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Updated: May 28, 2025
'Hah! that is a fine note! said Sidonia, and he looked round. 'Who is that singing? Some new protegee of Lord Monmouth? ''Tis the daughter of the Colonnas, said Lord Eskdale, 'the Princess Lucretia. 'Why, she was not at dinner to-day. 'No, she was not there. 'My favourite voice; and of all, the rarest to be found. When I was a boy, it made me almost in love even with Pisaroni.
She covered Rossini's elaborate fioriture with a fresh profusion of ornament, but always with a dexterity which saved it from the reproach of being overladen. She performed Semiramide with Mme. Pisaroni, and played Zerlina to Sontag's Donna Anna. Her habit of treating such dramatic parts as Ninetta, Zerlina, and Amina was the occasion of keen controversy among the critics of the time.
Pisaroni and Rasallima Caradori, contralto and soprano, were engaged at lavish salaries, and on the appointed day of the first rehearsal they all appeared except Caradori, whose Florentine manager positively forbade her singing as a violation of his contract. M. Fournier was in despair, but at last some one remembered Mme. Persiani, who was known as a charming dilettante.
Pisaroni excelled as much in her dramatic power as in the beauty of her voice, and up to the advent of Marietta Alboni on the stage was unquestionably without a rival in the estimate of critics as the artist who surpassed all the traditions of the operatic stage in this peculiar line of singing.
Her former companions had disappeared. Malibran had been dead for thirteen years, Mme. Pisaroni had also departed from the earthly scene, and a galaxy of new stars were glittering in the musical horizon.
It is necessary next to understand with what incredible skill the artist manages this instrument; it is the pearly, light, and florid vocalization of Persiani joined to the resonance, pomp, and amplitude of Pisaroni.
There was a time early in the century when the voice of Rosamunda Pisaroni was believed to be the most perfect and delightful, not only of all contraltos of the age, but to have reached the absolute ideal of what this voice should be.
In November, 1831, there was a strenuous rivalry between the two theatres of Milan, La Scala and the Carcano. The composers were Bellini, Donizetti, and Majocchi. At the Scala, which was still under the direction of Crivelli, then a very old man, were Giulietta Grisi, Amalia Schütz, and Pisaroni, with Mari, Bonfigli, Pocchini, Anbaldi, etc.
It was no timid débutante, but a finished singer whose voice rolled out in a swelling flood of melody such as no English opera-house had heard since the palmiest days of Pisaroni.
The registers of her voice are so perfectly united, that in her scales you do not feel sensible of the passage from one to another; the tone is unctuous, caressing, velvety, melancholy, like that of all pure sopranos, though less somber than that of Pisaroni, and incomparably more pure and limpid.
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