in the second act (the "Mario-Aria"). Mario's performance generated great excitement, and "a new star was born". Despite achieving immediate success, he chose not to stay long at the Paris Opéra. With the splendid quality of his singing and his dashing stage presence, he hoped to perform in other places. In 1839 he first sang in London, achieving instant success in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. There he met the famous Italian soprano Giulia Grisi. He then joined the Théâtre Italien, where Grisi and other illustrious singers including Maria Malibran, Henriette Sontag, Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache regularly performed. His first appearance there was as Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. From 1841 Mario and Grisi lived together. The acclaim which Mario received in Italian opera surpassed the renown he had won in French opera, and he soon acquired a Europe-wide reputation for the beauty of his singing and the elegance of his bearing. He possessed a handsome face and a lithe figure; he liked to show off his legs in tights. His lyrical voice, though less dazzling than that of the older virtuoso tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini and not as powerful as that of his younger rival Enrico Tamberlik, was described as having grace and a beguiling, velvety softness that made it unique. The music critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was born in 1856 and therefore could not have heard Mario in his prime, remarked that Mario's singing featured a marked vibrato. Mario created few operatic parts, the most notable being that of Ernesto in Donizetti's Don Pasquale (1843). However, he sang in the première of Rossini's Stabat Mater, and Verdi wrote a new cabaletta for him to sing in the main tenor aria in I due Foscari for a production in Paris. In established roles, Mario's greatest performances were as the title character in Rossini's Otello, Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia, Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Fernando in La favorite, the Duke in Rigoletto, Alfredo in La traviata, Manrico in Il trovatore, Lionel in Martha and many others. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London and the Théâtre Italien in Paris were the scenes of most of his stage triumphs. He sang in London from 1847 until 1867, and again during 1871. Mario also made occasional appearances elsewhere in England in oratorio, for example at the Birmingham Festival of 1849 and at