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Cannot one see the guests, a group entranced by its privilege the ladies with bandeaux and with little shawls to ward the dew from their shoulders; the gentlemen, D'Orsayesque all, forgetting to puff the cigars which the ladies, 'this once, have suffered them to light? One sees them there; but they are only transparent phantoms between us and Grisi, not interrupting our vision.
Then Monsieur Gravier, in the course of a tour, had persuaded Mademoiselle Mars to write her name on this album, with Mademoiselles Georges, Taglioni, and Grisi, and some distinguished actors, such as Frederick Lemaitre, Monrose, Bouffe, Rubini, Lablache, Nourrit, and Arnal; for he knew a set of old fellows brought up in the seraglio, as they phrased it, who did him this favor.
Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, are of Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your muscadins of Paris, and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to "the sweet singers of Israel!"
Yes; you who can't resist purchasing a chest of cigars, because they are so good; or an ormolu clock at Howell and James's, because it is such a bargain; or a box at the Opera, because Lablache and Grisi are divine in the PURITANI; fancy how difficult it is for a parson to resist spending a half-crown when John Breakstone's family are without a loaf; or 'standing' a bottle of port for poor old Polly Rabbits, who has her thirteenth child; or treating himself to a suit of corduroys for little Bob Scarecrow, whose breeches are sadly out at elbows.
Grisi came on after the rising of the curtain and received a most cordial burst of applause. At length the great audience was hushed to silence, and the orchestra played the symphonic prelude which introduces the contralto air "Eccomi alfin in Babilonia." Alboni glided from the side and walked slowly to the footlights.
Her concert engagement being terminated, our prima donna made a short tour through Austria, and returned to Paris again to make her début in opera on December 2d, in "Semiramide," with Mme. Grisi, Coletti, Cellini, and Tagliafico, in the cast. The caprice of audiences was never more significantly shown than on this occasion.
Grisi, in the spring of 1830, to M. Auguste Gérard de Melcy, a French gentleman of fortune, did not deprive the stage of one of its greatest ornaments, for after a short retirement at the beautiful château of Vaucresson, which she had recently purchased, she again resumed the operatic career which had so many fascinations for one of her temperament, as well as substantial rewards.
At the end of the first and second acts, the heartrending accents of a mother's agony, wrung from the depths of her soul, and the scornful courage tempered with malignant passion, were contrasted with consummate power. It was conceded that Grisi herself never rose to a greater pitch of dramatic truth and power. Mlle.
In truth, there is that in music which is life-giving. A songstress whose name will always be mentioned in the same breath with that of the tenor Mario, who became her husband, and with whom she toured the United States in 1854, was Giulia Grisi. She was born in Milan in 1812, made her début at sixteen, and had an undisputed reign of over a quarter of a century.
Lind could never have been a great actress, and risen into that stormy world of dramatic power, where the passion and imagination of Pasta, Schröder-Devrient, Malibran, Viardot, or even Grisi, wrought such effects, but, within the sphere of her temperament, she was easy, natural, and original.
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