Masetto, and in rehearsal would often for exercise hold a double bass out at arm’s length.  The force of his voice was so prodigious that he could make himself heard above any orchestral thunders or chorus, however gigantic.  This power was rarely put forth, but at the right time and place it was made to peal out with a resistless volume, and his portentous notes rang through the house like the boom of a great bell.  It was said that his wife was sometimes aroused at night by what appeared to be the fire tocsin, only to discover that it was her recumbent husband producing these bell-like sounds in his sleep.  The vibratory power of his full voice was so great that it was dangerous for him to sing in a greenhouse.

Like so many of the foremost artists, Lablachc shone alike in comic and tragic parts.  Though he sang successfully in all styles of music and covered a great dramatic versatility, the parts in which he was peculiarly great were Leporello in “Don Giovanni”; the Podesta in “La Gazza Ladra”; Geronimo in “Il Matrimonio Segreto”; Caliban in Halevy’s “Tempest”; Gritzonko in “L’Etoile du Nord”; Henry VIII in “Anna Bolena”; the Doge in “Marino Faliero”; Oroveso in “Norma”; and Assur in “Semiramide.”  In thus selecting certain characters as those in which Lablache was unapproachably great, it must be understood that he “touched nothing which he did not adorn.”  It has been frankly conceded even among the members of his own profession, where envy, calumny, and invidious sneers so often belittle the judgment, that Lablache never performed a character which he did not make more difficult for those that came after him, by elevating its ideal and grasping new possibilities in its conception.

Lablache sang in London and Paris for many years successively, and his fame grew to colonial proportions.  In 1828 his terms were forty thousand francs and a benefit, for four months.  A few years later, Laporte, of London, paid Robert, of Paris, as much money for the mere cession of his services for a short season.  In 1852 when Lablachc had reached an age when most singers grow dull and mechanical, he created two new types, Caliban, in Halevy’s opera of “The Tempest,” and Gritzonko, in “L’Etoile du Nord,” with a vivacity, a stage knowledge, and a brilliancy of conception as rare as they were strongly marked.  He was one of the thirty-two torch-bearers who followed Beethoven’s body to its interment, and he sung the solo part in “Mozart’s Requiem” at the funeral, as he had when a child sung the contralto part in the same mass at Hadyn’s obsequies.  He was the recipient of orders and medals from nearly every sovereign in Europe.  When he was thus honored by the Emperor of Russia in 1856, he used the prophetic words, “These will do to ornament my coffin.”  Two years afterward he died at Naples, January 23, 1858, whither he had gone to try the effects of the balmy climate of his native city on his failing health.  His only daughter married Thalberg, the pianist.  He was the singing master of Queen Victoria, and he is frequently mentioned in her published diaries and letters in terms of the strongest esteem and admiration.  His death drew out expressions of profound sorrow from all parts of Europe, for it was felt that, in Lablache, the world of song had lost one of the greatest lights which had starred its brilliant record.