for three years under the operatic _regime_ which shared the general
splendor of Napoleon's court. He was afterward appointed first tenor at
Naples by King Joachim Munit, and there produced his opera of "Califo di
Bagdad," which met with great success. It was here that the child Maria,
then only five years old, made her first public appearance in one of
Paer's operas, and here that she received her first lessons in music
from M. Panseron and the composer Hérold. When Garcia quitted Italy
in 1816, he sang with Catalani in Paris, but, as that jealous artist
admitted no bright star near her own, Garcia soon left the troupe, and
went to London in the spring of 1818. He oscillated between the two
countries for several years, and was the first brilliant exponent of the
Rossinian music in two great capitals, as his training and method were
peculiarly fitted to this school. The indomitable energy and ambition
which he transmitted to his daughters, who were to become such
distinguished ornaments of the stage, were not contented with making
their possessor a great executant, for he continued to produce operas,
several of which were put on the stage in Paris with notable success.
Garcia's name as a teacher commenced about the year 1823 to overshadow
his reputation as a singer. In the one he had rivals, in the other he
was peerless. His school of singing quickly became famous, though he
continued to appear on the stage, and to pour forth operas of more than
average merit.

The education of his daughter Maria, born at Paris, March 24, 1808, had
always been a matter of paternal solicitude. A delicate, sensitive, and
willful child, she had been so humored and petted at the convent-school
of Hammersmith, where she was first placed, that she developed a caprice
and a recklessness which made her return to the house of her stern and
imperious father doubly painful, lier experience was a severe one, and
Manuel Garcia was more pitiless to his daughter than to other pupils.