Great Singers, Second Series | Page 3

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 B��riot.--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 _d��but_ 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 H��rold. 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 peculiarly intractable organ. The lower notes of the voice were very imperfect, the upper tones thin, disagreeable, and hard, the middle veiled, and her intonation so doubtful that it almost indicated an imperfect ear. She would sometimes sing so badly that her father would quit the piano precipitately and retreat