Jenny Lind

Swedish singer

• Born: October 6, 1820
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: November 2, 1887
• Place of death: Wynds Point, Herefordshire, England

Through perseverance, hard work, and a uniquely charismatic personality, the “Swedish Nightingale,” as Lind was known, became the most famous female singer of the nineteenth century, an internationally successful touring star, and a role model for her generation.

Early Life

Jenny Lind was born Johanna Maria Lind. Her parents, Anne-Marie Fellborg and Niclas Jonas Lind, lived together but did not choose to marry until their daughter was fifteen. For this reason, Jenny was placed in a foster home. Although considerate of her parents in later years, she was more devoted to her grandmother, who had instilled in her the spiritual values that would become a major part of her life.

After Lind’s precocious singing ability was discovered by a member of the Swedish Royal Opera, she was admitted to the court theater school at the age of nine. Her first major role was the part of Agathe in Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (1821; the marksman) at the Stockholm Opera on March 7, 1838. In 1840 Lind became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music with the rank of court singer. Recognizing that her voice needed more extensive and better training, however, in 1841 she left to study in Paris, France, with vocal instructor Manuel García, Jr., brother of the famous early nineteenth century diva Maria García Malibran and son of the singer and impresario who had introduced Italian opera to the United States in 1825. After one year of intensive training with García, who was considered the world’s greatest teacher of singing, Lind returned home and resumed her operatic career, which would last nineteen years.

Life’s Work

In 1844 Lind began an extensive and successful European tour that included performances in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Vienna, Copenhagen, and London. In addition to being a technically brilliant coloratura soprano with a range of two and three-quarters octaves and having perfect pitch, she impressed almost all of her contemporaries with her piety, simplicity, and instinctive dislike of celebrity. Her generous donations to charity wherever she performed also made her a unique symbol of virtue and goodness. The public had found a new heroine, and Lindomania soon swept Europe. Despite enthusiastic accounts by the press and large crowds wherever she appeared, Lind grew tired of theatrical life and chose to retire from the operatic stage in May, 1849, after more than six hundred performances in thirty operas. For the more than thirty years remaining in her professional life, she sang in oratorios and concerts.

Lind was not a beautiful woman; although she had typical Nordic blond hair and blue eyes, she had plain features with a broad mouth and wide nose. Some of her portraits were even enhanced to make her appear more romantically appealing. However, her remarkable charismatic stage presence transcended mere physical attractiveness. Dressed simply in blue or white and carrying flowers, this rather ordinary looking young woman seemed to many concertgoers to become an angelic being as soon as she began to sing. Along with a magnificent voice, she possessed a unique ability to make an emotional connection to her audiences.

In 1850 American impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum persuaded Lind to undertake a tour of the United States and Cuba. Despite his career as a showman of curiosities such as the midget Tom Thumb and overt frauds such as the Feejee Mermaid (a combination of a dead monkey and a fish), Barnum appreciated culture and genuinely admired Lind, and his offer was generous. For each concert, Lind would receive one thousand dollars plus all her expenses; she would choose the music to be performed and was allowed to give charity concerts when she wished. Barnum also agreed to manage her publicity, secure her lodgings and concert sites, and make other technical arrangements. Along with his potential profits, Barnum would gain respectability and even admiration as the man who brought Europe’s greatest singer to the United States. The contract was signed in January, 1850, and on August 21, Lind and her entourage of eight, including a companion, her secretary, her pianist and musical director, servants, and her pet dog, left Liverpool, England, to begin a concert tour that lasted until May 27, 1852.

Enthralled by the sometimes fanciful accounts of her life in newspapers and literary magazines, a crowd of about thirty thousand people was waiting on the pier when Lind’s party reached New York on September 1, 1850. She toured the city and gave concerts during most of September; the profits from two of these performances, a sum of more than ten thousand dollars, were designated for charity. Lind then moved on to Boston and Philadelphia, where again she sang to capacity crowds.

At each stop, Barnum had arranged for the first few tickets to the opening performance to be auctioned to the highest bidders, a scheme that pitted individuals and even cities against each other; it was a publicity ploy that Lind disliked. The highest bidder in Philadelphia, for example, paid $625 for his ticket, although most seats could be purchased for three to seven dollars each. In Boston a young working girl purchased one of the cheaper tickets, declaring, “there goes half a month’s earnings, but I am determined to hear Jenny Lind.” On being told this, Lind asked her secretary to give her admirer a twenty-dollar gold piece. Similar acts of kindness in other cities and her well-publicized charity concerts illustrated not only Lind’s generosity but also Barnum’s media skills. He also approved of the marketing of a variety of items with her name, including Jenny Lind coats, hats, sewing machines, singing tea kettles, cigars, pianos, sofas, and bed frames.

