"Si Pauline Garcia a la voix de sa sœur, elle en a l'âme en même temps, et, sans la moindre imitation, c'est le même génie.... Elle chante comme elle respire.... Sa physionomie, pleine d'expression, change avec une rapidité prodigieuse, avec une liberté extrème, non seulement selon le morceau, mais encore selon la phrase qu'elle exécute. Avant d'exprimer, elle sent."
Again, Richard Wagner pays a remarkable tribute to her powers in a letter to L. Uhl relating to his stay in Paris in 1859, and to the attempts to arrange for the production of "Tristan" there. In it the composer recounts how the same difficulty of reading the rôles of this work was encountered in Germany, which militated much against its production. "Madame Viardot," he writes, "expressed to me one day her astonishment that in Germany people always spoke of this difficulty of reading the music of 'Tristan.' She asked me if in Germany the artists were not then musicians? I for my part hardly know how to enlighten her on this point; for this grand artiste sang through at sight, with the most perfect expression, a whole act of the rôle of Isolda."
Such was the artiste whose début in London in 1839 was followed by so brilliant a career.
We now come to 1840—a year made noteworthy in the life of Garcia by another important advance in his career.
Since his appointment to a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire, his reputation had continued to be steadily consolidated, and his clientèle included, besides those who were being trained for the musical profession, a great number of amateur pupils, among whom were to be found not only some of the most distinguished names in Paris, but many members of the royal family itself. Throughout this period he had been steadily working to increase his knowledge relative to the mechanism of the voice, and at last, in 1840, he found that his investigations had reached a point at which they might be found of interest to others.
Accordingly, in this year he set down the result of his studies in the classical paper which he submitted to the Académie des Sciences de France under the title, "Mémoire sur la voix humaine," to which was added the rather odd-sounding subtitle, "Description des produits du phonateur humain." In it he embodied the various discoveries which he had made relating to the larynx.
Among the principal points to which he drew attention were the following:—
(1) The head voice does not necessarily begin where the chest voice ends, and a certain number of notes can be produced in either register.
(2) The chest voice and the head voice are produced by a special and spontaneous modification of the vocal organs, and the exhaustion of the air contained in the chest is more rapid in the proportion of four to three in the production of a head than a chest note.
(3) The voice can produce the same sounds in two different timbres—the clear or open, and the sombre or closed.