There was a time early in the century when the voice of Rosamunda Pisaroni was believed to be the most perfect and delightful, not only of all contraltos of the age, but to have reached the absolute ideal of what this voice should be. She even for a time disputed the supremacy of Henrietta Sontag as the idol of the Paris public, though the latter great singer possessed the purest of soprano voices, and won no less by her personal loveliness than by the charm of her singing. Pisaroni excelled as much in her dramatic power as in the beauty of her voice, and up to the advent of Marietta Alboni on the stage was unquestionably without a rival in the estimate of critics as the artist who surpassed all the traditions of the operatic stage in this peculiar line of singing. But her memory was dethroned from its pedestal when the gorgeous Alboni became known to the European public. Thomas Noon Talfourd applied to a well-known actress of half a century since the expression that she had "corn, wine, and oil" in her looks. A similar characterization would well apply both to the appearance and voice of Mlle. Alboni, when she burst on the European world in the splendid heyday of her youth and charms--the face, with its broad, sunny Italian beauty, incapable of frown; the figure, wrought in lines of voluptuous symmetry, though the _embonpoint_ became finally too pronounced; the voice, a rich, deep, genuine contralto of more than two octaves, as sweet as honey, and "with that tremulous quality which reminds fanciful spectators of the quiver in the air of the calm, blazing summer's noon"; a voice luscious beyond description. To this singer has been accorded without dissent the title of the "greatest contralto of the nineteenth century."