Great Singers, Second Series | Page 3

Career.--Manuel Garcia's Operatic Enterprise in New
York.--Maria Garcia is inveigled into marrying M. Malibran.--Failure
of the Garcia Opera, and Maria's Separation from her Husband.--She
makes her _Début_ in Paris with Great Success.--Madame Malibran's
Characteristics as a Singer, a Genius, and a Woman.--Anecdotes of her
Generosity and Kindness.--She sings in a Great London
Engagement.--Her Eccentric and Daring Methods excite Severe
Criticism.--Her Reckless Expenditure of Strength in the Pursuit of her
Profession or Pleasures.--Madame Malibran's Attachment to De
Bériot.--Anecdotes of her Public and Private Career.--Malibran in Italy,
where she becomes the Popular Idol.--Her Last London
Engagement.--Her Death at Manchester during the Great Musical

Festival.
I.
With the name of Malibran there is associated an interest, alike
personal and artistic, rarely equaled and certainly unsurpassed among
the traditions which make the records of the lyric stage so fascinating.
Daring originality stamped her life as a woman, her career as an artist,
and the brightness with which her star shone through a brief and stormy
history had something akin in it to the dazzling but capricious passage
of a meteor. If Pasta was the Siddons of the lyric drama,
unapproachable in its more severe and tragic phases, Malibran
represented its Garrick. Brilliant, creative, and versatile, she sang
equally well in all styles of music, and no strain on her resources
seemed to overtax the power of an artistic imagination which delighted
in vanquishing obstacles and transforming native defects into new
beauties, an attribute of genius which she shared in equal degree with
Pasta, though it took on a different manifestation.
This great singer belonged to a Spanish family of musicians, who have
been well characterized as "representative artists, whose power, genius,
and originality have impressed a permanent trace on the record of the
methods of vocal execution and ornament." Her father, Manuel Vicente
Garcia, at the age of seventeen, was already well known as composer,
singer, actor, and conductor. His pieces, short comic operas, had a great
popularity in Spain, and were not only bright and inventive, but marked
by thorough musical workmanship. A month after he made his _début_
in Paris, in 1811, he had become the chief singer, and sang for three
years under the operatic regime which shared the general splendor of
Napoleon's court. He was afterward appointed first tenor at Naples by
King Joachim Munit, and there produced his opera of "Califo di
Bagdad," which met with great success. It was here that the child Maria,
then only five years old, made her first public appearance in one of
Paer's operas, and here that she received her first lessons in music from
M. Panseron and the composer Hérold. When Garcia quitted Italy in
1816, he sang with Catalani in Paris, but, as that jealous artist admitted
no bright star near her own, Garcia soon left the troupe, and went to

London in the spring of 1818. He oscillated between the two countries
for several years, and was the first brilliant exponent of the Rossinian
music in two great capitals, as his training and method were peculiarly
fitted to this school. The indomitable energy and ambition which he
transmitted to his daughters, who were to become such distinguished
ornaments of the stage, were not contented with making their possessor
a great executant, for he continued to produce operas, several of which
were put on the stage in Paris with notable success. Garcia's name as a
teacher commenced about the year 1823 to overshadow his reputation
as a singer. In the one he had rivals, in the other he was peerless. His
school of singing quickly became famous, though he continued to
appear on the stage, and to pour forth operas of more than average
merit.
The education of his daughter Maria, born at Paris, March 24, 1808,
had always been a matter of paternal solicitude. A delicate, sensitive,
and willful child, she had been so humored and petted at the
convent-school of Hammersmith, where she was first placed, that she
developed a caprice and a recklessness which made her return to the
house of her stern and imperious father doubly painful, lier experience
was a severe one, and Manuel Garcia was more pitiless to his daughter
than to other pupils. Already at this period Maria spoke with ease
Spanish, Italian, French, and English, to which she afterward added
German. The Garcia household was a strange one. The Spanish
musician was a tyrant in his home, and a savage temper, which had but
few streaks of tenderness, frequently vented itself in blows and
brutality, in spite of the remarkable musical facility with which Maria
appropriated teaching, and the brilliant gifts which would have flattered
the pride and softened the sympathies of a more gentle and complacent
parent. The young girl, in spite of her prodigious instinct for art and her
splendid intelligence, had a