Chapter 7

As a singer of romances Mario has never been equaled. He could not execute those splendid songs of the Rossinian school, in which the feeling of the theme is expressed in a dazzling parade of roulades and fioriture, the songs in which Rubini was matchless. But in those songs where music tells the story of passion in broad, intelligible, ardent phrases, and presents itself primarily as the vehicle of vehement emotion, Mario stood ahead of all others of his age, it may be said, indeed, of all within the memory of his age. It was for this reason that he attained such a supremacy also on the concert stage. The choicest songs of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gordigiano, and Meyerbeer were interpreted by his art with an intelligence and poetry which gave them a new and more vivid meaning. The refinements of his accent and pronunciation created the finest possible effects, and were perhaps partly due to the fact that before Mario became a public artist he was a gentleman and a noble, permeated by the best asthetic and social culture of his times.

Mario's power illustrated the value of tastes and pursuits collateral to those of his profession. The painter's eye for color, the sculptor's sense of form, as well as the lover's honeyed tenderness, entered into the success of this charming tenor. His stage pictures looked as if they had stepped out of the canvases of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese. In no way was the artistic completeness of his temperament more happily shown than in the harmonious and beautiful figure he presented in his various characters; for there was a touch of poetry and proportion in them far beyond the possibilities of the stage costumer's craft. Other singers had to sing for years, and overcome native defects by assiduous labor, before reaching the goal of public favor, but "Signor Mario was a Hyperian born, who had only to be seen and heard, and the enchantment was complete." For a quarter of a century Mario remained before the public of Paris, London, and St. Petersburg, constantly associated with Mme. Grisi.

V.

To return once more to the consideration of Grisi's splendid career. The London season of 1839 was remarkable for the production of "Lucrezia Borgia." The character of the "Borgia woman" afforded a sphere in which our prima donna's talents shone with peculiar luster. The impassioned tenderness of her _Desdemona_, the soft sweetness of "love in its melancholy and in its regrets" of _Anna Bolena_, the fiery ardor and vehemence of _Norma_, had been powerfully expressed by her, but the mixture of savage cruelty and maternal intensity characteristic of _Lucretia_ was embodied with a splendor of color and a subtilty of ideal which deservedly raised her estimate as a tragedienne higher than before. Without passing into unnecessary detail, it is enough to state that Mme. Grisi was constantly before the publics of London and Paris in her well-established characters for successive years, with an ever-growing reputation. In 1847 the memorable operatic schism occurred which led to the formation of the Royal Italian Opera at Convent Garden. The principal members of the company who seceded from Her Majesty's Theatre were Mmes. Grisi and Persiani, Signor Mario, and Signor Tamburini. The new establishment was also strengthened by the accession of several new performers, among whom was Mlle. Alboni, the great contralto. "Her Majesty's" secured the possession of Jenny Lind, who became the great support of the old house, as Grisi was of the new one. The appearance of Mme. Grisi as the Assyrian Queen and Alboni as _Arsace_ thronged the vast theatre to the very doors, and produced a great excitement on the opening night. The subject of our sketch remained faithful to this theatre to the very last, and was on its boards when she took her farewell of the English public. The change broke up the celebrated quartet. It struggled on in the shape of a trio for some time without Lablache, and was finally diminished to Grisi and Mario, who continued to sing the _duo concertante_ in "Don Pasquale," as none others could. They were still the "rose and nightingale" whom Heine immortalizes in his "Lutetia," "the rose the nightingale among flowers, the nightingale the rose among birds." That airy dilettante, N. P. Willis, in his "Pencilings by the Way," passes Grisi by with faint praise, but the ardent admiration of Heine could well compensate her wounded vanity, if, indeed, she felt the blunt arrow-point of the American traveler.

