It is difficult to fancy why Alboni should have ventured on so dangerous an experiment.  It may be that she feared the public would tire of her luscious voice, unperturbed as it was by the resistless passion and sentiment which in such singers as Malibran, Pasta, and Viardot, had overcome all defects of voice, and given an infinite freshness and variety to their tones.  It may be that the higher value of a soprano voice in the music market stirred a feeling in Alboni which had been singularly lacking to her earlier career.  Whatever the reason might have been, it is a notorious fact that Mlle. Alboni deliberately forced the register upward, and in doing so injured the texture of her voice, and lost something both of luscious tone and power.  In later years she repented this artistic sin, and recovered the matchless tones of her youth in great measure, but, as long as she persevered in her ambition to be a soprano, the result was felt by her most judicious friends to be an unfortunate one.

A pleasant incident, illustrating Alboni’s kindness of heart, occurred on the eve of her departure for Italy, whither she was called by family reasons.  Her leave-taking was so abrupt that she had almost forgotten her promise to sing in Paris on a certain date for the annual benefit of Filippo Galli, a superannuated musician.  The suspense and anxiety of the unfortunate Filippo were to be more easily imagined than described when, asked if Alboni would sing, he could not answer definitively—­“Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”  He sold very few tickets, and the rooms (in the Salle Hera) were thinly occupied.  She, however, had not forgotten her promise; at the very moment when the matinee was commencing she arrived, in time to redeem her word and reward those who had attended, but too late to be of any service to the veteran.  Galli was in despair, and was buried in reflections neither exhilarating nor profitable, when, some minutes after the concert, the comely face and portly figure of Alboni appeared at the door of his room.  “How much are the expenses of your concert?” she kindly inquired. “Mia cara,” dolorously responded the beneficiaire, “cinque centifranci [five hundred francs].”  “Well, then, to repair the loss that I may have caused you,” said the generous cantatrice, “here is a banknote for a thousand francs.  Do me the favor to accept it.”  This was only one of the many kind actions she performed.

Mlle. Alboni’s Paris engagement, in the spring of 1850, was marked by a daring step on her part, which excited much curiosity at the time, and might easily have ended in a most humiliating reverse, though its outcome proved fortunate, that undertaking being the role of Fides in “Le Prophete,” which had become so completely identified with the name of Viardot.  It was owing as much, perhaps, to the insistance of the managers of the Grand Opera as to the deliberate choice of the singer that this experiment was attempted.  Meyerbeer