-one might even
say, sarcastically enjoying the scene. Among the audience, however,
was another gifted woman, who might far more legitimately have been
shocked at the utter wreck of every musical means of expression in the
singer--who might have been more naturally forgiven, if some humour of
self-glorification had made her severely just--not worse--to an old
_prima donna_;--I mean Madame Viardot.--Then, and not till then, she
was hearing Madame Pasta.--But Truth will always answer to the appeal
of Truth. Dismal as was the spectacle--broken, hoarse, and destroyed
as was the voice--the great style of the singer spoke to the great
singer. The first scene was Ann Boleyn's duet with Jane Seymour. The
old spirit was heard and seen in Madame Pasta's _Sorgi!_ and the
gesture with which she signed to her penitent rival to rise. Later,
she attempted the final mad scene of the opera--that most complicated
and brilliant among the mad scenes on the modern musical stage--with
its two _cantabile_ movements, its snatches of recitative, and its
_bravura_ of despair, which may be appealed to as an example of vocal
display, till then unparagoned, when turned to the account of frenzy,
not frivolity--perhaps as such commissioned by the superb creative
artist.--By that time, tired, unprepared, in ruin as she was, she had
rallied a little. When--on Ann Boleyn's hearing the coronation music
of her rival, the heroine searches for her own crown on her
brow--Madame Pasta turned in the direction of the festive sounds, the
old irresistible charm broke out;--nay, even in the final song, with
its _roulades_, and its scales of shakes, ascending by a semi-tone,
the consummate vocalist and tragedian, able to combine form with
meaning--the moment of the situation, with such personal and musical
display as form an integral part of operatic art--was indicated: at
least to the apprehension of a younger artist.--'You are right!' was
Madame Viardot's quick and heartfelt response (her eyes were full of
tears) to a friend beside her--'You are right! It is like the
_Cenacolo_ of Da Vinci at Milan--a wreck of a picture, but the
picture is the greatest picture in the world!'"

The great Mme. Viardot herself, whose intractable voice and noble
stage presence inevitably remind one of Mme. Pasta, took no chances
with fate. The friend of Alfred de Musset, the model for George Sand's
"Consuelo," the "creator" of Fides in _Le Prophete_, and the singer
who, in the reviv