could no longer command a steady tone, the beaux restes of her art and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice, according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless, Chorley asserts that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure than almost any other singer he had ever heard in the theatre! If this critic did not grasp this opportunity to point the way to the future, on another occasion he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution: "There might, there should be yet, a new Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs. Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who is to represent the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is suggestive.
The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools. Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate
