Now available from Amadeus Press...

524 pp, 7 color plates, 154 b/w photos, 6 x 9", hardcover

ISBN: 0-931340-60-8

$39.95, plus shipping and handling

Publication Date: October 1993

Available from Amadeus Press, LLC, 512 Newark Pompton Turnpike, Pompton Plains, NJ 07444 Telephone: (973) 835-6375, (800) 321-3408. http://www.amadeuspress.com/ and email at publicity@amadeuspress.com

Jenny Lind's tribute to Adelina Patti—"There is only one Niagara; and there is only one Patti"—is perhaps the most memorable of artists' tributes to the opera diva. Patti was a favorite among royalty and composers alike, especially Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer, and Verdi, who declared her "an artist by nature, so perfect that perhaps there has never been her equal".

Adelina Patti (1843-1919) gave her first public recital at the age of eight in New York City; she last performed in public at London's Albert Hall sixty-three years later. For decades in between, her singing and artistry enthralled millions throughout Europe, Russia, and North and South America. Among her admirers were Queen Victoria, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, and Czar Alexander II of Russia. Leo Tolstoy paid tribute to her in Anna Karenina, and George Bernard Shaw, as music critic, wrote eloquently of her glorious singing.

Patti's private life, rich in scandal and adventures, was the subject of much public scrutiny. The pet of the cultural elite, the possessor of enormous wealth, the chatelaine of a Welsh country estate, and a physically alluring woman, she was a fascinating personality. Perhaps the greatest sensation was her marriage in 1868 to a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Caux, followed in a few years by a separation and her living "in sin" with a celebrated French tenor, a married man and a father. The press called her affair with the singer and subsequent marriage to him the nineteenth century's greatest stage romance.