Schroder-Devrient is here but she's not such a sensation as in Germany. La Malibran played Othello and she was Desdemona. Malibran is small while the German lady is huge it looked as if she would stifle Othello! This was an expensive performance all seats cost 24 francs to see Malibran with a black face and not very good in the part... The orchestra is marvellous, not to be compared however with the real French Opera, the Academic Royale. If ever magnificence was seen in a theatre I doubt whether it reached the level of splendour shown in Robert le Diable, the very latest five-act opera of Meyerbeer, who wrote II Crodato, It is a masterpiece of the modern school, in which devils (the huge chorus) sing through megaphones and spirits arise from their graves not like in The Charlatan [an opera by Kurpinski], but in groups of fifty or sixty. On the stage there's a diorama [transformation effect] in which, towards the end, you see the inside of a church and the whole church itself at Christmas or Easter all lit up, with monks and congregation seated, with censers and, what is more, with a grand organ, whose sound, when heard on the stage, enchants and amazes one and practically drowns the whole orchestra. No one will ever stage anything like it! Meyerbeer has made himself Immortal! But he had to wait for three years in Paris before he could produce it and they say he had to spend 20,000 francs on the cast. Mme Cinti-Damoreau's singing could not be bettered I prefer her to Malibran. Malibran amazes you the other ravishes you, and she does her chromatic scales better than Tulon, the famous flautist. Impossible to have a more perfectly trained voice, and it seems to cost her so little effort that she coquets with the public. Nourrit, the French tenor, sings with extraordinary feeling, but Cholet (who is at the Opera-Comique where they are doing [Auber's] Fra Diavolo, [Ries's] The Robber's Bride, and Zampa, a delightful new opera by Herold) is the principal "leading-man" or "seducer". He annoys one, but is marvellous a genius with a true romantic voice. He has formed his own special style. << less