Heroic Artists, Critical Abuse, and the Death of Maria Malibran

Malibran was born into a family of musical royalty. Her mother, Maria Joaquina Sitches Garcia (1780–1864), was a distinguished Spanish actress, pedagogue, and dramatic soprano, known onstage as Joaquina Briones. Her older brother, Manuel Patricio Rodríguez Garcia (1805–1906), was one of the most famous vocal pedagogues of the nineteenth century,¹⁷ and her younger sister, Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), took up the performing mantle following Malibran’s death, dazzling audiences on Europe’s most important opera stages for nearly three decades.¹⁸ At the helm of this powerful musical family was Malibran’s father, Manuel del Pópulo Vicente Rodríguez Garcia (1775–1832), a celebrated tenor and opera composer, as well as his children’s vocal instructor.¹⁹

Garcia senior racked up an impressive array of achievements during his lifetime. He served as one of Gioachino Rossini’s muses, creating roles in some of the composer’s most important operas, including Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia and the title role in Otello (see fig. 2).²⁰ Garcia was also a showrunner, the first to import, direct, and perform Italian opera in the original language in the United States and Mexico. In his spare time, he composed prolifically, writing operettas, tonadillas, choruses with orchestra, and songs. Garcia’s enduring legacy is rooted most firmly in his pedagogical accomplishments. Known as “the father of modern singing,” his students included Adolphe Nourrit, Henriette Méric-Lalande, and his three children.²¹ All told, his reputation as one of the most important contributors to the bel canto tradition has helped disguise the darker sides of his personality. Specifically, he harbored a violent temper, signs of which appeared as early as October 1799, when he was briefly jailed following a fight with a military guard at the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid.²²

Garcia’s hostility was directed primarily toward members of his own family and most frequently in the context of music lessons where his cruelty achieved its fullest expression. Accounts of his and his children’s lives do not, however, reveal the full scope of his abuses; on the contrary, some even provide him cover.²³ The Escudier brothers, Marie and Léon, for example, characterized rumors of Garcia’s cruelty to his children as “an abominable lie.”²⁴ More recently, in his otherwise excellent biography of Garcia, James Radomski relies on the Escudiers’ denial to discount rumors of violence and to argue that Garcia was merely a demanding teacher, his strict methods misunderstood.²⁵ Indeed, when biographers and critics raise the topic of Garcia’s violent behavior, they tend to frame it in terms of a pedagogical imperative: unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary. A recent example by Orlando Figes is illustrative:

Rather than holding him to account, Figes romanticizes Garcia’s pedagogical techniques, excusing his harmful behavior, even infusing it with its own hint of heroism—without this strict instruction, he implies, there would have been no Malibran.

Among Garcia’s staunchest defenders was his youngest daughter, Pauline Viardot. By many accounts, he was far easier on her than he was on her siblings—as the baby of the family, only eleven when he died, she perhaps escaped the worst of his wrath. FitzLyon writes that Garcia was “cruel and even violent with his two elder children,” but “he never ill-treated Pauline, and she reciprocated his adoration.”²⁷ Garcia himself was vocal about his preference for Viardot, allegedly describing the sisters in terms that simmer with violent undertones: “Pauline…can be guided by a thread of silk; Maria needs a hand of iron.”²⁸ Overall, the relationship between Viardot and her father seems to have been harmonious. Camille Saint-Saëns, a close friend of and collaborator with Viardot, reported after her death that she had once confided in him that neither she nor her sister had ever been “brutalized by their father.”²⁹ Yet, on at least one occasion, she admitted that she was unable to escape Garcia’s violent pedagogical impulses entirely. Tucked into the memoir of the sculptor Gustave Crauk, the vignette begins with Viardot making a mistake while practicing her scales. Repeating the scales a second time, she made a similar error at which point Garcia grew angry and yelled at her. Taking his admonishments to heart, she sang the notes again, this third time perfectly. Expecting to be praised for a job well done, Viardot was met instead with her father forcefully slapping her, declaring: “In the future you will know that you must do things right the first time.” According to Crauk, Viardot recounted this tale frequently with her own students, begging them to “remember her father’s blows.”³⁰