A visit to St. Petersburg in 1851, in company with Mario, was the occasion of a vast amount of enthusiasm among the music-loving Russians. During her performance in "Lucrezia Borgia," on her benefit night, she was recalled twenty times, and presented by the Czar with a magnificent Cashmere shawl worth four thousand rubles, a tiara of diamonds and pearls, and a ring of great value. From the year 1834, when she first appeared in London, till 1861, when she finally retired, Grisi missed but one season in London, and but three in Paris. Her splendid physique enabled her to endure the exhaustive wear and friction of an operatic life with but little deterioration of her powers. When she made her artistic tour through the United States with Mario in 1854, her voice had perhaps begun to show some slight indication of decadence, but her powers were of still mature and mellow splendor. Prior to crossing the ocean a series of "farewell performances" was given. The operas in which she appeared included "Norma," "Lucrezia Borgia," "Don Pasquale," "Gli Ugonotti," "La Favorita." The first was "Norma," Mme. Grisi performing _Norma_; Mlle. Maria, _Adalgiza_; Tamberlik, _Pollio_; and La-blache, _Oroveso_; the last performance consisted of the first act of "Norma," and the three first acts of "Gli Ugonotti," in which Mario sustained the principal tenor part. "Rarely, in her best days," said one critic, "had Grisi been heard with greater effect, and never were her talents as an actress more conspicuously displayed." At the conclusion of the performance the departing singer received an ovation. Bouquets were flung in profusion, vociferous applause rang through the theatre, and when she reappeared the whole house rose. The emotion which was evinced by her admirers was evidently shared by herself.

The American engagement of Grisi and Mario under Mr. Hackett was very successful, the first appearance occurring at Castle Garden, August 18, 1854. The seventy performances given throughout the leading cities are still a delightful reminiscence among old amateurs, in spite of the great singers who have since visited this country and the more stable footing of Italian opera in later times. Mr. Hackett paid the two artists eighty-five thousand dollars for a six months' tour, and declared, at a public banquet he gave them at the close of the season, that his own profits had been sixty thousand dollars. Mme. Grisi had intended to retire permanently when she was still in the full strength of her great powers, but she was persuaded to reappear before the London public on her return from New York. It became evident that her voice was beginning to fail rapidly, and that she supplied her vocal shortcomings by dramatic energy. She continued to sing in opera in various parts of Europe, but the public applause was evidently rather a struggle on the part of her audiences to pay tribute to a great name than a spontaneous expression of pleasure, and at Madrid she was even hissed in the presence of the royal court, which gave a special significance to the occasion. Mr. Gye, of the Royal Italian Opera in London, in 1861 made a contract with her not to appear on the stage again for five years, evidently assuming that five years were as good as fifty. But it was hard for the great singer, who had been the idol of the public for more than a quarter of a century, to quit the scene of her splendid triumphs. So in 1866 she again essayed to tread the stage as a lyric queen, in the _rôle_ of _Lucrezia_, but the result was a failure. It is not pleasant to record these spasmodic struggles of a failing artist, tenacious of that past which had now shut its gates on her for ever and a day. Her career was ended, but she had left behind a name of imperishable luster in the annals of her art. She died of inflammation of the lungs during a visit to Berlin, November 25, 1869. Her husband, Mario, retired from the stage in 1867, and suffered, it is said, at the last from pecuniary reverses, in spite of the fact that he had earned such enormous sums during his operatic career. His concert tour in the United States, under the management of Max Strakosch, in 1871-'72. is remembered only with a feeling of pain. It was the exhibition of a magnificent wreck. The touch of the great artist was everywhere visible, but the voice was utterly lost. Signor Mario is still living at Rome, and has resumed the rank which he laid aside to enter a stage career.

