d. To perform such a work as that
of Cherubini required Pasta's tragic genius united with the voice of
a Catalani, made, as it were, of adamant and gold. To such an ideal
equipment of powers, Titiens approached more nearly than any other
singer who had ever assayed the _role_ in more recent times. One of
the noblest operas ever written, it has been relegated to the musical
lumber-room on account of the almost unparalleled difficulties which it
presents.

It is not desirable to catalogue the continued achievements of Mlle.
Titiens season by season in England, which country she had adopted as
her permanent home. She had achieved her place and settled the character
of her fame. Year after year she shone before the musical world of
London, to which all the greatest singers of the world resort to obtain
their final and greatest laurels, without finding her equal in the
highest walks of the lyric stage. As her voice through incessant work
lost something of its primal bloom, Mlle. Titiens confined her
repertory to a few operas such as "Trovatore," "Norma," "Don Giovanni,"
"Semiramide," etc., where dramatic greatness is even more essential than
those dulcet tones so apt to vanish with the passage of youth. As an
oratorio singer, she held a place to the last unequaled in musical
annals.

In 1875 Mlle. Titiens visited America, on a concert and operatic
tour which embraced the principal cities of the country. She was well
received, but failed, through the very conditions and peculiarities of
her genius, to make that marked impression on the public mind which
had sometimes, perhaps, been achieved by artists of more shallow and
meretricious graces. The voice of Mlle. Titiens had begun to show the
friction of years, and though her wonderful skill as a vocalist covered
up such defects in large measure, it was very evident that the greatest
of recent German singers had passed the zenith of her fascination as
a vocalist. But the grand style, the consummate breadth and skill in
phrasing, that gradation of effects by which the intention of a composer
is fully manifested, the truth and nobility of declamation, that repose
and dignity of action by which dramatic purpose reaches its goal
without a taint of violence or extravagance--in a word, all those great
qualities where the artist separates from the mere vocalist were
so finely manifested as to gain the deepest admiration of the
_cognoscenti_, and justify in the American mind the great