Great Singers, Second Series | Page 9

want of funds.
Mme. Malibran promised to sing at a concert which some of the
leading vocalists gave for her benefit. The name of Malibran of course
drew a crowd, and the room was filled; but she did not appear, and at
last they were obliged to commence the concert. The entertainment was
half over when she came, and approached the young girl, saying to her
in a low voice: "I am a little late, my dear, but the public will lose
nothing, for I will sing all the pieces announced. In addition, as I
promised you all my evening, I will keep my word. I went to sing in a
concert at the house of the Duc d'Orléans, where I received three
hundred francs. They belong to you. Take them."

III.
In April of the same year during which Mme. Malibran had established
herself so firmly in the admiration of the Parisian world, she accepted
an engagement for the summer months with La-porte of the King's
Theatre in London. She made her _début_ in the character of
Desdemona, a part which had already been firmly fixed in the notions
of the musical public by the two differing conceptions of Pasta and
Sontag. The opera had been originally written for Mme. Colbran,
Rossini's wife, and when it was revived for Pasta that great lyric
tragedienne had embodied in it a grand, stormy, passionate style, suited
to the genre of her genius. Mme. Sontag, on the other hand, fashioned
her impersonation from the side of delicate sentiment and tenderness,
and Malibran had a difficult task in shaping the conception after an
ideal which should escape the reproach of imitation. Her version was
full of electric touches and rapid alternations of feeling, but at times it
bordered on the sensational and extravagant. Her fiery vehemence was
often felt to be inconsistent with the tenderness of the heroine. The
critics, while admitting the varied and original beauties of her reading,
were yet severe in their condemnation of some of its features. Mme.
Malibran, however, urged that her action was what she would have
manifested in the actual situations. "I remember once," says the
Countess De Merlin, "a friend advised her not to make Otello pursue
her so long when he was about to kill her. Her answer was: 'You are
right; it is not elegant, I admit; but, when once I fairly enter into my
character, I never think of effects, but imagine myself actually the
person I represent. I can assure you that in the last scene of Desdemona
I often feel as if I were really about to be murdered, and act
accordingly.' Donzelli used to be much annoyed by Mme. Malibran not
determining beforehand how he was to seize her; she often gave him a
regular chase. Though he was one of the best-tempered men in the
world, I recollect him one evening being seriously angry. Desdemona
had, according to custom, repeatedly escaped from his grasp; in
pursuing her, he stumbled, and slightly wounded himself with the
dagger he brandished. It was the only time I ever saw him in a passion."
She next appeared successively as _Rosina, Ni-netta, and Tancredi_,

winning fresh laurels in them all, not only by her superb skill in
vocalizing, but by her versatility of dramatic conception and the ease
with which she entered into the most opposite phases of feeling and
motive. She covered Rossini's elaborate fioriture with a fresh profusion
of ornament, but always with a dexterity which saved it from the
reproach of being overladen. She performed Semiramide with Mme.
Pisaroni, and played Zerlina to Sontag's Donna Anna. Her habit of
treating such dramatic parts as _Ninetta, Zerlina_, and Amina was the
occasion of keen controversy among the critics of the time. Entirely
averse to the conventional method of idealizing the character of the
country girl out of all semblance to nature, Malibran was essentially
realistic in preserving the rusticity, awkwardness, and naivete of
peasant-life. One critic argued: "It is by no means rare to discover in
the humblest walk of life an inborn grace and delicacy of Nature's own
implanting; and such assuredly is the model from which characters like
Ninetta and Zerlina ought to be copied." But there were others who saw
in the vigor, breadth, and verisimilitude of Mme. Malibran's stage
portraits of the peasant wench the truest and finest dramatic justice. A
great singer of our own age, Mme. Pauline Lucca, seems to have
modeled her performances of the operatic rustic after the same method.
In such characters as __Susanna in the "Nozze di Figaro," and Fidalma
in Cimarosa's "Il Matrimonio Segreto," her talent for lyric comedy
impressed the cognoscenti of London with irresistible power. She was
fascinated by the ludicrous, and was wont to say that she was anxious