Chapter 11

M. Duponchel, the manager of the Opéra in Paris, hastened to London to hear Alboni sing, and immediately offered her an engagement. In October, 1847, she made her Parisian _début_. Her first appearance in concert was with Alizard and Barroilhet. "Many persons, artists and amateurs," said Fiorentino, "absolutely asked on the morning of her _début_, Who is this Alboni? Whence does she come? What can she do?" And their interrogatories were answered by some fragments of those trifling and illusory biographies which always accompany young vocalists. There was, however, intense curiosity to hear and see this redoubtable singer who had held the citadel of the Royal Italian Opera against the attraction of Jenny Lind, and the theatre was crowded to suffocation by rank, fashion, beauty, and notabilities on the night of her first concert, October 9th. When she stepped quietly on the stage, dressed in black velvet, a brooch of brilliants on her bosom, and her hair cut _à la Titus_, with a music-paper in her hand, there was just one thunder-clap of applause, followed by a silence of some seconds. She had not one acknowledged advocate in the house; but, when Arsace's cavatina, "Ah! quel giorno," gushed from her lips in a rich stream of melodious sound, the entire audience was at her feet, and the critics could not command language sufficiently glowing to express their admiration.

"What exquisite quality of sound, what purity of intonation, what precision in the scales!" wrote the critic of the "Revue et Gazette Musicale." "What _finesse_ in the manner of the breaks of the voice! What amplitude and mastery of voice she exhibits in the 'Brindisi'; what incomparable clearness and accuracy in the air from 'L'ltaliana' and the duo from 'Il Barbiere!' There is no instrument capable of rendering with more certain and more faultless intonation the groups of rapid notes which Rossini wrote, and which Alboni sings with the same facility and same celerity. The only fault the critic has in his power to charge the wondrous artist with is, that, when she repeats a morceau, we hear exactly the same traits, the same turns, the same fioriture, which was never the case with Malibran or Cinti-Damoreau."

"This vocal scale," says Scudo, speaking of her voice, "is divided into three parts or registers, which follow in complete order. The first register commences at F in the base, and reaches F in the _medium_. This is the true body of the voice, whose admirable timbre characterizes and colors all the rest. The second extends from G in the _medium_ to F on the fifth line; and the upper part, which forms the third register, is no more than an elegant superfluity of Nature. It is necessary next to understand with what incredible skill the artist manages this instrument; it is the pearly, light, and florid vocalization of Persiani joined to the resonance, pomp, and amplitude of Pisaroni. No words can convey an idea of the exquisite purity of this voice, always mellow, always equable, which vibrates without effort, and each note of which expands itself like the bud of a rose--sheds a balm on the ear, as some exquisite fruit perfumes the palate. No scream, no affected dramatic contortion of sound, attacks the sense of hearing, under the pretense of softening the feelings."

"But that which we admire above all in the artist," observes Fiorentino, "is the pervading soul, the sentiment, the perfect taste, the inimitable method. Then, what body in the voice! What largeness! What simplicity of style! What facility of vocalization! What genius in the contrasts! What color in the phrases! What charm! What expression! Mlle. Alboni sings as she smiles--without effort, without fatigue, without audible and broken respiration. Here is art in its fidelity! here is the model and example which every one who would become an artist should copy."

"It is such a pleasure to hear real singing," wrote Hector Berlioz. "It is so rare; and voices at once beautiful, natural, expressive, flexible, and _in time_, are so very uncommon! The voice of Mlle. Alboni possesses these excellent qualities in the highest degree of perfection. It is a magnificent contralto of immense range (two octaves and six notes, nearly three octaves, from low E to C in alt), the quality perfect throughout, even in the lowest notes of the lowest register, which are generally so disastrous to the majority of singers, who fancy they possess a contralto, and the emission of which resembles nearly always a rattle, hideous in such cases and revolting to the ear. Mlle. Alboni's vocalization is wonderfully easy, and few sopranos possess such facility. The registers of her voice are so perfectly united, that in her scales you do not feel sensible of the passage from one to another; the tone is unctuous, caressing, velvety, melancholy, like that of all pure sopranos, though less somber than that of Pisaroni, and incomparably more pure and limpid. As the notes are produced without effort, the voice yields itself to every shade of intensity, and thus Mlle. Alboni can sing from the most mysterious piano to the most brilliant forte. And this alone is what I call singing humanly, that is to say, in a fashion which declares the presence of a human heart, a human soul, a human intelligence. Singers not possessed of these indispensable qualities should in my judgment be ranked in the category of mechanical instruments. Mlle. Alboni is an artist entirely devoted to her art, and has not up to this moment been tempted to make a trade of it; she has never heretofore given a thought to what her delicious notes--precious pearls, which she lavishes with such happy bounty--might bring her in per annum. Different from the majority of contemporary singers, money questions are the last with which she occupies herself; her demands have hitherto been extremely modest. Added to this, the sincerity and trustworthiness of her character, which amounts almost to singularity, are acknowledged by all who have any dealings with her."

