duet for so- 
 prano and bass. To cap the climax, in re- 
 sponse to the demands of the audience, now 
 quite hysterical with delight, he executed a 
 spirited dance with the corps de ballet.
 
 IIO SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In 1832 he was heard for the first time in 
 London and Paris, and for a number of years 
 was an important member of the "Old Guard." 
 In 1840 the London manager, in a futile at- 
 tempt to break the power of this coterie, did 
 not engage Tamburini — an omission that re- 
 sulted in a series of riots and the re- 
 engagement of the favorite bass for the fol- 
 lowing season. 
 
 Like Grisi and Mario, Tamburini continued 
 to sing long after his voice had lost its beauty. 
 In 1852 he was singing in London with only 
 an echo of his former sonorous tones. Paris 
 heard him, too, at that time, and Holland. 
 In 1859 he sang in London for the last time. 
 He made his home in Nice, and died there 
 in 1876.
 
 Some Conclusions 
 
 N selecting for review the lives of 
 a few of the famous singers of 
 the nineteenth century, I have lim- 
 ited myself to the group of mem- 
 orable artists that shared with Rossini, Bel- 
 lini and Donizetti the operatic glories of their 
 epoch. Lack of space has forbidden me to 
 do more than refer to Alboni, whose contralto 
 voice may well have been the most perfect 
 of the whole century, and I have not even 
 mentioned Pisaroni, another contralto, whom 
 Chorley named as worthy of a place in his 
 ideal quartet, in company with Pasta, Duprez 
 and Lablache. Then there were Persiani, the 
 most accomplished coloratura singer of the 
 period, for whom Donizetti wrote the part of 
 Lucia, and Ronconi, too, the baritone whose 
 artistic quality made one oblivious to the 
 mediocrity of his voice. But, without fuller or 
 further reference to these four worthy sing- 
 ers, we shall find that the careers of those 
 I have written about furnish ample material 
 from which to draw some interesting and 
 instructive conclusions. 
 in
 
 112 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 How did these singers compare with those 
 of our own time? Were their voices better 
 in quality, or better trained in technique? 
 Were they better musicians or more resource- 
 ful actors? Such questions as these are un- 
 answerable, but of one thing we may be sure: 
 the qualities that made these old singers fa- 
 mous in their day and generation, would, if 
 they were living and singing now, make them 
 just as famous as they were then. We could 
 count upon Garcia and Malibran for a per- 
 formance of "Carmen" as thrilling as any we 
 have ever had in America. W r hat an Isolde 
 would Pasta make, and that Lablache died too 
 soon to sing Verdi's "Falstaff" deprives the 
 world of what unquestionably would have 
 been one of the most perfect impersonations 
 in all operatic history! 
 
 As I have said, the operas in which these 
 old singers achieved their celebrity are all, 
 except one, dead or moribund, "But in Music 
 we know how fashions end" and, likely 
 enough, in the year 2000 the repertory of 
 1900 will be in like state, without in the least 
 diminishing thereby the great names left be- 
 hind them by Lehmann and Jean de Reszke, 
 who artistically are the lineal descendants of 
 Pasta and Garcia. Rossini and his school 
 understood thoroughly the possibilities of the 
 human voice and were in considerable part in- 
 strumental in forming a method of singing
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS 113 
 
 founded upon principles that are just as 
 sound and admirable to-day as they were 
 eighty years ago. Lili Lehmann mastered 
 these principles in her youth, and so late as 
 1899 sang Norma with the same noble ar- 
 tistry that illuminated her Isolde. Jean de 
 Reszke, too, surpassed all other Wagnerian 
 tenors by virtue of the vocal means that he 
 owed to his knowledge of bel canto. 
 
 The treatment of the human voice as a 
 solo instrument for the interpretation of art 
 music dates back only to the end of the six- 
 teenth century, the birth-time of opera, and 
 from that time down to our own we shall find 
 the history of singing closely interwoven with 
 that of opera. All the greatest singers have 
 made their names in opera chiefly, and have 
 devoted themselves to concert singing inci- 
 dentally only. We know very little about 
 methods of singing previous to 1700, but the 
 ever-growing popularity of opera has pro- 
 duced since that date a voluminous literature, 
 which furnishes us with an interesting, though 
 tantalizingly incomplete, knowledge of the 
 subject. 
 
