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The late Romantic Age saw the advent of singing-actors, whose impact upon audiences depended as much, or more, upon the virtuosity of their acting and the dramatic use of the voice than it did upon pure vocal beauty. Three singers are central to the development of operatic acting in this period. The acting of Giuditta Pasta, who made her name as the first interpreter of some of Bellini's major roles, recalled the statuesque and fixed style of opera seria, though with greater refinement and more attention to the inner aspects of the role. Maria Malibran, who enjoyed a meteoric career, primarily on the stages of London and Paris, appealed through the originality and, quite often, the shock value of her performances; although her voice had its beautiful aspects, the dramatic dimension of the performance was clearly the salient one. Adolphe Nourrit, the first tenor of the Paris Opéra, acted economically and with discipline; like Pasta his name was often linked with that of Talma, the great French tragic actor. His performances were marked, however, by a sense of struggle, as if he could not achieve the vocal freedom he longed for, a struggle that in real life led to his early death by suicide.
Romanticism and performance - two concepts that, initially at least, seem to be incompatible. If there is one theme that virtually all works of European romanticism possess in common, it is a deep belief in the subjective experience of the world and in privacy as a natural, preferred state for human beings. Performance, however, is not an ideal conduit for the subjective vision. Performance implies that the world is best apprehended through social interaction and display, and, through the inevitably public context in which it takes place, it seems to deny the preeminence of the subjective. Performance, according to that great progenitor of romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the fons et origo of every vice that corrupts the state of harmony between the social world and the feeling, subjective individual. Performance invites display, while the romantic impulse is primarily inward, even hermetic. For Rousseau, the most authentic desire for artistic experience arises from "[un] gout [...] pour la solitude" ('a taste for solitude') in which spectators become readers, who are...