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.  Ebers tells us in his “Seven Years of the King’s Theatre”:  “Nothing could have been more free from trick or affectation than Pasta’s performance.  There is no perceptible effort to resemble a character she plays; on the contrary, she enters the stage the character itself; transposed into the situation, excited by the hopes and fears, breathing the life and spirit of the being she represents.”  Mme. Pasta was a slow reader, but she had in perfection the sense for the measurement and proportion of time, a most essential musical quality.  This gave her an instinctive feeling for propriety, which no lessons could teach; that due recognition of accent and phrase, that absence of flurry and exaggeration, such as makes the discourse and behavior of some people memorable, apart from the value of matter and occasion; that intelligent composure, without coldness, which impresses and reassures those who see and hear.  A quotation from a distinguished critic already cited gives a vivid idea of Pasta’s influence on the most cold and fastidious judges: 

“The greatest grace of all, depth and reality of expression, was possessed by this remarkable artist as few (I suspect) before her—­as none whom I have since admired—­have possessed it.  The best of her audience were held in thrall, without being able to analyze what made up the spell, what produced the effect, so soon as she opened her lips.  Her recitative, from the moment she entered, was riveting by its truth.  People accustomed to object to the conventionalities of opera (just as loudly as if all drama was not conventional too), forgave the singing and the strange language for the sake of the direct and dignified appeal made by her declamation.  Mme. Pasta never changed her readings, her effects, her ornaments.  What was to her true, when once arrived at, remained true for ever.  To arrive at what stood with her for truth, she labored, made experiments, rejected with an elaborate care, the result of which, in one meaner or more meager, must have been monotony.  But the impression made on me was that of being always subdued and surprised for the first time.  Though I knew what was coming, when the passion broke out, or when the phrase was sung, it seemed as if they were something new, electrical, immediate.  The effect to me is at present, in the moment of writing, as the impression made by the first sight of the sea, by the first snow mountain, by any of those first emotions which never entirely pass away.  These things are utterly different from the fanaticism of a laudator temporis acti.”