 Since 1700 the art of singing has reached 
 two climaxes. The date of the first of these 
 may be fixed about 1740, when Handel's 
 vogue as an operatic composer was at its 
 height. Opera then had drifted far away 
 from the spirit of drama and had crystallized
 
 114 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 into a conventional form of lyric expression. 
 The singer had nothing to do but sing; as 
 Victor Maurel puts it, "the singer was not 
 required to render the sentiments of the 
 dramatis personce with verisimilitude ; all that 
 was demanded of him was harmonious sounds, 
 the bel canto." Of this school of singing 
 Farinelli, Senesino, Cuzzoni and Pacchiarotti 
 were typical and in them vocal technique and 
 skill in phrasing must often have touched per- 
 fection itself. 
 
 The second climactic point was reached 
 about a century after the first — 1835, the 
 birth-year of "I Puritani," marks, perhaps, the 
 time when the modern school of bel canto 
 was at the very zenith of its excellence. The 
 singer was now responsible for something be- 
 sides the perfect emission of his voice; he 
 was expected to interpret dramatically, as well 
 as musically. Such librettos as those of 
 "Otello," "Norma" and "Lucrezia Borgia" 
 required of the singer a substantial minimum 
 of skill in the portrayal of human emotions, 
 and the public estimate of the value of an 
 operatic artist was much influenced by his 
 dramatic competence. In fact, the success of 
 many singers, including Pasta and Pauline 
 Garcia, was largely due to their capacity as 
 actors, which outweighed their vocal short- 
 comings. 
 
 These increasing histrionic demands might
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS H5 
 
 easily have lowered the vocal standard had not 
 the composer borne in mind the novel condi- 
 tions. In the eighteenth century the singer 
 had been allowed an almost unlimited license 
 in the matter of ornamentation; the melody 
 was only a skeleton, which the singer might 
 dress with such embellishments as his own 
 taste or fancy might dictate. It is told of 
 Garcia that he disapproved of a melody that 
 had been assigned to him in a new opera and 
 absolutely refused to rehearse it, saying that 
 there need be no uneasiness on that score, be- 
 cause he should be quite ready with it at 
 the first performance. Finally, when the time 
 came, he substituted a melody, entirely his 
 own, which harmonized perfectly with the 
 accompaniment composed for the original 
 melody. Such effrontery would, of course, be 
 simply impossible under modern conditions. 
 
 Rossini was the first composer to prescribe 
 the notes and ornaments exactly as he wished 
 to have them sung, but he was, none the less, 
 an opportunist, as well as a man of genius, 
 and neither he nor Bellini nor Donizetti ever 
 wrote anything that could overtax the vocal 
 powers of their singers. The orchestra, then 
 a much smaller body of instruments than now, 
 was the loyal, self -obliterating follower of the 
 voice, and never, as in the later Verdi and 
 Wagner, the jealous and aggressive rival. In 
 their mutual relations the voice always took
 
 Il6 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 precedence. Furthermore, the opera houses 
 built before 1850 were less spacious and less 
 richly decorated and upholstered than those 
 of the present day. Altogether, all the con- 
 ditions for an unstrained emission of the voice 
 were so favorable that Mr. W. J. Henderson, 
 an authority on such matters, is of the opin- 
 ion that the old singers employed habitually 
 a much smaller volume of tone than that used 
 to-day. If Mr. Henderson's theory is cor- 
 rect, we have ground for thinking that the 
 lowering of vocal standards during the past 
 fifty years is due to the attempt on the part 
 of the singer to increase the size of his voice 
 in direct ratio with the increase in the size 
 of orchestras and auditoriums. 
 
 We may, if we will, characterize the operas 
 of Rossini and his immediate successors as 
 silly, insincere, old-fashioned, or obsolete, but 
 we cannot deny that they gave satisfaction to 
 a generation that knew not only the music 
 of Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, but 
 also the dramatic art of Talma, Kemble and 
 Siddons. The fact that so sophisticated a 
 public as that of Paris during the reign of 
 Louis Philippe considered the operas of Ros- 
 sini, Bellini and Donizetti fit mediums for the 
 indisputable talents of Pasta, the Garcias, 
 Duprez and Lablache counsels us to accord to 
 these old and mostly-forgotten operas some- 
 thing of the reverence that we hold for
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS WJ 
 
 the great artists for whom they were 
 written. 
 
