In the following year (1833), Mme. Schröder-Devrient sang under Mr.
Bunn at the Covent Garden Theatre, appearing in several of Weber's and
Mozart's masterpieces. She was becoming more and more of a favorite with
the English public. The next season she devoted herself again to
the stage of Germany, where she was on the whole best understood and
appreciated, her faults more uniformly ignored. She appeared in twelve
operas by native composers in Berlin, and thence went to Vienna and St.
Petersburg. She proceeded to Italy in 1835, where she sang for eighteen
months in the principal cities and theatres of that country, and
succeeded in evoking from the critical Italians as warm a welcome as
she had commanded elsewhere. In one city the people were so enthusiastic
that they unharnessed her horses, and drew her carriage home from the
theatre after her closing performance. Although she never entirely
mastered the Italian school, she yet displayed so much intelligence,
knowledge, and faculty in her art-work, that all catholic lovers of
music recognized her great talents. She appeared again in Vienna in
1836, with Mme. Tadolini, Genaro, and Galli, singing in "L'Elisir
d'Amore," and works of a similar cast, operas unsuited, one would think,
to the peculiar _cachet_ of her genius, but her ability in comic and
romantic operas, though never so striking as in grand tragedy, seemed to
develop with practice.
Her last English engagement was in 1837, opening the season with
a performance of "Fidelio" in English. The whole performance was
lamentably inferior to that at the Opera-House in 1832. "Norma" was
produced, Schröder-Devrient being seconded by Wilson, Giubilei, and Miss
Betts. She was either very ill advised or overconfident, for her "massy"
style of singing was totally at variance with the light beauty of
Bellini's music. Her conception of the character, however, was in the
grandest style of histrionic art. "The sibyls of Michael Angelo are not
more grand," exclaimed one critic; "but the vocalization of Pasta
and Grisi is wholly foreign to her." During this engagement, Mme.
Schröder-Devrient was often unable to perform, from serious illness.
From England she went to the Lower Rhine.
In 1839 she was at Dresden with Herr Tichatschek, one of the first
tenors of Germany, a handsome man, with a powerful, sweet, and extensive
voice. In June, 1841, she gave a performance at Berlin, to assist the
Parisian subscription for a monument to Cherubini. The opera was "Les
Deux Journées," in which she took her favorite part of _Constance_. The
same year she sang at Dresden with the utmost success, in a new _rôle_
in Goethe's "Tasso," in which she was said to surpass her _Fidelio_. For
several years Mme. Schröder-Devrient resided in perfect seclusion in the
little town of Rochlitz, and appeared to have forgotten all her stage
ambition. Suddenly, however, she made her reappearance at Dresden in the
_rôle_ of _Romeo_ in Bellini's "I Montecchi ed i Capuletti." She had
lost a good deal of her vocal power and skill, yet her audiences seemed
to be moved by the same magic glamour as of old, in consequence of her
magnificent acting. Among other works in which she performed during this
closing operatic season of her life was Gluck's "Iphigenie en Aulis,"
which was especially revived for her. Johanna Wagner, the sister of
the great composer, was also in the cast, and a great enthusiasm
was created by a general stage presentation of almost unparalleled
completeness for that time.
Mme. Devrient retired permanently from the stage in the year 1849,
having amassed a considerable fortune by her professional efforts. She
made a second matrimonial venture with a rich Livonian proprietor named
Bock, with whom she retired to his estate. Her retirement occasioned
profound regret throughout Germany, where she was justly looked on as
one of the very greatest artists, if, indeed, even this reservation
could be made, who had ever shone on their lyric stage. The Emperor
Francis I. paid Mme. Schröder a compliment which had never before been
paid to a German singer. He ordered her portrait to be painted in all
her principal characters, and placed in the collection of the Imperial
Museum. Six years after her farewell from the stage, an Italian critic,
Scudo, heard her sing in a private house in Paris, and speaks very
disparagingly of her delivery of the melodies of Schubert in a weak,
thin voice. She, like Malibran, possessed one of those voices which
needed incessant work and practice to keep it in good order, though she
did not possess the consummate musical knowledge and skill of Malibran.
She was a woman of great intelligence and keen observation; an artist of
the most passionate ardor and impetuosity, always restrained, however,
by a well-studied control and reserve; in a word, a great lyric
tragedienne rather than a great singer in the exact sense of that word.
She must be classed with that group of dramatic singers who were the
interpreters of the school of music which arose in Germany after the
death of Mozart, and which found its most characteristic type in Carl
Maria von Weber, for Beethoven, who on one side belongs to this school,
rather belonged to the world, like Shakespeare in the drama, than to a
single nationality. Mme. Schröder-De-vrient died February 9, 1860,
at Cologne, and the following year her marble bust was placed in the
Opera-House at Berlin.