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Updated: May 9, 2025
Grisi was measured against the greatest lyric tragedienne of the age, the critics, keen to probe the weak spot of new aspirants, found points of favorable comparison in Grisi's favor. During this year, 1832, both Giuditta and Giulia Grisi retired from the stage, the former to marry an Italian gentleman of wealth, and the latter to devote a period to rest and study.
The girl was the extreme contrast of himself, with dark almost piercing-eyes, and a paleness which was physically constitutional the joy of the artistic spirit. It was the head of a tragedienne or a martyr, and the lean, rather beautiful body was eloquent of life. Presently Junia said: "To try to spoil him would be a crime against his country, and I shall tell him you are here."
But Louis XV. got wind of this threatened checkmate, and a royal mandate took her out of the convent walls which had threatened to immure her for life. Anne was placed with Clairon, the great tragedienne, to learn acting, and with Mlle. Fel to learn singing. As a consequence, while she had some rivals in the beauty of her voice, her acting surpassed anything on the operatic stage of that era.
Her Dalilla in Samson was much admired in America, but her rendering of the rôle of Francesca di Rimini in the tragedy of that name is perhaps her greatest performance. Signora Sedowsky is undoubtedly the greatest tragic actress of Italy. She is perhaps less stately and grand than Ristori, but in fire and depth of feeling she greatly surpasses this eminent tragédienne.
Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her home with him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeen years, and though always an alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is still remembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.
Without going quite so far, the actor showed himself none the less exacting. According to his ideas, Deborah, the tragedienne at the Odeon a Greek statue! had too large hands, and the fascinating Blanche Pompon at the Varietes was a mere wax doll.
I had even succeeded in placing a bouquet on the dressing-table of the great tragedienne on my second visit to the theatre. Her dressing-room door had been left ajar during that memorable fourth act which was to see the consummation of my labours. I had the bouquet in my hand, having brought it expressly for that purpose.
Her accents were so plaintive, so penetrating, so profoundly tragical, that no one could resist their influence. Her genius as a tragedienne surpassed her talent as a singer. When on the stage she was no longer Pasta, but Tancredi, Romeo, Desdemona, Medea, or Semiramide.
In the final mad scene Pasta rallied into something like her former grandeur of acting; and in the last song with its roulades and its scales of shakes ascending by a semitone, this consummate vocalist and tragedienne, able to combine form with meaning dramatic grasp and insight with such musical display as enter into the lyric art was indicated at least to the apprehension of the younger artist.
The impassioned tenderness of her Desdemona, the soft sweetness of "love in its melancholy and in its regrets" of Anna Bolena, the fiery ardor and vehemence of Norma, had been powerfully expressed by her, but the mixture of savage cruelty and maternal intensity characteristic of Lucretia was embodied with a splendor of color and a subtilty of ideal which deservedly raised her estimate as a tragedienne higher than before.
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