Mrs. Joseph Wood had made a brilliant American debut at the Park Theatre in New York on 9 September 1833 before appearing in Boston three months later. Earlier, Mrs. Wood as Mary Ann Paton and then as the wife of Lord William Lenox had, during a triumphant career at Covent Garden, won recognition as the finest vocalist in England. When her unhappy first marriage had ended in divorce, she married Wood, a handsome singer at Covent Garden but of more humble origins than hers. Together, the Woods would dominate the musical scene in New York for the four years following. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, New York, 1927–1949, 3:657, 664; 4:63, 109; also p. 227, below.

When Charles Francis Adams first heard Mrs. Wood, he found her voice and ability worthy of comparison with those he judged best among the signers he had heard, Mrs. Malibran and Mrs. Austin (p. 227, 231, 301, below). Soon, however, her gifts won praise from him that did not look back to the performances of others: “Her complete management of her voice and powerful compass give the requisite brilliancy of execution” (p. 307, below). During the two theatrical seasons, 1833–1834 and 1835–1836, in which he had the opportunity to hear Mrs. Wood, Adams’ Diary reveals that he attended twenty of her performances. He heard her in six roles: three times in the Barber of Seville, twice in Cenerentola, Fra Diavolo, Maid of Judah, and Robert the Devil. It was in La Sonnambula, however, that she became for Adams almost a passion.

Between 29 December 1835, when Bellini’s new opera had its first performance in Boston (after being introduced in New York by the Woods on 13 November, preceding), and 9 March 1836, the xifinal one of the season, Adams was at six of Mrs. Woods’ appearances as Amina in La Sonnambula. He found the opera satisfying at each hearing until the last: “The music is sustained throughout, full of melody and character, occasionally passionate and then pathetic with some extraordinarily poetical conceptions.... A very delightful piece. Such a one as I love to hear. It is delicious”; “Perhaps there is in the whole range of refined enjoyments none more perfect in all respects than that of listening to the good singing of a good Opera”; “I shall remember the moments spent in hearing these notes as the pleasantest of my life” (vol. 6:297–298, 303, 345). Adams’ enthusiasm was hardly greater than that of Boston’s musical public: “Mr. and Mrs. Wood took the town by storm, and airs from the ‘Sonnambula’ were played, sung, whistled, and ground on hand-organs with persistent zeal” (Francis Boott Greenough, ed., Letters of Horatio Greenough to ... Henry Greenough, Boston, 1887, p. 51).

One of the most popular of the “airs” was the finale, “ Oh Ah do not mingle one earthly feeling,” which Adams pronounced “exquisite” (vol. 6:305). The front cover of the song in sheet-music form, displaying Mrs. Wood and cast before an arboreal retreat and waterfall, was executed “On Stone by J. H. Bufford corner of Beekman & Nassau Sts.” and “Published at Atwill’s Music Saloon 201 Broadway./Endicott, Litho.” Presumably the artist was John H. Bufford and the lithographic printer was George Endicott, both well known lithographers (George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860, New Haven, 1957).