MUSI O.
THE GARCIA. FAMILY.
MANUEL GARCIA the younger, who was born in 1805 and died in 1906, had so much to recommend him beyond his longevity that we cannot congratulate Mr. Mackinlay on the choice of his title,—Garcia the Centenarian.* True, he was the only musician of note who attained to that patriarchal age, and of him, as of the old negro woman in Walt Whitman's "Ethiopia Saluting the Colours," it could well have been said, "How strange the things you see and have seen." He was in Spain during the whole of the Peninsular War, and in Naples when Murat was executed. Journeying to America in 1825, he saw Joseph Bonaparte, the ex-King of Spain, in exile. Paris was his headquarters from 1828 to 1848, where he witnessed both Revolutions, and for the last fifty- eight years of his life he lived in England. He was born before Mendelssohn or Schumann, and outlived the first • Garcia the Centenarian and his Times. By M. Sterling Mackinlay. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. [15s. net.]
by nearly sixty, and the second by fifty, years. He received lessons from Ansani, who knew, and was old enough to have been the pupil of, Porpora ; and in 1876 he was invited by Wagner to train the singers for the opening performances at Bayreuth. Finally, he attended and took the liveliest interest in the celebrations in honour of his hundredth birthday in 1905. But though profoundly interesting as a link with the past, and as bridging the gap between Porpora. and Wagner, Garcia had far greater and more enduring titles to recollec- tion than his prodigious longevity. He will be remembered, not as Garcia the centenarian, but as Garcia the inventor of the laryngoscope ; Garcia the author of the " Traite de l'Art du Chant"; Garcia the elder brother of the two most interesting and gifted singers of the century,—Malibran and Pauline Viardot-Garcia.
Musical genius seldom remains on the same plane for two generations, and Manuel Garcia the elder has long been eclipsed by his more famous children. But the record of his life proves him to have been a man of astonishing versa- tility and resource, equally distinguished as singer, teacher, composer, and impresario. He created the role of Almaviva in the Barbiere ; sang with great success in Spain, France, Italy, and England; took the first Italian opera company to America in 1825; composed some forty operas, in many cases writing the words as well as the music. The most amazing instance of his resourcefulness is connected with his visit to Mexico, where, discovering that nearly all the music of the company's repertory had been left behind or lost, he repro- duced the entire scores of Don Giovanni, Otello, and II Barbiere from memory, and then set to work to compose eight new operas for his company ! This Admirable Crichton —who was also, it appears, a competent scene-painter- had the temper as well as the energy of a demon. When Malibran declared that she could not learn a role in two days, be is reported to have said : "You will do it, my daughter; and if you fail in any way, I shall really strike you with my dagger when I am supposed to kill you on the stage." On the other hand, as a set-off against the numerous stories of his tyranny, and even cruelty, to his children, we have the testimony of Madame Viardot : "How often have I heard my sister Maria remark, Si mon pere n'avait pas ete si severe avec moi, je n'aurais rien fait de bon ; j'etais paresseuse et indocile.' As for myself, I never saw my father lose his patience with me while he taught me the solfege, music and singing." Manuel the elder died in 1832 at the age of fifty- seven, and the meteoric Malibran only survived him four years, throwing away her life in a mad fit of emulation rather than yield to a rival and disappoint the public. It is more than seventy years since her tragic death at Manchester, and there can be -very few persons living who heard her sing; but fate has been kinder to her than to most of her contemporaries, and for the excellent reason that she combined with great natural gifts extraordinary personal charm, vivacity, and intelligence. -Unlike the great majority of prime donne, she was a first-rate musician. The charming reminiscences of M. Ernest Legouve, on which Mr. Mackinlay might have drawn far more freely, prove her to have been an exceptionally brilliant and witty talker. The glamour of her irregular beauty and the magic of her voice are immortalised in the verse of de Musset ; but the true secret of her continuing fame is that she had not only a charming face and an exceptional larynx, but a most engaging and distinguished mind, and a certain intrepidity of temperament which prompted her to do chivalrous as well as reckless things.
