an operatic company, she
was seized with cholera and died in a few hours.

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 Kaernthnerthor 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 was without a rival, and
his performances of the "Erlkoenig," 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 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 debut 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,