After the greatness of the artist had fairly-been made known to the public, the excitement in Paris was extraordinary. At some of the later concerts more than a thousand applications for admission had to be refused, and it was said that two theatres might have been thronged. Alboni was nearly smothered night after night with roses and camellias, and the stage was literally transformed into a huge bed of flowers, over which the prima donna was obliged to walk in making her exits. An amusing example of the _naïveté_ and simplicity of her character is narrated. On the morning after her second performance, she was seated in her hotel on the Boulevard des Italiens, reading the _feuilletons_ of Berlioz and Fiorentino with a kind of childish pleasure, unconscious that she was the absorbing theme of Paris talk. A friend came in, when she asked with unaffected sincerity whether she had really sung "_assez bien_" on Monday night, and broke into a fit of the merriest laughter when she received the answer, "_Très bien pour une petite fille_." "Alboni," writes this friend, "is assuredly for a great artist the most unpretending and simple creature in the world. She hasn't the slightest notion of her position in her art in the eyes of the public and musical world."

III.

Mme. Alboni's great success, it is said, made M. Vatel, the manager of the Italiens, almost frantic with disappointment, for, acting on the advice of Lablache, he had refused to engage her when he could have done so at a merely nominal sum, and had thus left the grand prize open to his rival. Her concert engagement being terminated, our prima donna made a short tour through Austria, and returned to Paris again to make her _début_ in opera on December 2d, in "Semiramide," with Mme. Grisi, Coletti, Cellini, and Tagliafico, in the cast. The caprice of audiences was never more significantly shown than on this occasion. Alboni, on the concert stage, had recently achieved an unmistakable and brilliant recognition as a great vocalist, and on the night of her first lyric appearance before a French audience a great throng had assembled. All the celebrities of the fashionable, artistic, and literary world, princes, Government officials, foreign ministers, dilettanti, poets, critics, women of wit and fashion, swelled the gathering of intent listeners, through whom there ran a subdued murmur, a low buzz of whispering, betraying the lively interest felt. Grisi came on after the rising of the curtain and received a most cordial burst of applause. At length the great audience was hushed to silence, and the orchestra played the symphonic prelude which introduces the contralto air "Eccomi alfin in Babilonia." Alboni glided from the side and walked slowly to the footlights. Let an eye-witness complete the story: "There was a sudden pause," says one who was present; "a feather might almost have been heard to move. The orchestra, the symphony finished, refrained from proceeding, as though to give time for the enthusiastic reception which was Alboni's right, and which it was natural to suppose Alboni would receive. But you may imagine my surprise and the feelings of the renowned contralto when not a hand or a voice was raised to acknowledge her! I could see Alboni tremble, but it was only for an instant. What was the reason of this unanimous disdain or this unanimous doubt? call it what you will. She might perhaps guess, but she did not suffer it to perplex her for more than a few moments. Throwing aside the extreme diffidence that marked her _entrée_, and the perturbation that resulted from the frigidity of the spectators, she wound herself up to the condition of fearless independence for which she is constitutionally and morally remarkable, and with a look of superb indifference and conscious power she commenced the opening of her aria. In one minute the crowd, that but an instant before seemed to disdain her, was at her feet! The effect of those luscious tones had never yet failed to touch the heart and rouse the ardor of an audience, educated or uneducated." Alboni's triumph was instantaneous and complete; it was the greater from the moment of anxious uncertainty that preceded it, and made the certainty which succeeded more welcome and delightful. From this instant to the end of the opera, Alboni's success grew into a triumph. During the first act she was twice recalled; during the second act, thrice; and she was encored in the air "In si barbara," which she delivered with pathos, and in the cabaletta of the second duet with _Semiramide_. She followed in "La Cenerentola," and it may easily he fancied that her hearers compensated in boisterous warmth of reception for the phlegmatic indifference shown on the first night.

The English engagement of Mlle. Alboni the following year at Covent Garden was at a salary of four thousand pounds, and the popularity she had accomplished in England made her one of the most attractive features of the operatic season. Her delicious singing and utter freedom from aught that savored of mannerism or affectation made her power of captivation complete in spite of her lack of dramatic energy. She sang in the same company with Grisi, Persiani, and Viardot, while Mario and Tamburini added their magnificent voices to this fine constellation of lyric stars. When she returned to London in 1849, Jenny Lind had retired from the stage where she had so thoroughly bewitched the public, and Mlle. Alboni became the leading attraction of Her Majesty's Theatre, thus arraying herself against the opera organization with which she had been previously identified. Among the other members of the company were Lablache and Ronconi. Mlle. Alboni seemed to be stung by a feverish ambition at this time to depart from her own musical genre, and shine in such parts as _Rosina, Ninetta, Zerlina_ ("Don Giovanni ") and _Norina_ ("Don Pasquale"). The general public applauded her as vehemently as ever, but the judicious grieved that the greatest of contraltos should forsake a realm in which she blazed with such undivided luster.