Grisi united much of the nobleness and tragic inspiration of Pasta with something of the fire and energy of Malibran, but in the minds of the most capable judges she lacked the creative originality which stamped each of the former two artists. She was remarkable for the cleverness with which she adopted the effects and ideas of those more thoughtful and inventive than herself. Her _Norma_ was ostentatiously modeled on that of Pasta. Her acting showed less the exercise of reflection and study than the rich, uncultivated, imperious nature of a most beautiful and adroit southern woman. But her dramatic instincts were so strong and vehement that they lent something of her own personality to the copy of another's creation. When to this engrossing energy were added the most dazzling personal charms and a voice which as nearly reached perfection as any ever bestowed on a singer, it is no marvel that a continual succession of brilliant rivals was unable to dispute her long reign over the public heart.

PAULINE VIARDOT.

Vicissitudes of the Garcia Family.--Pauline Viardot's Early Training.--Indications of her Musical Genius.--She becomes a Pupil of Liszt on the Piano.--Pauline Garcia practically self-trained as a Vocalist.--Her Remarkable Accomplishments.--Her First Appearance before the Public with De Beriot in Concert.--She makes her _Début_ in London as _Desdemona_.--Contemporary Opinions of her Powers.--Description of Pauline Garcia's Voice and the Character of her Art.--The Originality of her Genius.--Pauline Garcia marries M. Viardot, a Well-known _Litterateur_.--A Tour through Southern Europe.--She creates a Distinct Place for herself in the Musical Art.--Great Enthusiasm in Germany over her Singing.--The Richness of her Art Resources.--Sketches of the Tenors, Nourrit and Duprez, and of the Great Barytone, Ronconi.--Mine. Viardot and the Music of Meyerbeer.--Her Creation of the Part of _Fides_ in "Le Prophète," the Crowning Work of a Great Career.--Retirement from the Stage.--High Position in Private Life.--Connection with the French Conservatoire.

I.

The genius of the Garcia family flowered not less in Mme. Malibran's younger sister than in her own brilliant and admired self. Pauline, the second daughter of Manuel Garcia, was thirteen years the junior of her sister, and born at Paris, July 18, 1821. The child had for sponsors at baptism the celebrated Ferdinand Paer, the composer, and the Princess Pauline Prascovie Galitzin, a distinguished Russian lady, noted for her musical amateurship, and the full name given was Michelle Ferdinandie Pauline. The little girl was only three years old when her sister Maria made her _début_ in London, and even then she lisped the airs she heard sung by her sister and her father with something like musical intelligence, and showed that the hereditary gift was deeply rooted in her own organization.

Manuel Garcia's project for establishing Italian opera in America and the disastrous crash in which it ended have already been described in an earlier chapter. Maria, who had become Mme. Malibran, was left in New York, while the rest of the Garcia family sailed for Mexico, to give a series of operatic performances in that ancient city. The precocious genius of Pauline developed rapidly. She learned in Mexico to play on the organ and piano as if by instinct, with so much ease did she master the difficulties of these instruments, and it was her father's proud boast that never, except in the cases of a few of the greatest composers, had aptitude for the musical art been so convincingly displayed at her early years. At the age of six Pauline Garcia could speak four languages, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, with facility, and to these she afterward added German. Her passion for acquirement was ardent and never lost its force, for she was not only an indefatigable student in music, but extended her researches and attainments in directions alien to the ordinary tastes of even brilliant women. It is said that before she had reached the age of eight-and-twenty, she had learned to read Latin and Greek with facility, and made herself more than passably acquainted with various arts and sciences. To the indomitable will and perseverance of her sister Maria, she added a docility and gentleness to which the elder daughter of Garcia had been a stranger. Pauline was a favorite of her father, who had used pitiless severity in training the brilliant and willful Maria. "Pauline can be guided by a thread of silk," he would say, "but Maria needs a hand of iron."