To appeal to large general audiences, Lind’s concerts were a blend of several different types of music, a tradition that dated from at least the late eighteenth century. Along with overtures and arias from her popular operatic roles—including Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831; the sleepwalker) and Norma (1831), Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), Weber’s Der Freischütz, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) and Le nozze di Figaro (1786; the marriage of Figaro)—were excerpts from sacred works, especially George Frideric Handel’s The Messiah (1742) and Franz Joseph Haydn’s Die Schöpfung (1798; the creation). Light popular songs such as “Home, Sweet Home” and “Echo Song,” and settings of Robert Burns’s “John Anderson, My Jo” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” were always part of her programs. Lind knew instinctively that these simpler pieces would be more meaningful to many in her audience, however splendidly the classical works displayed the remarkable qualities of her voice.

In 1850 and 1851 Lind gave concerts in Baltimore; Washington; several southern cities, including Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans; Havana, Cuba; and the Midwest, including St. Louis, Louisville, and Cincinnati. Her last (and ninety-fifth) performance before she terminated her contract with Barnum to develop her own touring schedule was held in Philadelphia’s National Theater on June 9, 1851.

Now independent, Lind reorganized her troupe and revisited a number of cities in the North, the Midwest, and New England. In December, however, news of her mother’s death temporarily halted the concert series. On February 5, 1852, she married her pianist and musical director Otto Goldschmidt, whom she had first met while touring in Europe. Though her concerts had brought her increased wealth, much of which she continued to give to charity, she was growing tired of traveling; after three final concerts in New York in May, 1852, the couple returned to Europe in early June.

With Lind’s marriage, the adulation of the press became more subdued, but her international popularity remained. The Goldschmidts lived briefly in Dresden but in 1856 settled permanently in England. They had three children, one of whom wrote a biography of her mother (1926). Lind gave her last concert in 1880. Like many retired performers of the time, she became a teacher. Beginning in 1876, she devoted her energies to the Bach Choir founded and directed by her husband, and from 1883 to 1886, she was professor of singing at London’s Royal College of Music. After a long illness, Lind died on November 2, 1887.

Significance

Although Jenny Lind was the nineteenth century’s most famous vocal star and was admired by millions of people, she was not above criticism. She was occasionally faulted for high ticket prices and her association with Barnum, and a few critics thought that her concert choices lacked originality or that she was excessively religious. Though shy and prone to stage fright, she was resolute where her performances were concerned; she won over a hostile audience who hissed her first Havana concert, and after a drunken crowd outside the performance hall spoiled her first visit to Pittsburgh, she returned for a successful second engagement.

No one disputed her commercial success. Barnum, with Lind’s somewhat reluctant help, launched the first successful large-scale promotion of a performer. Music publishers profited handsomely from her fame, and several later singers began their careers as “new” Jenny Linds. Her programs of arias by composers she preferred, balanced by Scottish, British, and Swedish folk melodies, reinforced a long English and American tradition of shared popular culture that could be enjoyed by rich and poor alike. A hallmark of her success was that Lind was more than a splendid singer; she was a person with whom ordinary individuals could identify and whose lifestyle they could genuinely respect.

Bibliography

Barnum, Phineas Taylor. Struggles and Triumphs: Or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum. Buffalo, N.Y.: Warren, Johnson, 1871. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Ever the showman, Barnum tells a good story, and it is useful to read his version of his relationship with Lind because he was frequently accused of exploiting her for commercial purposes.

Dizikes, John. Opera in America: A Cultural History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. This comprehensive (612 pages) history of opera and its influence on American culture includes a chapter on Lind’s American tour as well as references throughout the work. Dizikes’s book is particularly helpful in placing the singer within the context of her time. It contains bibliographical notes and numerous illustrations.

Saxon, A. H. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. In dealing specifically with Lind’s career in relationship to Barnum, this biography is more critical than most of the singer’s personality, motivations, and failings, therefore providing a corrective to other more complimentary accounts. It contains valuable annotated notes and illustrations.

Schultz, Gladys Denny. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962. This pleasantly written account deals not only with Lind’s successes but also with the hardships in her early life and how she managed to overcome them. However, some aspects of the singer’s life have been fictionalized, thus marring an otherwise interesting study.

Wagenknecht, Edward Charles. Jenny Lind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. This brief (231 pages) biography considers Lind not only as a performer but also as a woman whose primary motivation was her spiritual life, for which she left the operatic stage to devote herself to concerts, oratorios, and eventually her marriage. It contains an extensive bibliography of articles and books about Lind.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Seven Daughters of the Theater. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Lind’s biography is the first in this series of famous women singers, actors, and dancers. Although Wagenknecht’s account of Lind includes much material from his earlier full-length study, its juxtaposition with six related biographies provides a valuable study in contrasts.

Ware, W. Porter, and Thaddeus C. Lockard, Jr. P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind: The American Tour of the Swedish Nightingale. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. This laudatory biography is one of the more recent studies of the singer. Focusing primarily on Lind’s reception in America, it includes a number of useful reviews and descriptions of her and her concerts by contemporaries.