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Updated: June 9, 2025
Among the incidents related of this interesting operatic episode, the following are specially worthy of mention: An Italian connoisseur, who had never heard Sontag, and who firmly believed that no German could sing, was induced to go one night by a friend to a performance in which she appeared. After listening five minutes he started up hastily in act to go.
Malibran's mischievousness partook of the force and versatility of her extraordinary genius, and having tormented poor Mademoiselle Sontag with every inconceivable freak and caprice during the whole rehearsal of the opera, at length, when requested by her to say in what part of the stage she intended to fall in the last scene, she, Malibran, replied that she "really didn't know," that she "really couldn't tell;" sometimes she "died in one place, sometimes in another, just as it happened, or the humor took her at the moment."
True, I here made the acquaintance of Countess Rossi, the famous Sontag, by whom, to my genuine astonishment, I was most heartily greeted, and I thereby obtained the right of afterwards approaching her in Berlin with a certain degree of familiarity. The curious way in which I was disillusioned about this lady on that occasion will be related in due course.
In 1852 she came to America and created an immense furore in the musical and fashionable world. She died of cholera in Mexico in 1854. Born the same year as Madame Sontag was Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, one of the world's noblest interpreters of German opera and German Lieder, although surpassed by others in vocal resources.
Though she had a powerful frame, she gave one at the outset an impression of weak gentleness, and the hands she extended, albeit cordial, were somewhat limp. She wore her bonnet still, though she had untied the strings and thrown them back; and her ample figure was tightly laced under a sontag. "Why, aunt Luceba!" cried Isabel, radiant. "I'm as glad as I can be. When did you rain down?"
The foreign residents have degraded the Opera. The audience which greets Patti is a rabble compared with that which listened to Sontag. 'The exquisite urbanity which is proverbially French, and which was apparent at the Italiens fifteen or twenty years ago, has disappeared since Paris has become the world's railway terminus.
Holtei's wife had in former days been a popular actress at the Konigstadt theatre in Berlin, and it was here, at the time when Henriette Sontag raised it to the height of its fame, that Holtei's style had been formed.
This was the closing appearance in opera, as she contemplated, for the task of reinstating her family fortunes was almost done. Fate fulfilled her expectations with a malign sarcasm; for while her agent, M. Ullman, was absent in Europe gathering a company, Mme. Sontag was seized with cholera and died in a few hours, on June 17, 1854.
Lind may be said to have brought to England, and considered as her special property.... With myself, the real value of Madame Sontag grew, night after night as her variety, her conscientious steadiness, and her adroit use of diminished powers were thus mercilessly tested.
Chopin heard Henrietta Sontag with great joy; he was ever a lover and a connoisseur of singing. He advised young pianists to listen carefully and often to great singers. Mdlle. de Belleville the pianist and Lipinski the violinist were admired, and he could write a sound criticism when he chose. But the Gladowska is worrying him. "Unbearable longing" is driving him to exile.
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