Staudigl's last appearance took place in 1856, on Palm Sunday, for a few days later he became a victim to insanity, from which he never recovered. He made repeated tours abroad, and was much admired wherever he went. As a singer of Schubert's Lieder he was without a rival, and his performances of the "Erlkoenig," the "Wanderer," and "Aufenthalt" were considered wonderful. His death occurred in 1861, and his funeral was the occasion of a great demonstration. Manuel Garcia, the tenor, had two daughters who both achieved the highest distinction on the operatic stage. The eldest, Maria Felicien, became Madame Malibran, and she is mentioned to-day as one of the most wonderful operatic singers that the world has produced. Daring originality stamped her life as a woman and her career as an artist, and the brightness with which her star shone through a brief and stormy history had something akin in it to the dazzling but capricious passage of a meteor. As a child she was delicate, sensitive, and self-willed, and she had a prodigious instinct for art. Nevertheless, her voice was peculiarly intractable, being thin in the upper notes, veiled in the middle tones, and her intonation very imperfect. On leaving school she was taken in hand by her father, who was more pitiless to her than to his other pupils. He understood her disposition thoroughly, and said that she could never become great except at the price of much suffering, for her proud and stubborn spirit required an iron hand to control it. Soon after making her debut she went with her father to America, for he had conceived a project for establishing opera in the United States. His company consisted of himself, Madame Garcia, a son, and his daughter. Maria's charming voice and personal fascination held the public spellbound, and raised the delight of opera-goers to a wild pitch of enthusiasm. While in New York, a French merchant, M. Francois Eugene Malibran, fell passionately in love with her, and she, being sick of her father's brutality, and the supposed great fortune of Malibran dazzling her imagination, married him, though in opposition to her father's will. A few weeks after the marriage M. Malibran was a bankrupt, and imprisoned for debt, and his bride discovered that she had been cheated by a cunning scoundrel, who had calculated on saving himself from poverty by dependence on the stage earnings of his wife. Garcia and the rest of his family went to Mexico, where he succeeded in losing his fortune. Madame Malibran remained in New York with her husband; but at the end of five months she wearied of her hard fate, and, leaving him, returned to Paris. Here she soon had the world at her feet, for the novelty and richness of her style of execution set her apart from all other singers as a woman of splendid and inventive genius.