Given Viardot’s reluctance to cast aspersions on her father and her inclination to frame his cruelty as instructional, a letter she wrote to her husband, Louis Viardot, from Berlin in 1867 is significant. Garcia, who had died in 1835, was long gone by this time, perhaps freeing Viardot to speak openly.³¹ The main subject of this missive was her eldest daughter, Louise Héritte, who had recently abandoned her diplomat husband, Ernest Héritte, in South Africa, returning along with their three-year-old son to her parents’ home in Baden-Baden. From the moment of her arrival, Louise acted capriciously toward her parents. In a letter to Louis, Pauline’s frustration boiled over, and in her impatience with her daughter, combined with sympathetic feelings for her son-in-law, she drew an unsettling comparison:

This excerpt is arresting. Not only does Viardot provide a firsthand account of the violence that Garcia inflicted on his wife. She also inflects her letter with a disturbing undertone, drawing a connection between her father’s mistreatment and her mother’s unwavering dedication, between brutality and noble acceptance. Although Viardot stopped short of advocating domestic violence, a trace of wishful thinking might be detected in her words: if Ernest would take a stronger hand, as her father might have, perhaps Louise’s flighty nature could be tamed. This notion of wrangling with, and diffusing, a wild personality through strict “discipline” was by no means a new concept for the Garcias and their heirs, as Figes’s summation (quoted above) implied. It is this very narrative that saturates accounts of Malibran’s life.

Nineteenth-century accounts of Malibran’s childhood frequently euphemized Garcia’s violence as a necessary tool to tame her tempestuous spirit and shape her into a world-class musician. A description penned in 1856 by the Escudiers, the same pair who had earlier denied Garcia’s violence outright as an “abominable lie,” is typical:

Entwined here are two themes that would come to characterize both mundane and pivotal moments throughout Malibran’s life and career: musical perfection and violence. Notably, in the Escudiers’ narrative, the abuse committed by Garcia is linked directly to Malibran’s ability to sing well.

This alignment of violence with instruction is consistent throughout other contemporary accounts of the father-daughter pair. Garcia’s brutality is always situated in the context of lessons or performance, implying a pedagogical technique employed as a matter of course. An article published in the influential French music journal Le Ménestrel in 1863, for instance, includes a description by Garcia junior of lessons he and Malibran endured with their father when they were young. According to this account, Garcia senior would position himself behind his terrified children as they sang and slap them across the cheek “with mathematical precision” whenever they hit a wrong note or slipped out of time. If they cried or failed to correct their mistake the cuffing would continue more fiercely than before: “Garcia had muscles of steel, which no exercise ever tired.”³⁴

This description helps place Malibran’s terrified reaction, described in another anecdote, into perspective. In Memoirs of Madame Malibran, her friend and eventual biographer, the Countess de Merlin, recalled an evening when she and Malibran were rehearsing a duet in Garcia’s presence. Malibran, who struggled with some of the ornaments her father had written for her, whispered, “I cannot.” In response, “he fixed his large eyes sternly upon her and said, ‘Did I hear aright?’” Coming face-to-face with his fury, she corrected herself quickly and “sang the passage perfectly,” later confiding in Merlin, “such is the effect of an angry look from my father, that I am sure it would make me jump from the roof of the house without hurting myself.”³⁵

More details of Garcia’s pedagogical brutality are provided in an account by Arthur Pougin, one of nineteenth-century France’s principal musical and dramatic critics. Pougin comments that Garcia “beat” Malibran “pitilessly, in order to correct an involuntary slip, or to get the effect he wanted,” and concludes his account with a vignette demonstrating general acceptance of Garcia’s actions:

The sense of menace woven throughout these stories is amplified further in the memoirs of the librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. In the early 1820s Bouilly visited Garcia at home in Paris to discuss plans for collaborating on an opera. When he arrived at the apartment, he was greeted by a servant in an anteroom where he overheard “the plaintive cries of a child”:

Significantly, Bouilly’s account stands apart from those discussed above—he neither euphemizes nor condones Garcia’s violence. Nevertheless, although he may have managed to extricate Malibran from her plight during that singular moment, he went no further; he did not report the experience to friends, family members, or the authorities. Bouilly’s inaction may have been rooted in a wider cultural milieu that accepted, even expected, the use of harsh language and behavior between family members and within pedagogical contexts. “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” as the adage goes. This context may have conditioned Bouilly to question the severity of what he heard: Garcia was probably speaking to (or yelling at) his daughter in Spanish, and thus Bouilly may not have felt entirely confident about what he was hearing behind closed doors.³⁸

The connection between musical instruction and corporal punishment was by no means limited to Malibran’s experience, nor was Garcia the only instructor who employed strict discipline. Anecdotal accounts are littered with examples of parents who hit their children in the name of achieving greatness. Johann van Beethoven, father of Ludwig van Beethoven, displayed bursts of violence in his attempt to fashion his young son into a child prodigy;³⁹ Friedrick Wieck, the renowned nineteenth-century piano instructor whose most famous student was his daughter, Clara Schumann, was notoriously tyrannical, employing both physical and emotional abuse to produce the desired results from his daughter and other children;⁴⁰ and the violist and composer Rebecca Clarke described the cruelty her father inflicted on her and her siblings, recalling, “we were all of us whipped, sometimes really painfully.”⁴¹

Moreover, the link between musical instruction and “poisonous pedagogy,” the employment of brute force and emotional manipulation to achieve results, was never exclusively a family affair.⁴² In her memoirs, Boston-based pianist Amy Fay described the group piano lessons she attended in Berlin with Carl Tausig during which he heaped verbal and emotional abuse on his pupils; similarly, Emi di Bidoli documented the cruel techniques employed by her vocal teacher, Aglaja Orgeni; and Birgit Nilsson describes her first lessons with her teacher Joseph Hislop as equivalent to being placed in a “torture chamber.”⁴³

Instances of cruelty as a function of musical training have a long history—one need only think of the abuse of young boys conscripted as castrati to understand how closely linked are the concepts of brutalism and musical perfection.⁴⁴ As musicologist David Gramit has explored, however, the nineteenth century witnessed a flourishing of music pedagogy techniques rooted in “coercion, manipulation, and breaking down” the will of the pupil—the development of a system of control aimed not only at yielding excellent musicians but also geared toward developing an obedient citizenry.⁴⁵ Although cruelty was by no means a measure universally adopted by music instructors, there have been few, if any, corners of classical music training in which the use of harsh techniques to achieve results has been entirely absent.⁴⁶ Some students emerge from this type of training unscathed, even proud of what they endured in the name of art. Malibran herself seems to have harbored this very sentiment, something Viardot noted in a letter she wrote to the critic Henri de Curzon: “My father has been unworthily slandered as a father and as a man. How many times have I heard my sister say, ‘If my father hadn’t been so harsh with me, I wouldn’t have done any good; I was lazy and rebellious.’”⁴⁷ As scandalous revelations surrounding the conductor James Levine have revealed, however, the tendency to overlook and forgive abuse because of the abuser’s musical status or the results achieved is dangerous ground.⁴⁸ The ends do not justify the means. Despite Malibran’s protestations that she “needed” her father’s cruelty to transform her into a great musician, the damaging effects were long-lasting.

