Great Singers, Second Series: Malibran to Titiens

These were the rock stars of the 19th century. Before recording technology, before mass media, opera singers commanded the kind of devotion usually reserved for gods and revolutionaries. George T. Ferris captures a vanished world in these pages, where a single voice could launch an empire of admirers, where audiences wept, fainted, and fought duels over a single aria. This volume centers on Maria Felicia Malibran, perhaps the most legendary soprano of her age. The daughter of the fearsome vocal teacher Manuel Vicente Garcia, she was whipped into greatness through a childhood of brutal discipline. Her voice, eventually, became transcendent, and her performances ignited scandals and swoons across Europe. Ferris chronicles her tumultuous life: the marriages, the scandals, the relentless drive that burned her out by age 28. He then turns to Theresa Titiens, another towering figure of the operatic stage. Written in 1886, this book preserves something irreplaceable: the texture of how these artists were understood and celebrated in their own time. For anyone curious about the roots of celebrity, or the extraordinary women who sang before recording began, these portraits offer a window into a world of vocal magic and operatic excess.