When she was reproached by Fetis for using ad captandum effects too lavishly in the admonition:  “With the degree of elevation to which you have attained, you should impose your opinion on the public, not submit to theirs,” she answered, with a laugh and a shrug of her charming shoulders:  “Mon cher grognon, there may perhaps be two or three connoisseurs in the theatre, but it is not they who give success.  When I sing for you, I will sing very differently.”  Mme. Malibran, buoyed up on the passionate enthusiasm of the French public, essayed the most wonderful and daring flights in her song.  She appeared as Desdemona, Rosina, and as Romeo in Zingarelli’s opera—­characters, of the most opposing kind and two of them, indeed, among Pasta’s masterpieces.  It was said that, “if Malibran must yield the palm to Pasta in point of acting, yet she possessed a decided superiority in respect of song”; and, even in acting, Malibran’s grace, originality, vivacity, piquancy, spontaneity, feeling, and tenderness, won the heart of all spectators.  Such was her versatility, that the Semi-ramide of one evening was the Cinderella of the next, the Zerlina of another, and the Desdemona of its successor; and in each the individuality of conception was admirably preserved.  On being asked by a friend which was her favorite role, she answered, “The character I happen to be acting, whichever it may be.”

In spite, however, of the general testimony to her great dramatic ability, so clever and capable a judge as Henry Chorley rated her musical genius as far higher than that of dramatic conception.  He says:  “Though creative as an executant, Malibran was not creative as a dramatic artist.  Though the fertility and audacity of her musical invention had no limits, though she had the power and science of a composer, she did not establish one new opera or character on the stage, hardly even one first-class song in a concert-room.”  This criticism, when closely examined, may perhaps indicate a high order of praise.  Mme. Malibran, as an artist, was so unique and original in her methods, so incomparable in the invention and skill which required no master to prompt or regulate her cadences, so complex in the ingenuity which blended the resources of singing and acting, that other singers simply despaired of imitating her effects, and what she did perished with her, except as a brilliant tradition.  In other words, her utter superiority to the conventional made her artistic work phenomenal, and of a style not to be perpetuated on the stage.  The weight of testimony appears to be that Mme. Malibran was, beyond all of her competitors, a singer of most versatile and brilliant genius, in whom dramatic instincts reigned with as dominant force as ability of musical expression.  The fact, however, that Mme. Malibran, with a voice weak and faulty in the extreme in one whole octave of its range, and that the most important (between F and F), was able by her matchless skill and audacity in the forms of execution, modification, and ornament, to achieve the most brilliant results, might well blind even a keen connoisseur by kindling his admiration of her musical invention, at the expense of his recognition of dramatic faculty.