Part 22 (1/2)
”It is well known,” he says, ”that her voice is of a most uncommon quality, and capable of exertions almost supernatural. Her throat seems endued (as has been remarked by medical men) with a power of expansion and muscular motion by no means usual, and when she throws out all her voice to the utmost, it has a volume and strength that are quite surprising, while its agility in divisions, running up and down the scale in semi-tones, and its compa.s.s in jumping over two octaves at once, are equally astonis.h.i.+ng. It were to be wished she was less lavish in the display of these wonderful powers, and sought to please more than to surprise; but her taste is vicious, her excessive love of ornament spoiling every simple air, and her greatest delight (indeed her chief merit) being in songs of a bold and spirited character, where much is left to her discretion (or indiscretion) without being confined by accompaniment, but in which she can indulge in _ad libitum_ pa.s.sages with a luxuriance and redundancy no other singer ever possessed, or if possessing, ever practised, and which she carries to a fantastical excess. She is fond of singing variations on some known simple air, and latterly has pushed this taste to the very height of absurdity, by singing, even without words, variations composed for the fiddle.”
Allusion is here doubtless made to the _air varie_ by Pierre Rode, the violinist, which, from Catalani to Alboni and our own Louisa Pyne, has been such a favourite show-piece with all vocalists of brilliant executive powers, more especially in England. The vocal variations on Rode's air, however, were written in London, specially for Catalani, by Drouet the flute-player.
Catalani returned to Paris in October, 1815, when there was no longer any chance of Napoleon reproaching her for her abrupt departure nine years before. She solicited and obtained the ”privilege” of the Italian theatre; but here the celebrated system of her husband, M. Valabreque (in which the best possible operatic company consisted only of _ma femme et trois ou quatre poupees_) quite broke down. Madame Catalani gave up the theatre, with the subvention of 160,000 francs allowed her by the government, in 1818, M. Valabreque having previously enunciated in a pamphlet the reasons which led to this abandonment. Great expenses had been incurred in fitting up the theatre, and, moreover, the management had been forced to pay its rent. The pamphlet concluded with a paragraph which was scarcely civil on the part of a foreigner who had been most hospitably received, towards a nation situated as France was just then.
It is sufficiently curious to be quoted.
[Sidenote: M. VALABREQUE.]
”Consider, moreover,” said the discomforted director, or rather the discomforted husband of the directress, ”that in the time when several provinces beyond the mountains belonged to France, twenty thousand Italians were constantly attracted to the capital and supplied numerous audiences for the Italian theatre; that, moreover, the artists who were chiefly remarked at the theatres of Milan, Florence, Venice and Genoa, could be engaged for Paris by order of the government, and that in such a case the administration was reimbursed for a portion of the extra engagements.”
Catalani had left the King's Theatre in 1813, two years before she a.s.sumed the management of the Italian Theatre of Paris. With some brief intervals she had been singing in London since 1806, and after quitting England, she was for many years without appearing on any stage, if we except the short period during which she directed the Theatre Feydau.
Her terms were so inordinate that managers were naturally afraid of them, and Catalani found it more to her advantage to travel about Europe, giving concerts at which she was the sole performer of importance, than to accept such an engagement as could be offered to her at a theatre. She gave several concerts of this kind in England, whither she returned twice after she had ceased to appear at the Opera. She is said to have obtained more success in England than in any other country, and least of all in Italy.
When she appeared at the King's Theatre in 1824, and sang in Mayer's _Fanatico per la Musica_, the frequenters of the Opera, who remembered her performance in the same work eighteen years before, were surprised that so long an interval had produced so little change in the singer.
The success of the first night was prodigious; but Mr. Ebers (in his ”Seven Years of the King's Theatre”), tells us that ”repet.i.tions of this opera, again and again, diminished the audiences most perceptibly, though some new air was on each performance introduced, to display the power of the Catalani. * * * In this opera the sweet and soothing voice of Caradori was an agreeable relief to the bewildering force of the great wonder.”
In one season of four months in London, Madame Catalani, by her system of concerts, gained upwards of ten thousand pounds, and doubled that sum during a subsequent tour in the provinces, in Ireland and Scotland. She sang for the last time in public at Dublin, in 1828.
[Sidenote: CATALANI'S AGREEMENT]
As to the sort of engagement she approved of, some notion may be formed from the following draft of a contract submitted by her to Mr. Ebers in 1826:----
”_Conditions between Mr. Ebers and M. P. de Valabreque._
”1. Every box and every admission shall be considered as belonging to the management. The free admissions shall be given with paper orders, and differently shaped from the paid tickets. Their number shall be limited. The manager, as well as Madame Catalani, shall each have a good box.
”2. Madame Catalani shall choose and direct the operas in which she is to sing; she shall likewise have the choice of the performers in them; she will have no orders to receive from any one; she will find all her own dresses.
”3. Madame Catalani shall have two benefits, to be divided with the manager; Madame Catalani's share shall be free: she will fix her own days.
”4. Madame Catalani and her husband shall have a right to superintend the receipts.
”5. Every six weeks Madame Catalani shall receive the payment of her share of the receipts, and of the subscription.
”6. Madame Catalani shall sing at no other place but the King's Theatre, during the season; in the concerts or oratorios, where she may sing, she will be ent.i.tled to no other share but that specified as under.
”7. During the season, Madame Catalani shall be at liberty to go to Bath, Oxford, or Cambridge.
”8. Madame Catalani shall not sing oftener than her health will allow her. She promises to contribute to the utmost of her power to the good of the theatre. On his side, Mr. Ebers engages to treat Madame Catalani with every possible care.
”9. This engagement, and these conditions, will be binding for this season, which will begin and end and continue during all the seasons that the theatre shall be under the management of Mr.
Ebers, unless Madame Catalani's health, or state of her voice, should not allow her to continue.
[Sidenote: CATALANI'S AGREEMENT]