Pauline Viardot-Garcia, who is still living in Paris, though inferior in the quality of fascination to her elder sister, eclipsed her in dramatic power and all-round mastery of her art. Like Malibran, she was a first-rate musician, studied composition and the pianoforte under the best masters and to excellent purpose, and from the very first appealed to the lead. ing writers and artists as well as musicians of her time. She is generally believed to have been the prototype of George Sand's Consuelo, and moved in the mid-stream of culture when the Romantic movement was at its height, numbering amongst her admirers and friends Heine, de Musset, Berlioz, Chopin, and Liszt. She was that rara avis, a prima donna who kept abreast of the times, and lent encouragement to pioneers in the new paths. She was probably the first singer of her class to appreciate Brahms, who was a welcome visitor at her villa at. Baden-Baden, and Schumann dedicated to her his beautiful liederkreis. Sir Charles Santley in his reminiscences deliberately places her and Ronconi at the head of all the operatic singers he ever heard in his long career. Lastly, it may be noted that the remarkable and delicate sympathy with which Tourguenief always wrote of music and musicians may fairly be attributed to her lifelong friendship with the great Russian novelist.
The fame of Manuel Garcia the younger rests on a different basis. Like his sisters, he was carefully grounded in the technique of the art; like them, he was trained to be a singer, and for a short space appeared on the boards with credit, if not with special distinction. But his voice, never a powerful organ, suffered severely from the strain imposed on it during his visit to America as a member of his father's company, and by the time he was twenty-five he realised that the avenue to success was closed to him as a public singer. For a while he contemplated entering the Navy, and it appears that he actually served in the com- missariat department of the French expedition to Algiers in 1830. By the end of that year, however, he had decided to devote himself in real earnest to the career of teaching, and, with a thoroughness more characteristic of a Teuton than a Spaniard, undertook a prolonged course of medical studies with a view to mastering the physiology of the larynx. The result triumphantly justified this elaborate scheme of self-preparation. Established as a singing-master early in the "thirties," he trained Jenny Lind in the years 1841-42, published his famous " Trait4 de l'Art da Chant" in 1847, and migrated to London after the Revolution of 1848. His invention of the laryngo- scope, which Huxley described as anew ally against disease and a most valuable addition to that series of instruments which have revolutionised the practice of medicine, dates from the year 1854. In 1857 he gave lessons to Sautley, who has called him the King of Masters, and was still teaching more than forty years later, Mr. Mackinlay, the author of this memoir, having been his pupil from 1895 to 1900. The secret of his longevity could not be better explained than in his own happy phrase " Je suis trop °coupe pour avoir le temps de mourir."
Mr. Mackinlay brings to his task a sincere enthusiasm for his subject. He gives us an interesting account of Garcia's method as a teacher, and illustrates his modesty, courtesy, patience, and humour by some characteristic anecdotes. He has also unearthed some curious information bearing on the visit of the Garcias to America in 1825 from New York journals of the time. Here, unfortunately, commendation must end. His style is slipshod, undistinguished, and disfigured by facetious comments and gross solecisms. He uses the dreadful word "rendition," and habitually alludes to Garcia as the "maestro." His narrative is cumbered with a great deal of wholly irrelevant padding, both in the way of text and illustrations, which include full-length photographs of the present King and Queen of Spain (to whom the book is dedicated), of Madame Melba (who was not Garcia's pupil at all), and of Mr. Hermann Klein. He always speaks of Malibran as a contralto, which is a most misleading statement. Her voice was a contralto, but she combined with it a soprano register and achieved her greatest successes in soprano roles. The curious omissions in the narrative are doubtless to be accounted for by the fact that in the preface acknowledgment is made of the assistance only of Garcia's friends and pupils. To sum up, the new matter contributed by Mr. Mackinlay might have furnished forth a magazine article, but affords no excuse for the publication of a volume
of three hundred and thirty pages. C. L. G.
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