t otherwise striking. In demeanor
she was artless, unaffected and ladylike. Romantic stories were
continually in circulation regarding suitors for her hand. As the wife
of Count Rossi, an attache of the Sardinian legation, she retired to
private life in 1830, and passed many happy years with her husband in
various capitols of Europe. When, in 1848, owing to financial shipwreck,
she returned to the stage her voice still charmed by its exquisite
purity, spirituelle quality and supreme finish. In 1852 she came to
America and created an immense furore in the musical and fashionable
world. She died of cholera in Mexico in 1854.

Born the same year as Madame Sontag was Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient,
one of the world's noblest interpreters of German opera and German
Lieder, although surpassed by others in vocal resources. She grew up on
the stage, and was trained by her father, Friedrich Schroeder, a baritone
singer, and her mother, Sophie Schroeder, known as the "Siddons of
Germany." Her dramatic soprano was capable of producing the most tender,
powerful, truthful and intensely thrilling effects, although it was not
specially tractable and was at times even harsh. It was she who by her
magnificent interpretation of Leonore, in Beethoven's "Fidelio," first
revealed the beauty of the part to the public. In Wagner's operas she
appeared as Senta, in the "Flying Dutchman"; Venus, in "Tannhaeuser," and
actually created the role of Adriano Colonna, in "Rienzi." Goethe, who
had earlier failed to appreciate Schubert's matchless setting to his
"Erl King," when he heard Madame Schroeder-Devrient sing it, exclaimed:
"Had music instead of words been my vehicle of thought, it is thus I
should have framed the legend." She died in 1860.

Full of caprice, radiating the fire of genius, wayward and playful as a
child, Maria Felicita Malibran swept like a dazzling meteor across the
musical firmament. M. Arthur Pougin thus epitomizes her story:

"Daughter of a Spaniard, born in France, married in America, died in
England, buried in Belgium. Comedienne at five, married at seventeen,
dead at twenty-eight--immortal. Beautiful, brilliant, gay as a ray of
sunlight, with frequent shadings of melancholy; heart full of warmth and
abandon; devoted to the point of sacrifice; courageous to temerity;
ardent for pleasure as for work; with a will and energy indomitable. A
singer without a peer, and a lyric tragedienne capable of exciting the
instinctive enth