It is difficult to fancy why Alboni should have ventured on so dangerous an experiment. It may be that she feared the public would tire of her luscious voice, unperturbed as it was by the resistless passion and sentiment which in such singers as Malibran, Pasta, and Viardot, had overcome all defects of voice, and given an infinite freshness and variety to their tones. It may be that the higher value of a soprano voice in the music market stirred a feeling in Alboni which had been singularly lacking to her earlier career. Whatever the reason might have been, it is a notorious fact that Mlle. Alboni deliberately forced the register upward, and in doing so injured the texture of her voice, and lost something both of luscious tone and power. In later years she repented this artistic sin, and recovered the matchless tones of her youth in great measure, but, as long as she persevered in her ambition to be a _soprano_, the result was felt by her most judicious friends to be an unfortunate one.

A pleasant incident, illustrating Alboni's kindness of heart, occurred on the eve of her departure for Italy, whither she was called by family reasons. Her leave-taking was so abrupt that she had almost forgotten her promise to sing in Paris on a certain date for the annual benefit of Filippo Galli, a superannuated musician. The suspense and anxiety of the unfortunate Filippo were to be more easily imagined than described when, asked if Alboni would sing, he could not answer definitively--"Perhaps yes, perhaps no." He sold very few tickets, and the rooms (in the Salle Hera) were thinly occupied. She, however, had not forgotten her promise; at the very moment when the matinée was commencing she arrived, in time to redeem her word and reward those who had attended, but too late to be of any service to the veteran. Galli was in despair, and was buried in reflections neither exhilarating nor profitable, when, some minutes after the concert, the comely face and portly figure of Alboni appeared at the door of his room. "How much are the expenses of your concert?" she kindly inquired. "_Mia cara_," dolorously responded the bénéficiaire, "_cinque centifranci_ [five hundred francs]." "Well, then, to repair the loss that I may have caused you," said the generous cantatrice, "here is a banknote for a thousand francs. Do me the favor to accept it." This was only one of the many kind actions she performed.

Mlle. Alboni's Paris engagement, in the spring of 1850, was marked by a daring step on her part, which excited much curiosity at the time, and might easily have ended in a most humiliating reverse, though its outcome proved fortunate, that undertaking being the _rôle_ of _Fides_ in "Le Prophète," which had become so completely identified with the name of Viardot. It was owing as much, perhaps, to the insistance of the managers of the Grand Opéra as to the deliberate choice of the singer that this experiment was attempted. Meyerbeer perhaps smiled in his sleeve at the project, but he interposed no objection, and indeed went behind the scenes to congratulate her on her success during the night of the first performance. Alboni's achievement was gratifying to her pride, but it need not be said that her interpretation of _Fides_ was radically different from that of Mme. Viardot, which was a grand tragic conception, akin to those created by the genius of Pasta and Schröder-Devrient. The music of "Le Prophète" had never been well fitted to Viardot's voice, and it was in this better adaptation of Alboni to the vocal score that it may be fancied her success, such as it was, found its root. It was significant that the critics refrained from enlarging on the dramatic quality of the performance. Mlle. Alboni continued her grasp of this varied range of lyric character during her seasons in France, Spain, and England for several years, now assuming _Fides_, now _Amino_, in "Sonnambula," now _Leonora_ in "Favorita," and never failing, however the critics might murmur, in pleasing the ultimate, and, on the whole, more satisfactory bench of judges, the public. It was no new thing to have proved that the mass of theatre-goers, however eccentric and unjustifiable the vagaries of a favorite might be, are inclined to be swayed by the cumulative force of long years of approval. In the spring of 1851, Mlle. Alboni, among several of her well-established personations, was enabled to appear in a new opera by Auber, "Corbeille d'Oranges," a work which attained only a brief success. It became painfully apparent about this time that the greatest of contralto singers was losing the delicious quality of her voice, and that her method was becoming more and more conventional. Her ornaments and fioriture never varied, and this monotony, owing to the indolence and _insouciance_ of the singer, was never inspired by that resistless fire and geniality which made the same cadenzas, repeated night after night by such a singer as Pasta, appear fresh to the audience.

Mlle. Alboni's visit to the United States in 1852 was the occasion of a cordial and enthusiastic welcome, which, though lacking in the fury and excitement of the "Jenny Lind" mania, was yet highly gratifying to the singer's _amour propre_. There was a universal feeling of regret that her tour was necessarily a short one. Her final concert was given at Metropolitan Hall, New York, on May 2, 1852, the special occasion being the benefit of Signor Arditi, who had been the conductor of her performances in America. The audience was immense, the applause vehement.

