However pleased the directors may have been at first to have two popular songstresses, they were soon dismayed at the fierce rivalry that sprang up between them and was fanned to flames by Master Handel himself, who now composed exclusively for Faustina. By increasing the salary of her more tractable rival they finally disposed of Cuzzoni, who thenceforth through her exaggerated demands, managed to disgust her patrons wherever she appeared. Her reckless extravagance left her wholly destitute after losing her voice and her husband, Signor Sandoni, a harpsichord-maker. She passed her last years in Bologna, subsisting on a miserable pittance earned by covering buttons.
Faustina married Adolphe Hasse, the German dramatic composer, and at forty-seven sang before Frederick the Great, who was charmed with the freshness of her voice. The couple lived until 1783, the one eighty-three, the other eighty-four years of age. Dr. Burney visited them when they were advanced in the seventies and found Faustina a sprightly, sensible old lady, with a delightful store of reminiscences, and her husband a communicative, rational old gentleman, quite free from "pedantry, pride and prejudice."
Gertrude Elizabeth Mara, Germany's earliest noted queen of song, began her public career in 1755 as a child violinist of six, traveling with her father, Johann Schmäling, a respectable musician of Hesse-Cassel. In London her musical gifts proved to include a phenomenal soprano voice, which developed a compass from G to E altissimo, unrivalled portamento di voce, pure enunciation and precise intonation. She became skilled in harmony, theory, sight-reading and harpsichord playing. When she sang, her glowing countenance, her supreme acting and the lights and shades of her voice made people forget the plainness of her features and the insignificance of her form and stature. Her rendering of Handel's airs, especially "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth," was pronounced faultless.
Frederick the Great, who as soon expected pleasure from the neighing of a horse as from a German songstress, vanquished on hearing her, retained her as court singer. While in his service she became the wife of Jean Mara, a handsome, dissipated court violoncellist, whom she loved devotedly, but who led her a sorry life. Returning to London later she taught singing at two guineas a lesson. Upon fear being expressed that her price, double that of other teachers, would limit her class, she said her pupils having her voice as a model could learn in half the time required for those who had only the tinkling of a piano to imitate. Though she believed singing should be taught by a singer, a tenderness for her own experience made her insist that the best way to begin the musical education was by having the pupil learn to play the violin. When she heard a songstress extolled for rapid vocalization she would ask: "Can she sing six plain notes?" This question might afford young singers food for reflection. Madame Mara passed her declining years teaching singing near her native place, and died at Reval, in 1833. Two years earlier, on her eighty-third birthday, Goethe offered her a poetic tribute.