Garcia's operatic performances in Mexico were very successful up to the breaking out of the civil war consequent on revolt from Spain. Society was so utterly disturbed by this catastrophe that residence in Mexico became alike unsafe and profitless, and the Spanish musician resolved to return to Europe. He turned his money into ingots of gold and silver, and started, with his little family, across the mountains interposing between the capital and the seaport of Vera Cruz, a region at that period terribly infested with brigands. Garcia was not lucky enough to escape these outlaws. They pounced on the little cavalcade, and the hard-earned wealth of the singer, amounting to nearly a hundred thousand dollars, passed out of his possession in a twinkling. The cruel humor of the chief of the banditti bound Garcia to a tree, after he had been stripped naked, and as it was known that he was a singer he was commanded to display his art for the pleasure of these strange auditors. For a while the despoiled man sternly refused, though threatened with immediate death. At last he began an aria, but his voice was so choked by his rage and agitation that he broke down, at which the robber connoisseurs hissed. This stung Garcia's pride, and he began again with a haughty gesture, breaking forth into a magnificent flight of song, which delighted his hearers, and they shouted "_Bravissimo!_" with all the _abandon_ of an enthusiastic Italian audience. A flash of chivalry animated the rude hearts of the brigands, for they restored to Garcia all his personal effects, and a liberal share of the wealth which they had confiscated, and gave him an escort to the coast as a protection against other knights of the road. The reader will hardly fail to recall a similar adventure which befell Salvator Rosa, the great painter, who not only earned immunity, but gained the enthusiastic admiration of a band of brigands, by whom he had been captured, through a display of his art.

The talent of Pauline Garcia for the piano was so remarkable that it was for some time the purpose of her father to devote her to this musical specialty. She was barely more than seven on the return of the Garcias to Europe, and she was placed, without delay, under the care of a celebrated teacher, Meysenberg of Paris. Three years later she was transferred to the instruction of Franz Liszt, of whom she became one of the most distinguished pupils. Liszt believed that his young scholar had the ability to become one of the greatest pianists of the age, and was urgent that she should devote herself to this branch of the musical art. Her health, however, was not equal to the unremitting sedentary confinement of piano practice, though she attained a degree of skill which enabled her to play with much success as a solo performer at the concerts of her sister Maria. Her voice had also developed remarkable quality during the time when she was devoting her energies in another direction, and her proud father was wont to say, whenever a buzz of ecstatic pleasure over the singing of Mme. Malibran met his ear, "There is a younger sister who is a greater genius than she." It is more than probable that Pauline Garcia, as a singer, owed an inestimable debt to Pauline Garcia as a player, and that her accuracy and brilliancy of musical method were, in large measure, the outcome of her training under the king of modern pianists.

Manuel Garcia died when Pauline was but eleven years old, and the question of her daughter's further musical education was left to Mme. Garcia. The celebrated tenor singer, Adolphe Nourrit, one of the famous lights of the French stage, who had been a favorite pupil of Garcia, showed great kindness to the widow and her daughter. Anxious to promote the interests of the young girl, he proposed that she should take lessons from Eossini, and that great _maestro_ consented. Nourrit's delight at this piece of good luck, however, was quickly checked. Mme. Garcia firmly declined, and said that if her son Manuel could not come to her from Rome for the purpose of training Pauline's voice, she herself was equal to the task, knowing the principles on which the Garcia school of the voice was founded. The systems of Rossini and Garcia were radically different, the one stopping at florid grace of vocalization, while the other aimed at a radical and profound culture of all the resources of the voice.

It may be said, however, that Pauline Garcia was self-educated as a vocalist. Her mother's removal to Brussels, her brother's absence in Italy, and the wandering life of Mme. Malibran practically threw her on her own resources. She was admirably fitted for self-culture. Ardent, resolute, industrious, thoroughly grounded in the soundest of art methods, and marvelously gifted in musical intelligence, she applied herself to her vocal studies with abounding enthusiasm, without instruction other than the judicious counsels of her mother. She had her eyes fixed on a great goal, and this she pursued without rest or turning from her path. She exhausted the _solfeggi_ which her father had written out for her sister Maria, and when this laborious discipline was done she determined to compose others for herself. She had already learned harmony and counterpoint from Reicha at the Paris Conservatoire, and these she now found occasion to put in practice. She copied all the melodies of Schubert, of whom she was a passionate admirer, and thought no toil too great which promoted her musical growth. Her labor was a labor of love, and all the ardor of her nature was poured into it. Music was not the sole accomplishment in which she became skilled. Unassisted by teaching, she, like Malibran, learned to sketch and paint in oil and water-colors, and found many spare moments in the midst of an incessant art-training, which looked to the lyric stage, to devote to literature. All this denotes a remarkable nature, fit to overcome every difficulty and rise to the topmost shining peaks of artistic greatness. What she did our sketch will further relate.

