Malibran, as an artist, was so unique and original in her methods, so
incomparable in the invention and skill which required no master to
prompt or regulate her cadences, so complex in the ingenuity which
blended the resources of singing and acting, that other singers simply
despaired of imitating her effects, and what she did perished with her,
except as a brilliant tradition. In other words, her utter superiority
to the conventional made her artistic work phenomenal, and of a style
not to be perpetuated on the stage. The weight of testimony appears to
be that Mme. Malibran was, beyond all of her competitors, a singer of
most versatile and brilliant genius, in whom dramatic instincts reigned
with as dominant force as ability of musical expression. The fact,
however, that Mme. Malibran, with a voice weak and faulty in the extreme
in one whole octave of its range, and that the most important (between
F and F), was able by her matchless skill and audacity in the forms of
execution, modification, and ornament, to achieve the most brilliant
results, might well blind even a keen connoisseur by kindling his
admiration of her musical invention, at the expense of his recognition
of dramatic faculty.

It was characteristic of Mme. Malibran that she fired all her
fellow-artists with the ardor of her genius. Her resources and knowledge
were such that she could sing in any school and any language. The music
of Mozart and Cimarosa, Boïeldieu and Eossini, Cherubini and Bellini,
Donizetti and Meyerbeer, furnished in equal measure the mold into which
her great powers poured themselves with a sort of inspired fury, like
that of a Greek Pythoness. She had an artistic individuality powerful
to create types of its own, which were the despair of other singers, for
they were incapable of reproduction, inasmuch as they were partly forged
from her own defects, transformed by genius into beauties. In all those
accomplishments which have their root in the art temperament, she was a