There is no medical evidence of trauma that Malibran may have suffered as a result of her childhood treatment. The possibility of long-term effects can be deduced only from hints left behind in contemporary biographies and newspaper reviews. The clues are vague, but revealing nevertheless. In one of the earliest biographies of Malibran, published only three months following her death, Isaac Nathan noted that her vocal studies were “associated with the most painful remembrances…occasioned by the unnecessary and incessant severity which her father exercised while engaged in developing her unequalled capabilities.”⁴⁹ Without making the connection explicit, Nathan alludes to the long-term effects of Garcia’s behavior, commenting that those who knew Malibran best, “knew that no woman on earth ever suffered greater agony of mental torture than she did from the age of fifteen.…The effects these sufferings produced can never be forgotten by those who saw them. She would remain sometimes for hours in a state of unmovable ecstasy, gazing on vacancy, beautiful as Pygmalion’s Venus before it descended from the pedestal.”⁵⁰

A similar vignette appears in Countess de Merlin’s Memoirs of Madame Malibran published two years later: “During her early years Maria Garcia showed symptoms of that delicacy of health which characterized her after life.…She would frequently swoon when overcome by the violent conflict which ever raged within her—the struggle between the mental energy and the delicate constitution with which nature had endowed her.” Merlin’s description of Malibran’s mental and emotional state concludes: “Whilst suffering to her utmost powers of endurance, and struggling against pain and debility, this inimitable songstress has often won her brightest laurels.”⁵¹ The trope of the Romantic hero emerges in Merlin’s and Nathan’s accounts: Nathan repeatedly applies the term “genius” to Malibran’s abilities, and both authors imply that the more intense Malibran’s suffering became, the greater were her artistic triumphs. Neither author compares her situation to Beethoven (the most iconic of Romantic heroes) and his gradual loss of hearing, but his story of loss and pain echoes faintly in hers. For Malibran, moreover, the trope takes on a particularly poignant tone that parallels Beethoven’s situation: the singer is not quite able-bodied. Paradoxically, this state of disability is perceived as intrinsic to her performative success.⁵² In this reading, the more concentrated her pain becomes, the more extreme her compulsion to sing, to transform herself into a spectacle that delighted audiences.⁵³ Long-term trauma, in other words, was linked inextricably to an imperative to perform, to please audiences, just as she was once forced to appease her father. Hints of the consequences of this mindset began to appear in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the years during which she reached the heights of fame and found herself in constant demand in theaters across Europe.

Malibran emancipated herself from her family in New York City in 1826, following one final act of physical violence committed against her by her father, this time on stage and in full view of the opera-going public. The Garcia Troupe, led by its patriarch, had traveled to the United States one year earlier to introduce Italian opera to the new world. During these months, Malibran dazzled audiences in works by Mozart, Rossini, her father, and others.⁵⁴ On the docket for the end of February 1826 was Rossini’s Otello with Malibran performing Desdemona to Garcia’s Otello. Malibran, having had less than a week to prepare this challenging role, was apprehensive, fearing she would not be able to execute Rossini’s music properly. Her trepidation came to a head at the conclusion of the opening-night performance when Garcia, as Otello, came at her with a real dagger instead of the prop that was supposed to be used as the murder weapon. Malibran panicked, believing that her father truly meant to kill her, and screamed, a realistic turn that the audience assumed was part of the production. Garcia later denied any malintent, explaining that he had misplaced the prop dagger and out of necessity used a real one instead.⁵⁵ Unclear, however, is whether this explanation sufficed for Malibran, or whether it represented a final straw, a clear warning of the violence her father might inflict on her if she continued to live and perform with him.

Around this same time, she met and became enamored with a French-born businessman, François Eugene Malibran, twenty-eight years her senior, whom she married against her father’s wishes.⁵⁶ Garcia and his troupe left New York shortly thereafter for Mexico City, leaving his daughter behind. Finding herself alone in a foreign land, ensconced in a relationship in which an older man once again held emotional and financial authority over her, Malibran fled, arriving in Europe without her husband at the end of 1827.⁵⁷ Even though she had successfully escaped her father, his presence nevertheless lingered in the traumatic after-effects of her childhood. These were years of explosive fame, but they were by no means free. Instead, they were marred by frequent illness and injury, so much so that the impression Malibran sometimes left on critics and audiences was of a young woman who was not fully able-bodied.

