Acquitting herself with ease in both German and Italian, and being exceedingly versatile, she won equal renown in the operas of Weber, Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti.  Paris, in special, marveled at the little German who could give satisfaction in Grand Opera.  Her voice, a pure soprano, reached to D in alt., with upper notes like silvery bell-tones, and its natural pliability was cultivated by taste and incessant study.  She was of medium stature, elegant form, with light hair, fair complexion and soft, expressive blue eyes that lent an enchantment to features that were not otherwise striking.  In demeanor she was artless, unaffected and ladylike.  Romantic stories were continually in circulation regarding suitors for her hand.  As the wife of Count Rossi, an attache of the Sardinian legation, she retired to private life in 1830, and passed many happy years with her husband in various capitols of Europe.  When, in 1848, owing to financial shipwreck, she returned to the stage her voice still charmed by its exquisite purity, spirituelle quality and supreme finish.  In 1852 she came to America and created an immense furore in the musical and fashionable world.  She died of cholera in Mexico in 1854.

Born the same year as Madame Sontag was Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, one of the world’s noblest interpreters of German opera and German Lieder, although surpassed by others in vocal resources.  She grew up on the stage, and was trained by her father, Friedrich Schroeder, a baritone singer, and her mother, Sophie Schroeder, known as the “Siddons of Germany.”  Her dramatic soprano was capable of producing the most tender, powerful, truthful and intensely thrilling effects, although it was not specially tractable and was at times even harsh.  It was she who by her magnificent interpretation of Leonore, in Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” first revealed the beauty of the part to the public.  In Wagner’s operas she appeared as Senta, in the “Flying Dutchman”; Venus, in “Tannhaeuser,” and actually created the role of Adriano Colonna, in “Rienzi.”  Goethe, who had earlier failed to appreciate Schubert’s matchless setting to his “Erl King,” when he heard Madame Schroeder-Devrient sing it, exclaimed:  “Had music instead of words been my vehicle of thought, it is thus I should have framed the legend.”  She died in 1860.

Full of caprice, radiating the fire of genius, wayward and playful as a child, Maria Felicita Malibran swept like a dazzling meteor across the musical firmament.  M. Arthur Pougin thus epitomizes her story: 

“Daughter of a Spaniard, born in France, married in America, died in England, buried in Belgium.  Comedienne at five, married at seventeen, dead at twenty-eight—­immortal.  Beautiful, brilliant, gay as a ray of sunlight, with frequent shadings of melancholy; heart full of warmth and abandon; devoted to the point of sacrifice; courageous to temerity; ardent for pleasure as for work; with a will and energy indomitable.  A singer without a peer, and a lyric tragedienne capable of exciting the instinctive enthusiasm of the masses and the reasonable admiration of connoisseurs.  Pianist, composer, poet, she drew and painted with taste; spoke fluently five languages; was expert in all feminine work, skilled in sport and outdoor exercises, and possessed of a striking originality.  Such was Malibran in part, for the whole could never be expressed.”