 Certain it is that Tamagno and Maurel 
 never stirred their public more profoundly in 
 Verdi's "Otello" than did Garcia and Mali- 
 bran theirs sixty years earlier in Rossini's 
 version of the same tragic story; nor did 
 Lehmann or Ternina arouse the sympathies 
 of their hearers more surely in "Tristan und 
 Isolde" than did Pasta move her audiences in 
 Mayer's "Medea." The combination of qual- 
 ities that makes an artist great is rarely to be 
 found, but it is quite unrelated to time or 
 place. Pasta would have been a great artist 
 if she had been born a hundred years later, 
 and, equally, Ternina's splendid gifts would 
 have been recognized and admired a century 
 ago. 
 
 But what are the qualities that go to make 
 a great singer in this or any generation? Dif- 
 ficult as it is to answer this question con- 
 clusively, we have enough data before us to 
 form a safe opinion as to how the various 
 members of one group of famous singers 
 achieved their renown. 
 
 Was it Rossini, or was it some earlier au- 
 thority that asserted for the first time that 
 the three requisites for success as a singer 
 are Voice, Voice and — Voice? Whoever it 
 was, the man uttered at most no more than a 
 half-truth. Catalani was a beautiful woman
 
 1 1 8 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 with a beautiful voice and nothing more, 
 while Pasta was a plain woman with an un- 
 tuneful voice, but Pasta is ranked much 
 higher than Catalani among the world's great 
 singers. Maria and Pauline Garcia and even 
 Jenny Lind possessed voices not more beauti- 
 ful than many another. Rubini in his early 
 days was not thought worthy of even a place 
 in the chorus and Duprez was more than 
 thirty before he won recognition in his native 
 city, Paris. 
 
 As every singing teacher knows, mere 
 beauty of voice is by no means rare ; what is 
 rare is the effective will to develop the voice 
 to its utmost capacity. Natural beauty of voice 
 is often even a detriment to its possessor, for 
 it may tempt him to rely on nature, rather 
 than on art, for his victories. The solidest 
 foundation of all for a career is an artistic 
 ambition that will not be denied. This ambi- 
 tion includes the qualities of self-denial, pa- 
 tience, and industry ; it needs to be guided 
 by a keen intelligence and fortified by a sound, 
 vigorous body; then, if it be furnished, too, 
 with a voice of good quality and power, we 
 have the wherewithal to build a great career. 
 
 The early struggles of Pasta, Rubini and 
 Duprez offer a precious lesson to young sing- 
 ers that believe the world cruel in refusing 
 to accept them immediately at their own valua- 
 tion. Even those of their colleagues to whom
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS HO, 
 
 recognition came speedily (excepting Cata- 
 lani, whose attitude toward her art was in 
 no way commendable) made and sustained 
 their reputations by virtue of their unswerv- 
 ing devotion to high artistic ideals. The at- 
 tainment of every height was but the point of 
 departure for a loftier flight. Sontag, after 
 twenty years of retirement, won a new celeb- 
 rity in an entirely new repertory. Malibran 
 was always learning new roles and perfecting 
 herself in those she had already sung. Jenny 
 Lind, to use Paderewski's phrase about him- 
 self, stood in humility and reverence before 
 God and her art. I have spoken more than 
 once of Pasta's indomitable will and, as for 
 Garcia, there never was a man so ready to 
 undertake any new labor, no matter how 
 onerous, in order to broaden his artistic scope. 
 Even Lablache, the perfect artist, to whom 
 all gifts had been given, was as conscientious 
 in the preparation and performance of his 
 roles as if he were an unrecognized novice. 
 With such examples as these before us, we 
 shall not be far from right if we change 
 the recipe for success from one of having 
 into one of doing — "Voice, Voice and — 
 Voice" into "Work, Work and— Work." 
 
 It is worth noting how completely ready 
 these singers of the past were for stage careers. 
 A number of them were, so to speak, born on 
 the stage. Sontag, Malibran and Jenny Lind
 
 120 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 appeared publicly in children's parts almost 
 as soon as they could toddle, and all of the 
 women were full-fledged prima donnas before 
 they reached the age of twenty. Rubini, Du- 
 prez and Mario were men grown when their 
 success came, but Garcia, Nourrit, Tamburini 
 and Lablache were still boys in their 'teens. 
 Nowadays training for opera begins only 
 when a young man or woman has shown un- 
 mistakable signs of having an exceptional 
 voice, and more often than not there has been 
 no general musical education at all. Such a 
 situation is not altogether different from that 
 of a young man who, though without musical 
 aptitude, should decide to become a profes- 
 sional violinist, simply because he has inher- 
 ited a Guarnerius violin. 
 