As reviews of her performances indicate, Malibran was exceptionally, almost mysteriously, accident-prone, her list of injuries piling up one after another between 1829 and her death in 1836. While biographers note some of these injuries, none explore them collectively. In late June 1829 she hurt her arm at the King’s Theatre, London, during a production of Zingarelli’s Romeo e Giulietta, perhaps the result of a curtain falling too early and landing on her and her co-star.⁵⁸ A more serious incident occurred around nine months later, on April 3, 1830, when she either fell down a flight of stairs or slipped through a trapdoor left open by negligent stagehands at the Théâtre Italien, Paris.⁵⁹ While in Naples only one year before the horse-riding accident that would ultimately lead to her death, she was in a serious collision involving horses—an ominous harbinger. According to a press account from March 1835, “The horses ran away with her carriage, the wheels of which were dashed against the curb-stone, and broken in pieces. She was thrown out, had her wrists sprained, her whole body bruised, and received many severe contusions.”⁶⁰ Finally, later that same year she suffered from “chilled feet,” a condition that caused her so much pain that she had to appear on stage at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, in slippers and on crutches.⁶¹ Scattered among these reported injuries are other notices containing vague hints that she suffered from a series of other, undisclosed “indispositions,” some of which included pregnancies.⁶²

Almost without exception, Malibran continued to perform through these injuries, illnesses, and indispositions, feats of which critics kept careful track. Tucked into each of these notices were echoes of the feedback loop between suffering and artistic success that had been drilled into the diva as a child by her father. A few weeks following her first arm injury, in 1829, for example, she reappeared as Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia at the King’s Theatre. At that performance, one critic observed: “Her vocal execution was not at all impaired by the effects of her recent confinement, nor was her acting ever more animated; but she wore her left arm, which appeared to have been the object of the late injury, in a sling.”⁶³ An unidentified “indisposition” (possibly a pregnancy) affecting her at the end of 1830, moreover, prompted these remarks: “The indisposition of this young and admirable artiste has much augmented the feebleness of her body; but it has, at the same time, increased the passion and energy of her soul.”⁶⁴

While Malibran maintained this delicate balance between injury and performance throughout much of her career, there were a few instances when the indulgence of her critics was supplanted by speculation, and even cruelty. On hearing a report of her “chilled feet” in Naples, one critic grumbled that her appearance on stage with slippers and crutches could mark the beginning of a slippery slope toward full invalidism: “We suppose we shall next hear that the lady is wheeled on the stage in bed, and that the curtains were drawn; that she sung a bravura on the broad of her back, and wheeled off again amid still more outrageous expressions of admiration!” Woven into this disdainful remark is a clear recognition of the link between Malibran’s infirmity and spectators’ joyful reception of her performances. So entrenched was this connection, in fact, that at the conclusion of this review, the critic accused Malibran of deliberately attempting to manipulate her audience by faking her injury: “Perhaps, however, it was a ruse of Madame herself to show what she could do with her captivated audience. Oh, vanity! vanity!”⁶⁵

This was not the first time she had been suspected of faking illness or injury to gain favor. A similar allegation was leveled at her in June 1830 when she appeared in the lead role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the King’s Theatre, London. As reported in the press, an announcement was made midway through the performance that Malibran was too sick to complete the opera and that she was to be replaced.⁶⁶ When the curtain rose on the second half, however, that crowd was astonished to see that she was back on stage, singing as divinely as ever. This drew a savage response from one critic, who in condemning her for supposedly feigning illness made an extremely invidious comparison:

To compare Malibran to a fictional dog strips her not just of her integrity but also of her humanity. While the creature in the nursery rhyme is gendered male, the behavior inscribed by the comparison drew on inherently female stereotypes: the assertion that Malibran’s actions were not “original” appealed directly to assumptions about the figure of the prima donna as spoiled, whimsical, and most importantly, lacking in both intelligence and imagination.⁶⁸ If Malibran had, in fact, been trying to fool her audience, her actions backfired, at least as far as this critic was concerned.