The marriage of Alboni to the Compte de Pepoli in 1853 caused a rumor that she was about to retire from the stage. But, though she gave herself a furlough from her arduous operatic duties for nearly a year, she appeared again in Paris in 1854 in "La Donna del Lago" and other of the Rossinian operas. Her London admirers, too, recognized in the newly married prima donna all the charm of her youth.

In July, 1855, she was at the Grand Opéra, in Paris, performing in "Le Prophète," etc., with Roger, having contracted an engagement for three years. In 1856 she was at Her Majesty's Theatre with Piccolomini, and made her first appearance in the character of _Azucena_ in "Il Trovatore." Her performances were not confined to the opera-house; she sang at the Crystal Palace and in the Surrey Music Hall. In October she was again at the Italiens, commencing with "La Cenerentola." She then, in conjunction with Mario, Graziani, and Mme. Frezzolini, began performing in the works of Verdi. "Il Trovatore" was performed in January, 1857, and was followed by "Rigoletto," which was produced in defiance of the protestations of Victor Hugo, from whose play, "Le Roi s'amuse," the libretto had been taken. Victor Hugo declared that the representation of the opera was an infringement of his rights, as being simply a piracy of his drama, and he claimed that the Theatre Italiens should be restrained from performing it. The decision of the court was, however, against the irascible poet, and he had to pay the costs of the action.

But why should the reader be interested in a yearly record of the engagements of a great singer, after the narrative of the early struggles by which success is reached and the means by which success is perpetuated has come to an end? The significance of such a recital is that of ardent endeavor, persistent self-culture, and unflagging resolution. Mme. Alboni continued to sing in the principal musical centers of Western Europe till 1864, when she definitely retired from the stage, and settled at her fine residence in Paris, midst the ease and luxury which the large fortune she had acquired by professional exertion enabled her to maintain. She occasionally appeared in opera and concert to the great delight of her old admirers, who declared that the youthful beauty and freshness of her voice had returned to her. Since the death of her husband she has only sung in public once, and then in Rossini's Mass, in London in 1871.

Both the husband and the brothers of Alboni were gallant soldiers in the Italian war of independence, and received medals and other distinctions from Victor Emanuel. Mme. Alboni in private life is said to be one of the most amiable, warm-hearted, and fascinating of women, and to take the deepest interest in helping the careers of young singers by advice, influence, and pecuniary aid. In social life she is quite as much the idol of her friends as she was for so many years of an admiring public.

JENNY LIND.

The Childhood of the "Swedish Nightingale."--Her First Musical Instruction.--The Loss and Return of her Voice.--Jenny Lind's Pupilage in Paris under Manuel Garcia.--She makes the Acquaintance of Meyerbeer.--Great Success in Stockholm in "Robert le Diable."--Fredrika Bremer and Hans Christian Andersen on the Young Singer.--Her _Début_ in Berlin.--Becomes Prima Donna at the Royal Theatre.--Beginning of the Lind Enthusiasm that overran Europe.--She appears in Dresden in Meyerbeer's New Opera, "Feldlager in Schliesen."--Offers throng in from all the Leading Theatres of Europe.--The Grand _Furore_ in Every Part of Germany.--Description of Scenes in her Musical Progresses.--She makes her _Début_ in London.--Extraordinary Excitement of the English Public, such as had never before been known.--Descriptions of her Singing by Contemporary Critics.--Her Quality as an Actress.--Jenny Lind's _Personnel_.--Scenes and Incidents of the "Lind" Mania.--Her Second London Season.--Her Place and Character as a Lyric Artist.--Mlle. Lind's American Tour.--Extraordinary Enthusiasm in America.--Her Lavish Generosity.--She marries Herr Otto Goldschmidt.--Present Life of Retirement in London.--Jenny Lind as a Public Benefactor.

I.

The name of Jenny Lind shines among the very brightest in the Golden Book of Singers, and her career has been one of the most interesting among the many striking personal chapters in the history of lyric music. It was not that the "Swedish Nightingale" was supremely great in any chief quality of the lyric artist. Others have surpassed her in natural gifts of voice, in dramatic fervor, in versatility, in perfect vocal finish. But to Jenny Lind were granted all these factors of power in sufficiently large measure, and that power of balance and coordination by which such powers are made to yield their highest results. An exquisitely serene and cheerful temperament, a high ambition, great energy and industry, and such a sense of loyalty to her engagements that she always gave her audience the very best there was in her--these were some of the moral phases of the art-nature which in her case proved of immense service in achieving her great place as a singer, and in holding that place secure against competition for so many years.