of
her day) of a flourish like this:

[Sidenote: _La Bastardella's flourish._]

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote: _Character of the opera a century and a half ago._]

[Sidenote: _Music and dramatic expression._]

I marvel, I say, at the skill, the gifts, and the training which could
accomplish such feats, but I would not have them back again if they
were to be employed in the old service. When Senesino, Farinelli,
Sassarelli, Ferri, and their tribe dominated the stage, it strutted
with sexless Agamemnons and Caesars. Telemachus, Darius, Nero, Cato,
Alexander, Scipio, and Hannibal ran around on the boards as
languishing lovers, clad in humiliating disguises, singing woful arias
to their mistress's eyebrows--arias full of trills and scales and
florid ornaments, but void of feeling as a problem in Euclid. Thanks
very largely to German influences, the opera is returning to its
original purposes. Music is again become a means of dramatic
expression, and the singers who appeal to us most powerfully are those
who are best able to make song subserve that purpose, and who to that
end give to dramatic truthfulness, to effective elocution, and to
action the attention which mere voice and beautiful utterance received
in the period which is called the Golden Age of singing, but which was
the Leaden Age of the lyric drama.

[Sidenote: _Singers heard in New York._]

For seventy years the people of New York, scarcely less favored than
those of London, have heard nearly all the great singers of Europe.
Let me talk about some of them, for I am trying to establish some
ground on which my readers may stand when they try to form an estimate
of the singing which they are privileged to hear in the opera houses
of to-day. Madame Malibran was a member of the first Italian company
that ever sang here. Madame Cinti-Damoreau came in 1844, Bosio in
1849, Jenny Lind in 1850, Sontag in 1853, Grisi in 1854, La Grange in
1855, Frezzolini in 1857, Piccolomini in 1858, Nilsson in 1870, Lucca
in 1872, Titiens in 1876, Gerster in 1878, and Sembrich in 1883. I
omit the singers of the German opera as belonging to a different
category. Adelina Patti was always with us until she made her European
debut in 1861, and remained abroad twenty years. Of the men who were
the artistic associates of these _prime donne_, mention may be made of
Mario, Benedetti, Corsi, Salvi, Ronconi, Formes, Brignoli, Amadeo,
Coletti, and Campanini, none of whom, excepting Mario