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Updated: June 24, 2025
Like Catalani, Persiani, and other distinguished singers, she was severely criticised toward the last of her operatic career for sacrificing good taste and dramatic truth to the technique of vocalization, but this is an extravagance so tempting that but few singers have been entirely exempt from it.
O'Reilly on the previous night, numerous placards reflecting upon Madame Catalani were exhibited. One was inscribed with the following doggrel : "Seventeen thousand a-year goes pat, To Kemble, his sister, and Madame Cat." On another was displayed, in large letters, "No compromise, old prices, and native talent!"
A third was levelled against Madame Catalani, whose large salary was supposed to be one of the causes of the increased prices, and was inscribed "No foreigners to tax us we're taxed enough already." This last was a double-barrelled one, expressing both dramatic and political discontent, and was received with loud cheers by the pitites.
Two circumstances occurred during my stay in Edinburgh which made a great impression upon me: the one was the bringing of the famous old gun, Mons Meg, up to the castle; and the other was the last public appearance of Madame Catalani.
To be buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you need only be, or to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and there is a liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of your fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected by her possibly too-appreciative heirs.
Mme. Catalani made a brief visit to Paris in the spring of 1806, sang twice at St. Cloud, and gave three public concerts, each of which produced twenty-four thousand francs, the price being doubled for these occasions. Napoleon was always anxious to make Paris the center of European art, and to assemble within its borders all the attractions of the civilized world.
When in Hamburg in 1819, M. Schevenke, a great musician, criticised her vocal feats with severity. Mme. Catalani shrugged her beautiful shoulders and called him "an impious man." "For," said she, "when God has given to a mortal so extraordinary a talent as I possess, people ought to applaud and honor it as a miracle; it is profane to depreciate the gifts of Heaven."
During the period of her operatic career in England, Catalani illustrated the works of a wide variety of composers, both serious and comic; for her dramatic talents were equal to both, and there was no music which she did not master as if by inspiration, though she was such a bad reader that to learn a part perfectly she was obliged to hear it played on the piano.
Last of the eighteenth century queens of song was Angelica Catalani, born some forty miles from Rome in 1779, destined by her father, a local magistrate, for the cloister, and borne beyond its walls by her magnificent voice, with its compass of three octaves, from G to G. She is described as a tall, fair woman with a splendid presence, large blue eyes, features of perfect symmetry and a winning smile.
He found such great players as J. B. Cramer, Ferdinand Ries, Kalkbrenner, and Clementi in the field; but our young artist did not altogether lose by comparison. Among other distinguished musicians, Moscheles also met Kiesewetter, the violinist, the great singers Mara and Catalani, and Dragonetti, the greatest of double-bass players.
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