Tedesco, who came to New York with the first Havana company in April, 1847, presented herself to the always susceptible mind of Mr. White as a great, handsome, ox-eyed creature, the picture of lazy loveliness until she was excited by music; then she poured out floods, or rather gusts, of rich, clear sound. "She was not a great artist, but her voice was so copious and so musical that she could not be heard without pleasure, although it was not of the highest kind." Bettini left nothing here that remained in the memory of New Yorkers except the half of a name which he gave to his wife, the contralto Trebelli-Bettini, who was a member of Mr. Abbey's company on the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. Salvi came over with the Havana company in the spring of 1848, and was one of the fish which Maretzek took from Marty's weirs. If we are to believe the testimony of contemporaneous critics he was the greatest tenor of his time, with the exception of Mario. That was the opinion of White, who wrote of him as follows in The Century Magazine for May, 1882:
Although Salvi was past his youth when he first sang in New York, his voice was yet in perfect preservation. It lacked nothing that is to be expected in a tenor voice of the first class; and it had that mingling of manliness and tenderness, of human sympathy and seraphic loftiness which, for lack of any other or better word, we call divine. As a vocalist he was not in the first rank, but he stood foremost in the second. His presence was manly and dignified, and he was a good actor. But it was as a vocalist, pure and simple, that he captivated and moved his audiences. He was heard in America at brief intervals during a few years, and his influence upon the taste of the general music-loving public was very considerable and wholly good. Singing at Niblo's or Castle Garden and other like places at which the price of admission was never more than $1, and was generally 50 cents, he gave to multitudes who would otherwise have had no such opportunity that education in art which is to be had only from the performances of a great artist. In purity of style he was unexceptionable. He lacked only a little higher finish, a little more brilliancy of voice and impressiveness of manner to take a position among tenors of the very first rank. Of these, however, there are never two in the world at the same time, scarcely two in the same generation; and so Salvi prepared the public for the coming Mario. His forte was the cantabile and his finest effects were those in mezza voce, expressive of intense suppressed feeling. More than once when he sang "Spirto gentil," as he rose to the crescendo of the second phrase, and then let his cry pass suddenly away in a dying fall, I have heard a whole house draw suspended breath, as if in pain, so nearly alike in their outward manifestation and fine, keen pleasure.