 All of the singers in our group, except Cata- 
 lani, the unambitious, and Mario, the gifted 
 amateur, were thoroughly versed in everything 
 connected with the operatic stage. Several 
 of them were capable instrumentalists, sev- 
 eral were skilful with the pencil, several were 
 respectable composers, one, even, was a poet. 
 All of them, except Catalani and Rubini, were 
 competent actors ; some of them might well 
 have made names for themselves in the spoken 
 drama. In our own time singers are rarely so 
 completely equipped for their work. The old 
 way certainly produced a high standard of all- 
 around excellence.
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS 121 
 
 This long and thorough-going intimacy 
 with their profession developed in the old 
 singers a trait, the importance of which can- 
 not be too highly recommended to the student 
 and the young artist — self-dependence. I do 
 not underrate the value of preparatory study 
 under the guidance of teachers ; indeed, no 
 singer ever reaches the point where he can 
 dispense altogether with criticism from others. 
 The voice is so much a part of one's self that 
 one cannot listen to it objectively, and objec- 
 tive criticism is what every singer needs from 
 time to time as long as he sings. But students 
 are much too apt not to rely enough on their 
 own initiative and to believe that great artists 
 can be turned out ready made from the studio 
 of a good teacher. The untried novice who 
 feels that he is already competent to assume 
 first roles in New York or Berlin or Paris is 
 met with too frequently in musical circles. 
 This belief is fraught with danger. All of the 
 old artists mastered their art through practis- 
 ing it. They were trained first as musicians, 
 learning even as children something of the 
 proper use of the voice in the chorus and in 
 church choirs. Then, as their voices ma- 
 tured, they took small solo parts in unimport- 
 ant companies, advancing, according to their 
 fitness, until they were assigned first parts in 
 the large theatres. By some such route as this 
 nearly all of the world's great singers have
 
 122 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 journeyed from the lowlands of obscurity to 
 the heights of fame. 
 
 From the records of the past, as well as 
 observations of the present, I am disposed 
 to assert in a general way that the term of a 
 singer's professional life is two score years and 
 ten. Singers themselves are the poorest judges 
 of the proper moment for their own retire- 
 ment, because they cannot hear the ravages 
 that time has made in their voices. They can- 
 not accept the fact that, though the intellectual 
 mastery of their art is on the increase, their 
 physical resources may be diminishing. Cata- 
 lani, Grisi, Garcia, Mario and Tamburini all 
 continued to sing after they had past the half- 
 century mark, although their voices had suf- 
 fered a noticeable deterioration. Pasta's 
 voice had gone at forty, Duprez's at forty- 
 five. Pauline Garcia retired at the age of 
 forty for reasons unknown ; Jenny Lind with- 
 drew even earlier. That Lablache was able 
 to give pleasure with his singing till he was 
 sixty was probably owing to the fact that the 
 bass voice is the most durable of all voices. 
 Rubini retired at forty-eight, his voice already 
 somewhat impaired. Singing belongs to 
 youth. When the feeling and the physique 
 of youth are gone the only pleasure that sing- 
 ing can give to the hearer is either that of 
 reminiscence, the echo of sounds heard on 
 an earlier day, or that of admiration for
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS 123 
 
 mastery over an instrument no longer 
 perfect. 
 
 The more we study the history of singers 
 the more clearly we perceive that there is one 
 thing that a singer must possess if he is to 
 travel far in his career. Alone it can do but 
 little for him, yet without it the greatest gifts 
 come to nothing. He must have vigorous 
 health. He needs a body capable of resisting 
 severe physical and nervous strain, of adapt- 
 ing itself easily to changes of temperature, 
 and of quick recuperation after fatigue. He 
 needs a vigor that always ''bids not sit nor 
 stand, but go." It was this inward flame of 
 energy that made so fruitful the life of the 
 elder Garcia, that enabled Maria Garcia to 
 crowd a repertory of thirty-five operas into 
 ten years on the stage, and that gave to 
 Pauline Garcia and to the younger Manuel 
 respectively ninety and one hundred full, ac- 
 tive years. Even Sontag, who appeared so 
 frail, had an unsuspected supply of endur- 
 ance to draw upon, or she never could have 
 kept the youthful freshness of her voice 
 through forty-five years of use. Operatic 
 work makes such great drafts on the strength 
 of the singer that none but the rugged can 
 hope to succeed in it, and this is quite 
 as true to-day as it was in the days 
 of the giant Lablache and the dynamic 
 Garcias.
 