Whereas Malibran faced accusations of faking illnesses, her male counterparts were rarely blamed when they were too sick to perform. To take an example, Luigi Lablache, the great bass singer known for his brilliance in both comic and serious operas, was under the weather during the 1840 season at the Théâtre Italien, Paris.⁶⁹ As a result, a scheduled performance of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, in which he was to perform the role of Bartolo, had to be replaced with Donizetti’s much less popular Linda di Chamounix. Disappointed at this turn of events, one audience member took matters into her own hands and, approaching Lablache in public, demanded to know when he would return to the stage. According to a press account, “Lablache replied that he really could not determine at the moment; all he could say was, that he had still a terrible cold, and that if they forced him to sing in despite of his cold, he might be laid up for fifteen days longer.”⁷⁰ This explanation sufficed for Lablache’s fan, but likely would not have for fans and critics of Malibran, or any other prima donna. As Kimberly White has observed in her sweeping study of singers active in the early decades of the nineteenth century, “Female singers were stereotyped as the worst offenders for feigning illness, usually for reasons of amour-propre.”⁷¹

If Malibran was sometimes forced to defend herself against accusations of feigning illness, more often the spectacle of her visible suffering seemed to evoke pleasure in her critics and audiences. This voyeuristic tendency was on full display on the evening of June 4, 1833, during a production of a new operetta, The Students of Jena, by Hippolyte Chelard. Although the work was poorly received, there was one “bright” spot for spectators, when Malibran fell while singing one of her arias. According to a review printed the next day, this event occasioned the only encore of the evening, generated by “some wags of the Gallery, with [a] most philosophical want of sympathy for bodily pain.”⁷² It was not, however, just the spectacle of suffering to which audiences responded. A persistent theme in press reviews was the perception that the emotional effects of Malibran’s performances were directly linked to the level of pain she experienced. As one reviewer commented in June 1836:

The more intense Malibran’s pain and the more she appeared to be engaging in what Céline Frigau Manning has described as moments of “excess,” the greater was her reception by her audiences.⁷⁴

Malibran carried the correlation between pain and success to a tragic extreme in September 1836. Weakened and in physical decline from her horse-riding accident several months earlier, she spent most of the summer resting, canceling some performances, and appearing onstage only occasionally in August.⁷⁵ When she arrived in Manchester in September, she participated in a dress rehearsal on the twelfth of that month, in two concerts on the thirteenth, and in yet another concert on the morning of the fourteenth. Notes of concern regarding her health peppered daily newspaper accounts, but no critic raised any serious red flags. On the contrary, they praised her singing, as an article recalling her performance on the morning of September 14 illustrates. This review notes that when Malibran performed Pergolesi’s aptly named “O Lord have mercy upon me, for I am in trouble,” she “seemed to have almost entirely recovered from her indisposition. She was in excellent spirits.” The article affirms her performative strength, despite her condition: “The audience hung upon her tones with breathless attention, and nothing but the solemnity of the subject, and the sacred character of the place prevented them from testifying their approbation by a unanimous burst of applause.”⁷⁶ Readers keeping tabs on her well-being through such reports would have had little reason to suspect that anything was amiss.

In truth, however, she had not recovered at all as those witnessing her performances in person may have noticed. Sir George Smart, the conductor overseeing the festival, was certainly aware, jotting down his impressions on the morning of September 13 in his copy of the program booklet (see fig. 3): “Madame de Bériot was very unwell but she sang well tho she commenced feebly.”⁷⁷ That Malibran refused to rest is all the more remarkable given one additional fact: she was pregnant, well enough along that one critic described her as “far advanced.”⁷⁸ In opting to perform rather than face the wrath of her audience and accusations of fakery, therefore, she must have understood the extreme duress under which she was placing her body.⁷⁹

Malibran’s final appearance occurred on the evening of Wednesday, September 14. The concert was divided into two halves, opening with a “Sinfonia in D” by Mozart, and followed by individual arias and ensembles featuring singers including Clara Novello, Nicola Ivanoff, Luigi Lablache, Maria Caradori-Allan, Mrs. H. R. Bishop, and John Braham.⁸⁰ Malibran’s first appearance of the night occurred midway through part one, in the quartet from Beethoven’s Fidelio, “Mir ist so wunderbar.” The ensemble was reportedly “given with beautiful effect, from the amalgamation of the voices, independently of the transcendent merits of the composition.”⁸¹ A short break for Malibran followed, during which Mrs. Bishop sang “Rose Softly Blooming” from Spohr’s Azor and Zemira, and Braham performed “Mad Tom” by Purcell. After they finished, it was Malibran’s turn again.

