Last of the eighteenth century queens of song was Angelica Catalani, born some forty miles from Rome in 1779, destined by her father, a local magistrate, for the cloister, and borne beyond its walls by her magnificent voice, with its compass of three octaves, from G to G. She is described as a tall, fair woman with a splendid presence, large blue eyes, features of perfect symmetry and a winning smile.  So great was her natural facility she could rise with ease from the faintest sound to the most superb crescendo, could send her tones sweeping through the air with the most delicious undulations, imitating the swell and fall of a bell, and could trill like a bird on each note of a chromatic passage.  She dazzled her listeners, but left the heart untouched.

Her domestic life was a happy one, and her husband, Captain de Vallebregue, adored her, although he knew so little about music that once when she complained that the piano was too high he had six inches cut off its legs.  Surrounded by adulation at home and abroad, her self-conceit became inordinate, tempting her to the most absurd feats of skill.  Her excessive love of display and lack of artistic judgment and knowledge finally led her so far astray in pitch that she lost all prestige.  After seventeen years of retirement, she died of cholera in 1849, in Paris.  A few days before she was stricken with the dire epidemic Jenny Lind sought and received her blessing.

A queen of song who profoundly impressed her age was Giuditta Pasta, born near Milan in 1798, of Hebrew parentage.  For her Bellini wrote “La Sonnambula” and “Norma,” Donizetti his “Anna Bolena,” Pacini his “Niobe,” and she was the star of Rossini’s leading operas of the time.  Her voice, a mezzo-soprano, at first unequal, weak, of slender range and lacking flexibility, acquired, through her wonderful genius and industry a range of two octaves and a half, reaching D in altissimo, together with a sweetness, a fluency, and a chaste, expressive style.  Although below medium height, in impassioned moments she seemed to rise to queenly stature.  Both acting and singing were governed by ripe judgment, profound sensibility and noble simplicity.  She died at Lake Como in 1865.

So many queens of song have reigned from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present time that only a few brilliant names may here be mentioned.  Among these Henrietta Sontag was the greatest German singer of the first half of the century.  A distinguished traveler tells of having found her when she was eight years old, in 1812, sitting on a table, where her mother had placed her, and singing the grand aria of the Queen of the Night from the “Magic Flute,” her voice, “pure, penetrating and of angelic tone,” flowing as “unconsciously as a limpid rill from the mountain side.”  At fifteen she made her regular debut, and we are told that she sang “with the volubility of a bird.”  During her four years at the Conservatory of Prague she had won the prize in every class of vocal music, piano and harmony.