expression.  With this friendship began Rubini’s art connection with the Italian composer, which lasted till the latter’s too early death.  Rubini was such a great singer, and possessed such admirable powers of expression, especially in pathetic airs (for it was well said of him, “qu’il avait des larmes dans la voix"), that he is to be regarded as the creator of that style of singing which succeeded that of the Rossinian period.  The florid school of vocalization had been carried to an absurd excess, when Rubini showed by his example what effect he could produce by singing melodies of a simple emotional nature, without depending at all on mere vocalization.  It is remarkable that it was largely owing to Rubini’s suggestions and singing that Bellini made his first great success, and that Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” also the work which laid the foundation of this composer’s greatness, should have been written and produced under similar conditions.

The immense power, purity, and sweetness of his voice probably have never been surpassed.  The same praise may be awarded to his method of producing his tones, and all that varied and complicated skill which comes under the head of vocalization.  Rubini had a chest of uncommon bigness, and the strength of his lungs was so prodigious that on one occasion he broke his clavicle in singing a B flat.  The circumstances were as follows:  He was singing at La Scala, Milan, in Pacini’s “Talismano.”  In the recitative which accompanies the entrance of the tenor in this opera, the singer has to attack B flat without preparation, and hold it for a long time.  Since Farinelli’s celebrated trumpet-song, no feat had ever attained such a success as this wonderful note of Rubini’s.  It was received nightly with tremendous enthusiasm.  One night the tenor planted himself in his usual attitude, inflated his chest, opened his mouth; but the note would not come. Os liabet, sed non clambit.  He made a second effort, and brought all the force of his lungs into play.  The note pealed out with tremendous power, but the victorious tenor felt that some of the voice-making mechanism had given way.  He sang as usual through the opera, but discovered on examination afterward that the clavicle was fractured.  Rubini had so distended his lungs that they had broken one of their natural barriers.  Rubini’s voice was an organ of prodigious range by nature, to which his own skill had added several highly effective notes.  His chest range, it is asserted by Fetis, covered two octaves from C to C, which was carried up to F in the voce di testa.  With such consummate skill was the transition to the falsetto managed that the most delicate and alert ear could not detect the change in the vocal method.  The secret of this is believed to have begun and died with Rubini.  Perhaps, indeed, it was incommunicable, the result of some peculiarity of vocal machinery.