Some four years after the appearance of Madame Pasta another star of the first magnitude appeared,—Henrietta Sontag, a beautiful and fascinating woman, and, as some say, the greatest German singer of the century. Nature gave her a pure soprano voice of rare and delicate quality, united with incomparable sweetness. Essentially a singer and not a declamatory artist, the sentiment of grace was carried to such a height in her art that it became equivalent to the more robust passion and force which distinguished some of her great contemporaries.
She began singing minor parts at the theatre at the early age of eight, and her regular début in opera took place when she was only fifteen. "She appeared to sing," we are told, "with the volubility of a bird, and to experience the pleasure she imparted." Her great art lay in rendering pleasing whatever[{46}] she did. The ear was never disturbed by a harsh note.
The most romantic stories circulated about the adoration lavished upon her by men of rank and wealth, and it was reported that no singer ever had so many offers of marriage from people of exalted station. But she had met in Berlin a Piedmontese nobleman, Count Rossi, to whom she became affianced, and Mlle. Sontag refused all the flattering overtures made by her admirers. One of her most ardent lovers was De Beriot, the great violinist, who, on his rejection, fell into a deep state of despondency, from which the fascinations of the beautiful Malibran at length roused him. Sontag's union with Rossi was for a long time kept secret on account of the objections of his family, but she retired from the stage and lived nearly twenty years of happy life in the various capitals of Europe, to which her husband, attached to the Sardinian legation, was accredited.[{47}] At length, in 1848, her fortune was swept away in the political revolution, and she announced her intention of returning to the stage. She was at once offered £17,000 for the season at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, and on her first appearance it was evident that time had but developed the artist. What little her voice had lost was more than compensated for by the deeper passion and feeling which permeated her efforts, and she was rapturously greeted. In 1852 she made a tour of the large cities of the United States, where she quickly established herself as one of the greatest favorites, in spite of the fact that Malibran and Jenny Lind had preceded her, and that the country had hardly recovered from the Lind mania. In New Orleans she entered into an engagement to sing in the City of Mexico; but while her agent was absent in Europe, gathering together an operatic company, she was seized with cholera and died in a few hours.[{48}]
Joseph Staudigl, who was born in 1807, at Wollersdorf, Austria, was one of the most distinguished and accomplished bassos of the first half of this century. He was a man of varied gifts and ardent temperament, frank, open, and amiable. In 1825 he entered upon his novitiate in the Benedictine monastery at Melk, but two years later he went to Vienna to study surgery. Here his funds gave out, and he was glad to sing in the chorus at the Kärnthnerthor Theatre. In due course the opportunity offered for him to take leading parts, and he soon gained a great reputation. He was also a great singer of church music and oratorio, for which branches of music he had an inborn love.
Staudigl's last appearance took place in 1856, on Palm Sunday, for a few days later he became a victim to insanity, from which he never recovered. He made repeated tours abroad, and was much admired wherever he went. As a singer of Schubert's Lieder he[{49}] was without a rival, and his performances of the "Erlkönig," the "Wanderer," and "Aufenthalt" were considered wonderful. His death occurred in 1861, and his funeral was the occasion of a great demonstration.
Manuel Garcia, the tenor, had two daughters who both achieved the highest distinction on the operatic stage. The eldest, Maria Felicien, became Madame Malibran, and she is mentioned to-day as one of the most wonderful operatic singers that the world has produced. Daring originality stamped her life as a woman and 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.
As a child she was delicate, sensitive, and self-willed, and she had a prodigious instinct for art. Nevertheless, her voice was peculiarly intractable, being thin in the upper notes, veiled in the middle tones, and her[{50}] intonation very imperfect. On leaving school she was taken in hand by her father, who was more pitiless to her than to his other pupils. He understood her disposition thoroughly, and said that she could never become great except at the price of much suffering, for her proud and stubborn spirit required an iron hand to control it.
Soon after making her début she went with her father to America, for he had conceived a project for establishing opera in the United States. His company consisted of himself, Madame Garcia, a son, and his daughter. Maria's charming voice and personal fascination held the public spellbound, and raised the delight of opera-goers to a wild pitch of enthusiasm. While in New York, a French merchant, M. François Eugene Malibran, fell passionately in love with her, and she, being sick of her father's brutality, and the supposed great fortune of Malibran dazzling her imagination, married[{51}] him, though in opposition to her father's will. A few weeks after the marriage M. Malibran was a bankrupt, and imprisoned for debt, and his bride discovered that she had been cheated by a cunning scoundrel, who had calculated on saving himself from poverty by dependence on the stage earnings of his wife. Garcia and the rest of his family went to Mexico, where he succeeded in losing his fortune. Madame Malibran remained in New York with her husband; but at the end of five months she wearied of her hard fate, and, leaving him, returned to Paris. Here she soon had the world at her feet, for the novelty and richness of her style of execution set her apart from all other singers as a woman of splendid and inventive genius.
Her voice was a mezzo-soprano, naturally full of defects, and, to the very last, she was obliged to go through her exercises every day to keep it flexible; but by the tremendously[{52}] severe discipline to which her father's teaching subjected her, its range extended so that it finally reached a compass of three octaves. Her high notes had an indescribable brilliancy, and her low tones were so soft, sweet, and heart-searching that they thrilled with every varying phase of her sensibilities.
Mr. Chorley writes: "She may not have been beautiful, but she was better than beautiful, insomuch as a speaking, Spanish, human countenance is ten times more fascinating than many a faultless angel face, such as Guido could paint. There was a health of tint, with but a slight touch of the yellow rose in her complexion, a great mobility of expression in her features, an honest, direct brightness of the eye, a refinement in the form of her head, and the set of it on her shoulders."