Pure without attenuation, passionate without contortion, when once heard it exacted absolute confidence.
On this night her theme and her impersonation were adventitious introductions, but there were passages when her artistic pre-eminence and the sovereign fulness and fire of her singing struck a note of grateful remembered delight.

This is what the great voice does for us.
It rarely astonishes our ears.

It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat.
At the rising of the curtain the knights of the plains, Rudolfo, Romualdo, Arnoldo, and others, who were conspiring to overthrow Count Orso at the time when Camillo's folly ruined all, assemble to deplore Camilla's banishment, and show, bereft of her, their helplessness and indecision.

They utter contempt of Camillo, who is this day to be Pontifically divorced from his wife to espouse the detested Michiella.
His taste is not admired.
They pass off.

Camillo appears.