 124 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The question of health brings us naturally 
 to that of self-denial, the power to eschew all 
 indulgences and pursuits that weaken the fiber 
 of the body and divert the mind from the main 
 business in hand, which is the perfecting of 
 one's art. Art is a jealous mistress, who 
 can be wooed, won and held by unswerving 
 and single-minded devotion only. Self-denial 
 means character, a quality not often enough 
 credited to the account of singers. 
 
 The popular idea is that life behind the 
 operatic scenes is looser than elsewhere. This 
 may be true in the case of artists not of the 
 highest standing, but is not true of the very 
 best. Artists live in history mostly by their 
 public achievements and it is, therefore, pos- 
 sible that in the private lives of those I have 
 been writing about there were scandals. The 
 only scandal that I have unearthed is that of 
 Malibran's liaison with de Beriot, but even 
 this irregularity is easily condoned. Mali- 
 bran, while still a young girl, was married, 
 probably against her will and certainly under 
 false pretences, to a man more than twice her 
 age, for whom she never could have had any 
 love and whose conduct soon made even re- 
 spect impossible. A few years later she met 
 her real mate in de Beriot, whom she married 
 formally as soon as the courts released her 
 from the earlier tie. No shadow of scandal 
 hangs over the story of the other Garcias and
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS 12$ 
 
 an atmosphere of blissful domesticity per- 
 vades such records as remain of the conjugal 
 experiences of Grisi and Mario, Lablache, 
 Jenny Lind, Sontag and Catalani. Of the 
 private lives of the others little is known. 
 Whether it was chance, expediency or moral 
 principle that underlay such respectability I 
 cannot say; but the fact remains that the 
 entire group seems to have maintained a 
 standard of private conduct that would be 
 considered exemplary in any society. 
 
 Opera written by Italians and sung by sing- 
 ers trained according to the Italian traditions, 
 even when they were not Italian by birth, 
 practically monopolized the operatic field dur- 
 ing the first half of the nineteenth century; 
 the influence of Wagner, Gounod and even 
 Meyerbeer, Rossini's contemporary, belongs to 
 the latter half. The best singing of to-day is 
 derived from the earlier period through the 
 medium of such teachers as Manuel Garcia, Jr., 
 Marchesi, Stockhausen, Lamperti, delle Sedie 
 and Vannucini, who in their turn were nurtured 
 in the school of Sontag, Rubini and Lablache. 
 What is best in vocal technique we owe, there- 
 fore, to the Italians ; to the French we owe that 
 part of technique that concerns "I'art de bien 
 dire" ; to the Germans we owe nothing. Why 
 such bad singing should come from Germany, 
 the most profoundly musical of all nations, is 
 a puzzling question, but it must be admitted
 
 126 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 that very few German singers ever acquire 
 the art of bel canto. Sontag, Lehmann and 
 Hempel shine as brilliant exceptions from this 
 generalization. 
 
 Unfortunately, Italy of the twentieth cen- 
 tury appears to have forgotten the traditions 
 of its noble past. The operas of the later 
 Verdi, Ponchielli and Mascagni have bred too 
 many leather-lunged singers, who are at 
 their happiest only when most vociferous. 
 Wagner, too, with his mighty orchestra, has 
 invaded the musical precincts once sacred to 
 the dulcet harmonies of Rossini and Bellini 
 and engendered a type of singer who, unmind- 
 ful of the example set by Lehmann and Jean 
 de Reszke, believes that the only way to in- 
 terpret Wagner's music is to shout it. The 
 result of all this has been the sacrifice of 
 vocal control, the very essence of bcl canto 
 for the sake of the big tone. Even Caruso, the 
 splendor of whose voice surpasses anything 
 heard by our generation, has lost quite as 
 much as he has gained through his determina- 
 tion to acquire the big tone. The acquisition 
 is now complete and it is impossible to with- 
 hold one's admiration from the clarion tones 
 that ring out so true and free, but to many 
 that recall the fine restraint that used to ren- 
 der his delivery of "Spirto gentil" and "Una 
 furtiva Lagrima" so eloquent, the loss in 
 sweetness outweighs the gain in power.
 