II.

Pauline Garcia was just sixteen when, panting with an irrepressible sense of her own powers, she exclaimed, "_Ed io anclû son cantatrice_." Her first public appearance was worthy of the great name she afterward won. It was at a concert given in Brussels, on December 15, 1837, for the benefit of a charity, and De Bériot made his first appearance on this occasion after the death of Mme. Malibran. The court and most distinguished people of Belgium were present on this occasion, and so great was the impression made on musicians that the Philharmonic Society caused two medals to be struck for De Bériot and Mlle. Garcia, the mold of which was broken immediately. Pauline Garcia, in company with De Bériot, gave a series of concerts through Belgium and Germany, and it soon became evident that a new star of the first magnitude was rising in the musical firmament. In Germany many splendid gifts were showered on her. The Queen of Prussia sent her a superb suite of emeralds, and Mme. Sontag, with whom she sang at Frankfort, gave the young cantatrice a valuable testimonial, which was alike an expression of her admiration of Pauline Garcia and a memento of her regard for the name of the great Malibran, whose passionate strains had hardly ceased lingering in the ears of Europe. Paris first gathered its musical forces to hear the new singer at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, December 15, 1838, eager to compare her with Malibran. Among other numbers on the concert programme, she gave a very difficult air by Costa, which had been a favorite song of her sister's, an _aria bravura_ by De Bériot, and the "Cadence du Diable," imitated from "Tartini's Dream," which she accompanied with marvelous skill and delicacy. She shortly appeared again, and she was supported by Rubini, Lablache, and Ivanhoff. The Parisian critics recognized the precision, boldness, and brilliancy of her musical style in the most unstinted expressions of praise. But England was the country selected by her for the theatrical _début_ toward which her ambition burned--England, which dearly loved the name of Garcia, so resplendent in the art-career of Mme. Malibran.

Her appearance in the London world was under peculiar conditions, which, while they would enhance the greatness of success, would be almost certainly fatal to anything short of the highest order of ability. The meteoric luster of Mali-bran's dazzling career was still fresh in the eyes of the public. The Italian stage was filled by Mme. Grisi, who, in personal beauty and voice, was held nearly matchless, and had an established hold on the public favor. Another great singer, Mme. Persiani, reigned through the incomparable finish of her vocalization, and the musical world of London was full of distinguished artists, whose names have stood firm as landmarks in the art. The new Garcia, who dashed so boldly into the lists, was a young, untried, inexperienced girl, who had never yet appeared in opera. One can fancy the excitement and curiosity when Pauline stepped before the footlights of the King's Theatre, May 9, 1839, as _Desdemona_ in "Otello," which had been the vehicle of Malibran's first introduction to the English public. The reminiscence of an eminent critic, who was present, will be interesting. "Nothing stranger, more incomplete in its completeness, more unspeakably indicating a new and masterful artist can be recorded than that first appearance. She looked older than her years; her frame (then a mere reed) quivered this way and that; her character dress seemed to puzzle her, and the motion of her hands as much. Her voice was hardly settled even within its own after conditions; and yet, juaradoxical as it may seem, she was at ease on the stage; because she brought thither instinct for acting, experience of music, knowledge how to sing, and consummate intelligence. There could be no doubt, with any one who saw that _Desdemona_ on that night, that another great career was begun.... All the Malibran fire, courage, and accomplishment were in it, and (some of us fancied) something more beside."