On the operatic stage Madame Sembrich was by all odds Field’s favorite prima donna.  He was one of the earliest writers on the press to recognize the wonderful beauty of the singer’s voice and the perfection of her method.  He easily distinguished between her trained faculty and the bird-like notes of Patti, but the personality of the former won him, where he remained unmoved when Patti’s wonderful voice rippled through the most difficult, florid music like crystal running water over the smooth stones of a mountain brook.  Field’s admiration for Sembrich often found expression in more conventional phrases, but never in a form that better illustrated how she attracted him than in the following amusing comment on her appearance in Chicago, January 24th, 1884, in Lucia: 

It is not at all surprising that Madame Sembrich caught on so grandly night before last.  She is the most comfortable-looking prima donna that has ever visited Chicago.  She is one of your square-built, stout-rigged little ladies with a bright, honest face and bouncing manners.  Her arms are long but shapely, and in the last act of Lucia her luxurious black hair tumbles down and envelopes her like a mosquito net.  Her audience night before last was a coldly critical one, of course, and it sat like a bump on a log until Sembrich made her appearance in the mad scene, where Lucheer gives her vocal circus in the presence of twenty-five Scotch ladies in red, white, and green dresses, and twenty-five supposititious Scotch gentlemen in costumes of the Court of Louis XIV.  Instead of sending for a doctor to assist Lucheer in her trouble, these fantastically attired ladies and gentlemen stand around and look dreary while Lucheer does ground and lofty tumbling, and executes pirouettes and trapeze performances in the vocal art.

Then the audience began to wake up.  The comfortable-looking little prima donna gathered herself together and let loose the cyclone of her genius and accomplishments.  It was a whirlwind of appoggiaturas, semi-quavers, accenturas, rinforzandos, moderatos, prestos, trills, sforzandos, fortes, rallentandos, supertonics, salterellos, sonatas, ensembles, pianissimos, staccatos, accellerandos, quasi-innocents, cadenzas, symphones, cavatinas, arias, counter-points, fiorituras, tonics, sub-medicants, allegrissimos, chromatics, concertos, andantes, etudes, larghettos, adagios, and every variety of turilural and dingus known to the minstrel art.  The audience was paralyzed.  When she finally struck up high F sharp in the descending fourth of D in alt, one gentleman from the South Side who had hired a dress-coat for the occasion broke forth in a hearty “Brava!” This encouraged a resident of the North Side to shout “Bravissimo,” and then several dudes from the Blue Island district raised the cry of “Bong,” “Tray beang,” and “Brava!”

The applause became universal—­it spread like wild-fire.  The vast audience seemed