perfect taste and exquisite sensibility. If Fétis is to be trusted, Garat was almost the first singer to study the æsthetic plan of an aria and design his reading of it in accordance therewith. This can hardly be quite correct, however, for it was in the purely musical features of their delivery that the master singers of the preceding epoch had excelled.
In 1822, six years before Catalani’s retirement, and one year before the death of Garat, two vocal comets flashed upon the firmament of opera. One was that strangely gifted and unequal genius, Giuditta Pasta, and the other that superb musical tragedienne, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient. The latter startled the world with her imposing and passionate impersonation of Beethoven’s Lenore in the revival of Fidelio in 1822. A long career of dramatic song was hers. She was great in several roles, such as Adrianno in Wagner’s Rienzi, Euryanthe, Senta, and Preciosa. She failed as Venus in Tannhäuser. Wagner said she did not like the rôle. Schroeder-Devrient was not a singer; she was a dramatic artist with extraordinary declamatory force. She was the forerunner of the early school of Wagner interpreters, who knew little or nothing of the graces of song as practiced by the great artists of the Catalani type.
Pasta was a singer more closely approaching the type of the great dramatic sopranos of to-day. She united admirable singing with tragic acting of the classic style. She was undoubtedly the Lilli Lehmann of her time. If she had been called upon to sing rôles of the early Wagnerian kind, she would have succeeded in them. For her Donizetti wrote Anna Bolena, Bellini La Sonnambula and Norma,—her greatest part,— and Pacini Niobe.
With the advent of the works of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and their contemporaries, the demands upon singers changed. Certainly when Beethoven wrote Fidelio he had no thought of catering to the old appetite for exquisite finish and brilliant execution. He was seeking for the embodiment of tragic emotion; hence action, facial expression, and declamatory force had to contribute to the achievement of his end at the sacrifice of that bodily repose which made the singing of Farinelli and his peers what it was. Close upon the heels of Beethoven came Weber with his dramatic operas, and he too dragged singing as then understood from its pedestal. Wagner, as we well know, went still farther; but it was long after the period of the reign of Donizetti when Wagner came into his own.
We are far in these complacent days from regarding Bellini and Donizetti as “cocksparrow revolutionaries,” but they cut niches in the steps of progress just as assuredly as did Beethoven and Wagner. Their niches, however, were of a different kind. These masters were in the line of succession of the old Neapolitan school of composition, the school which sought always to conserve in opera the element of pure vocal beauty; but they yielded to the growing demand for dramatic intensity, and in so doing sacrificed some of the reposeful features necessary to the art of perfect singing.
The recitative of their operas was far more animated and varied than that of the earlier works. Much less of it was of the secco kind, the kind supported merely by chords on a harpsichord or a few stringed instruments. The new combination of instrumented recitative with aria parlante and aria di bravura, called the “dramatic scene,” demanded a wider range of expression and style than singers had hitherto sought to put into one number. It aimed chiefly at dramatic color, and it robbed the singer of those nicely contrived opportunities for the preparation of breathing which the old arias afforded.
Yet these were the days of singers who to us seem to be creations of overheated fancy. What marvels have we poor twentieth-century opera-goers not heard of Grisi, Mario, Malibran, Rubini, Tam-