 SOME CONCLUSIONS 12J 
 
 But we need not despond or be hopeless for 
 better things in the future. Lord Mount- 
 Edgecumbe, an English connaisseur in music, 
 writing ninety years ago, wagged his head as 
 despairingly over the noisy, unmelodious, 
 iconoclastic operas of Rossini, which he held 
 to be a sad deterioration from the pure and 
 noble style of Sarti and Cimarosa, as the crit- 
 ics fifty years later wagged their heads over 
 the degenerate Wagner. With his and many 
 another similar example before us, I, for one, 
 shall not proclaim that the true art of singing 
 has come, or ever will come, to a full stop. 
 The success of John McCormack, the Irish 
 tenor, whose lovely art, which embodies the 
 principles of bel canto as they were practised 
 by Garcia, Rubini and Mario, appeals to the 
 sophisticated as well as to the popular taste, 
 goes to prove that the worship of the big 
 tone has not exterminated our power to enjoy 
 the controlled tone. 
 
 The art of singing is the art of expressing 
 the emotions musically by means of the voice, 
 and the voice that is able to express truth- 
 fully through its tones the greatest variety of 
 emotions is the greatest voice. There are emo- 
 tions that require for their expression a mel- 
 low, restrained tone ; there are those that re- 
 quire an explosion of tone ; and there are, 
 besides these, countless tone-qualities, all of 
 which enrich the capacity of the voice
 
 128 SINGERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 for emotional expression. Rubini seems to 
 have possessed a greater capacity for such ex- 
 pression than any other singer of the nine- 
 teenth century. The greatest singer of the 
 twentieth century will be one who, a master of 
 bel canto like Rubini, can sound all the notes 
 within the scale of human emotion.
 
 INSTRUCTION BOOKS 
 
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 Bates, James, VOICE CULTURE FOR CHIL- 
 DREN 
 
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 Hall, Walter Henry, THE ESSENTIALS OF 
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 ment. In two parts. 
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 Part I, High Voice 1.25 
 
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 Medium Voice 1.25 
 
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 Higgs, James, A COLLECTION OF TWO- 
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 (Novello's Music Primers No. 51) . . .50
 
 Howard, F. E., CHILD VOICE IN SINGING, 
 THE 
 
 Cloth -75 
 
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 Hulbert, H. H., BREATHING FOR VOICE 
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 Mann, Richard, A MANUAL OF SINGING FOR 
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 New edition with additions by J. Stainer .50 
 Martin, G. C, THE ART OF TRAINING 
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 (Novello's Music Primers No. 39) • • i-5 n 
 Martin, G. C, THE ART OF TRAINING 
 CHOIR BOYS (The Exercises Only) 
 For the use of boys. (Novello's Music 
 
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 McNaught, W. G., SIGHT-SINGING STUDIES 
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 (Movable Dob.) 3 Books, each . . .15 
 
 Randegger, Alberto, SINGING 
 
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 Stainer, J., CHORAL SOCIETY VOCALIZA- 
 TION 
 Instructions and Exercises in Voice Train- 
 ing. (Novello's Music Primers No. 50) 1.00 
 
 Or, in four parts, each 25 
 
 Stainer, J., THE EXERCISES IN THE 
 
 "CHORAL SOCIETY VOCALIZATION" 
 PRIMER 
 Adapted and arranged for the use of 
 choirs and classes of female voices, by 
 Arthur W. Marchant. (Novello's Music 
 
 Primers No. 50a) 75 
 
 Stubbs, G. Edward, HOW TO SING THE 
 
 CHORAL SERVICE 
 
 A Manual of Intoning for clergymen . 1.00 
 
 Stubbs, G. Edward, PRACTICAL HINTS ON 
 
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 Hodges, D.D 75 
 
 Stubbs, G. Edward, THE ADULT MALE ALTO, 
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 The PSYCHOLOGY of SINGING 
 
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 DAVID C. TAYLOR 
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 beautiful tone. 
 
 It is one of the most original and stimulating books 
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 Italian method. "Self Help" is a simple com- 
 prehensive system of voice culture by imitation 
 arranged for the student's use in self instruction. 
 
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