closing operatic season of her life was Gluck's "Iphigenie en Aulis,"
which was especially revived for her. Johanna Wagner, the sister of
the great composer, was also in the cast, and a great enthusiasm
was created by a general stage presentation of almost unparalleled
completeness for that time.

Mme. Devrient retired permanently from the stage in the year 1849,
having amassed a considerable fortune by her professional efforts. She
made a second matrimonial venture with a rich Livonian proprietor named
Bock, with whom she retired to his estate. Her retirement occasioned
profound regret throughout Germany, where she was justly looked on as
one of the very greatest artists, if, indeed, even this reservation
could be made, who had ever shone on their lyric stage. The Emperor
Francis I. paid Mme. Schröder a compliment which had never before been
paid to a German singer. He ordered her portrait to be painted in all
her principal characters, and placed in the collection of the Imperial
Museum. Six years after her farewell from the stage, an Italian critic,
Scudo, heard her sing in a private house in Paris, and speaks very
disparagingly of her delivery of the melodies of Schubert in a weak,
thin voice. She, like Malibran, possessed one of those voices which
needed incessant work and practice to keep it in good order, though she
did not possess the consummate musical knowledge and skill of Malibran.
She was a woman of great intelligence and keen observation; an artist of
the most passionate ardor and impetuosity, always restrained, however,
by a well-studied control and reserve; in a word, a great lyric
tragedienne rather than a great singer in the exact sense of that word.
She must be classed with that group of dramatic singers who were the
interpreters of the school of music which arose in Germany after the
death of Mozart, and which found its most characteristic type in Carl
Maria von Weber, for Beethoven, who on one side belongs to this school,