She stepped onto the stage to perform the duet “Vanne se alberghi in petto” from Mercadante’s Andronica with Caradori-Allan.⁸² During the course of this duet, her partner, unaware of how ill Malibran was, challenged her to a vocal duel, singing newly elaborated fioriture in an attempt to compel Malibran to compete in turn. Despite her weakened condition, Malibran responded magnificently, eliciting an encore from the audience. Sir George Smart recounts what happened next:

The audience was thrilled by the performance, showering both prima donnas with applause that resounded through the theater, even as Malibran collapsed and was carried backstage, never to sing again. Notably, one critic present described her singing as a manifestation of her imminent death: “The fearful shake at the top of her voice will never be forgotten by those who heard it. It was a desperate struggle against sinking nature; it was the last vivid glare of the expiring lamp.”⁸⁴

One of Malibran’s biographers, Howard Bushnell, takes the opportunity to infuse a sense of victimhood into this story, linking this pivotal moment directly back to her harrowing childhood experiences with her father. After Smart offered to “address the audience,” Bushnell embellishes the narrative:

This rewriting of this pivotal moment reduces Malibran’s actions to her relationship with her father and places her in the role of the victim. In this interpretation, she manifests the soul of a Romantic hero, but she is also shorn of her own agency, eternally beholden to the will of her father.

But to accept this interpretation without question would perpetuate the myth of the Romantic hero that Malibran’s fans and early biographers once found so comforting. A different, more empowering, explanation of this event is possible, one that situates Malibran as the aggressor. Perhaps when Malibran responded to Smart, telling him that she would annihilate her rival, she was manifesting a desire to turn the tables on past experiences, embracing the role of the fighter. In doing so, she reached for the one “weapon” at her disposal: her superior virtuosic technique, gained at the hands of her father’s instruction. Just as Garcia had once come at her onstage with a knife in Otello, in this final appearance in Manchester, England, she mobilized her energy to overpower Caradori-Allan. In this interpretation, Malibran is in complete control, placing her unparalleled talents on full display in order to maintain her reputation as one of Europe’s finest performers.

Rather than placing Malibran on the unstable pedestal of the Romantic hero, in other words, one could construe her actions more literally, as evidence that she possessed the characteristics of a genuine hero. After all, not only did she survive a childhood of abuse and a set of physical and mental hardships throughout her career, but she also thrived despite the accumulating and ongoing traumas she sustained. In this formulation, her actions during her final days need not be interpreted as the result of a passive mindset but instead can be interpreted as a series of deliberate choices motivated by her desire to entertain her public, and, importantly, to sustain and even augment her reputation as one of the nineteenth century’s most famous divas.

In this sense, it is worth emphasizing that despite the specificity of Malibran’s individual traumas, the general hardships she suffered as a performer mirrored the experiences of many of her contemporaries. She was just one of many prima donnas who felt compelled to perform, despite poor working conditions and while ill. To advocate for oneself was to open oneself up to accusations of fakery and retaliation. While Malibran may have suffered deeply during her life, in other words, hers was not the mythical anguish of the Romantic hero; instead, she was subject to a typical, even mundane byproduct of the cruelty embedded in the training and careers of many young artists from the nineteenth century onward, followed by unrelenting pressure by audiences and impresarios. The normalization of the types of abuse she underwent must be recognized, but at the same time, acknowledging her past experiences need not render Malibran a victim. Once she freed herself from her father and first husband, she transformed herself into one of Europe’s most powerful stars. Her early death, thus, was a tragedy of immense proportion, but it was never preordained.