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The audience was most fashionable and critical, and the reception of the new singer was of the most assuring kind. The voice of Mlle. Titiens was a pure soprano, fresh, penetrating, even, powerful, unusually rich in quality, extensive in compass, and of great flexibility. It had a bell-like resonance, and was capable of expressing all the passionate and tender accents of lyric tragedy.
Titiens had begun to show the friction of years, and though her wonderful skill as a vocalist covered up such defects in large measure, it was very evident that the greatest of recent German singers had passed the zenith of her fascination as a vocalist.
One of the noblest operas ever written, it has been relegated to the musical lumber-room on account of the almost unparalleled difficulties which it presents. It is not desirable to catalogue the continued achievements of Mlle. Titiens season by season in England, which country she had adopted as her permanent home. She had achieved her place and settled the character of her fame.
Take an extreme case. A group of people are photographed by Edison's new process say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the finest men singers the age has known let them be photographed incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin"; let all be done stereoscopically.
Near the close of the season she appeared in Verdi's "Vêpres Siciliennes," in which, we are told, "she sang magnificently and acted with extraordinary passion and vigor. At the close of the fourth act, when Helen and Procida are led to the scaffold, the conflicting emotions that agitate the bosom of the heroine were pictured with wonderful truth and intensity by Mlle. Titiens."
When the probation was over, the young cantatrice again appeared before the footlights, and the unfortunate lover disappeared. The director of opera at Frankfort-on-the-Main, having heard Mlle. Titiens at Hamburg was so pleased that he made her an offer, and in pursuance of this she appeared in Frankfort early in 1850, where she made a most brilliant and decided success.
In June she made her appearance as Lucrezia Borgia. The qualities which this part demands are precisely those with which Mlle. Titiens was endowed tragic power, intensity, impulsiveness. Her commanding figure and graceful bearing gave weight to her acting, while in the more tender scenes she was exquisitely pathetic, and displayed great depth of feeling.
The great German cantatrice was now accepted as the legitimate successor of Pasta, Malibran, and Grisi, and numerous comparisons were made between her and the last-named great singer. No artists could be more unlike in some respects. Titiens lacked the adroitness, the fluent melting grace, the suavity, of the other.
"Titiens is the most superb Leonora without a single exception that the Anglo-Italian stage has ever witnessed," wrote an admiring critic. Among other brilliant successes of the season was her performance for the first time of Amelia in Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera," which was a masterpiece of vocalization and dramatic fire.
To perform such a work as that of Cherubini required Pasta's tragic genius united with the voice of a Catalani, made, as it were, of adamant and gold. To such an ideal equipment of powers, Titiens approached more nearly than any other singer who had ever assayed the rôle in more recent times.
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