operatic creation ever made a greater sensation in Paris. Meyerbeer had
kept it in his portfolio for years, awaiting the time when Mme. Viardot
should be ready to interpret it, and many changes had been made from
time to time at the suggestion of the great singer, who united to her
executive skill an intellect of the first rank, and a musical knowledge
second to that of few composers. At the very last moment it is said that
one or more of the acts were entirely reconstructed, at the wish of the
representative of _Fides_, whose dramatic instincts were as unerring as
her musical judgment. No performance since that of Viardot, though the
most eminent singers have essayed the part, has equaled the first ideal
set by her creation from its possibilities.

In this opera the principal interest pivots on the _mother_. The
sensuous, sentimental, or malignant phases of love are replaced by
the purest maternal devotion. It was left for Mme. Viardot to add an
absolutely new type to the gallery of portraits on the lyric stage. We
are told by a competent critic, whose enthusiasm in the study of
this great impersonation did not yet quite run away with his judicial
faculty: "Her remarkable power of self-identification with the character
set before her was, in this case, aided by person and voice. The mature
burgher woman in her quaint costume; the pale, tear-worn devotee,
searching from city to city for traces of the lost one, and struck
with a pious horror at finding him a tool in the hands of hypocritical
blasphemy, was till then a being entirely beyond the pale of the
ordinary prima donna's comprehension--one to the presentation of which
there must go as much simplicity as subtile art, as much of tenderness
as of force, as much renunciation of woman's ordinary coquetries as
of skill to impress all hearts by the picture of homely love, desolate
grief, and religious enthusiasm." M. Roger sang with Mme. Viardot in
Paris, but, when the opera was shortly afterward reproduced in London,