Rockstro told me that Sir Michael Costa, after his severe paralytic
stroke, had to conduct at some great performance—I cannot be sure, but I
think he said a Birmingham Festival—at any rate he came in looking very
white and feeble and sat down in front of the orchestra to conduct a
morning rehearsal. Madame Patey was there, went up to the poor old
gentleman and kissed his forehead.
It is a curious thing about this great singer that not only should she
have been (as she has always seemed to me) strikingly like Handel in the
face, and not only should she have been such an incomparable renderer of
Handel’s music—I cannot think that I shall ever again hear any one who
seemed to have the spirit of Handel’s music so thoroughly penetrating his
or her whole being—but that she should have been struck with paralysis
at, so far as I can remember, the same age that Handel was. Handel was
struck in 1737 when he was 53 years old, but happily recovered. I forget
Madame Patey’s exact age, but it was somewhere about this.