I.

With the name of Malibran there is associated an interest, alike
personal and artistic, rarely equaled and certainly unsurpassed among
the traditions which make the records of the lyric stage so fascinating.
Daring originality stamped her life as a woman, 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. If Pasta was the Siddons of the lyric drama, unapproachable
in its more severe and tragic phases, Malibran represented its Garrick.
Brilliant, creative, and versatile, she sang equally well in all styles
of music, and no strain on her resources seemed to overtax the power
of an artistic imagination which delighted in vanquishing obstacles and
transforming native defects into new beauties, an attribute of genius
which she shared in equal degree with Pasta, though it took on a
different manifestation.

This great singer belonged to a Spanish family of musicians, who have
been well characterized as "representative artists, whose power, genius,
and originality have impressed a permanent trace on the record of the
methods of vocal execution and ornament." Her father, Manuel Vicente
Garcia, at the age of seventeen, was already well known as composer,
singer, actor, and conductor. His pieces, short comic operas, had a
great popularity in Spain, and were not only bright and inventive,
but marked by thorough musical workmanship. A month after he made his
_debut_ in Paris, in 1811, he had become the chief singer, and sang
for three years under the operatic _regime_ which shared the general
splendor of Napoleon's court. He was afterward appointed first tenor at
Naples by King Joachim Munit, and there produced his opera of "Califo di
Bagdad," which met with great success. It was here that the child Maria,
then only five years old, made her first public appearance in one of
Paer's operas, and here that she received her first lessons in music
from M. Panseron and the composer Herold. When Garcia quitted Italy
in 1816, he sang with Catalani in Paris, but, as that jealous artist
admitted no bright star near her own, Garcia soon left the troupe, and
went to London in the spring of 1818. He oscillated between the two
countries for several years, and was the first brilliant exponent of the
Rossinian music in two great capitals, as his training and method were
peculiarly fitted to this school. The i