SHE SEEMS NICE
Legendary Swedish performer sang like an angel — the resemblance ends there
Chopin compared her softly shining soprano to the glow of the Northern Lights; Hans Christian Andersen thought she embodied “art in its holiness;” the critic Eduard Hanslick deemed her “one of the great manifestations of beauty in nature.”
Born 200 years ago in Stockholm, Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, was without doubt the most loved and revered singer of the Victorian age, as celebrated as its Queen and that other Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, Florence.
Nowadays, her legend lingers only around Norwich in the U.K., (where a children’s hospital she endowed still exists), and Malvern (its museum has a display devoted to her), in the names of several pubs, and at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music (she had pedagogic links with both). Yet in the prime of her mid-century fame, her image was marketed on dolls, mugs, medallions and every sort of trash; a tulip and even a patented whistling kettle were named after her.
As a popular song had it:
Yes all is Jenny Lind now In ev’ry shop she’s found Jenny Lind you get there retail By the yard, quart, pint or pound
The press was obsessed with her, partly because she came from somewhere different. Nobody knew that she was illegitimate or that she had a bitterly rancorous relationship with a mother she ended up disowning, but it was common knowledge that she grew up in very impoverished circumstances and that, in an operatic profession otherwise dominated by Italian Catholics, she was a fervent Scandinavian Episcopalian.
Not for her the gewgaws and diamonds of Milanese or Parisian prima donnas: plain, snub-nosed and always primly dressed, her readiness to be sanctimonious about her Protestant piety and simple tastes was perfectly attuned to the culture of the strait-laced Victorian middle classes.
“Few people realize what an inwardly beautiful and quiet life I lead, how infinitely little the world and its vanities have intoxicated my mind,” she told a journalist. “Herring and potatoes, a clean wooden stool and ditto wooden spoon to eat porridge with, would make me happy as a child.”
But she was sharp as nails when it came to money, and often not very nice at all.
The story went that when she was nine and fostered out as a miserable orphan, a passing stranger in Stockholm heard her singing through a window and arranged for an audition at the opera school. She was immediately taken on, and by the time she was 20 she had sung more than 400 professional performances of major roles and done her vocal cords considerable damage in the process.
Some sort of nervous breakdown ensued when the composer Adolf Lindblad with whom she was lodging — he and his wife having virtually adopted her — made unwelcome romantic overtures.
She escaped to Paris, where she found the great singing teacher Manuel Garcia. He instructed her to keep her mouth shut for three months and then meticulously proceeded to rebuild her technique and hone her artistry. Partly because she refused to sing in Catholic countries, her operatic career then took wing in northern capitals such as Berlin and Copenhagen. Mendelssohn was entranced (her exquisitely ethereal interpretation of his aria Hear ye, Israel from Elijah became her calling card later in her career), and two impresarios locked horns over who should present her to London — landing her in an embarrassing contractual muddle that leaked to the press and, as one commentator put it, “elevated it into a firm faith ... that that which had cost so much trouble to secure must be, indeed, something unspeakably precious.”
Lind eventually made her British debut in 1847 at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, with boxes sold for an astronomical 20 guineas and Victoria and Albert in attendance. There was no anticlimax. After her first solo crowned with an angelic trill, manic enthusiasm erupted and the Queen herself threw her a bouquet.
Not everyone was captivated. The philistine Thackeray admitted to finding her “atrociously stupid” and could not wait to get out “and have a cigar,” while more astutely objective critics sensed something over-calculated about her stage manner and noted that her Italian was not impeccable and her acting limited. Yet there was something undeniably magical about the sound she made. No recording exists of her voice, but it appears that it had an immediately distinctive tonal quality — described by one critic as redolent of “woodland freshness” — combined (thanks to Garcia) with impeccable breath control, perfectly controlled pianissimi and sparkling clarity.
On the crest of her operatic triumphs, Lind used the new railway network to make a pioneering whistle-stop concert tour of the U.K. Its climax was a much-publicized invitation to stay with the Bishop of Norwich in his palace.
At that time, it was unprecedented for anyone in the theatrical world to be received socially by the higher clergy and the encounter caused a great stir in ecclesiastical circles, consolidating Lind’s reputation for unbesmirched virtue. But two years later, following two broken engagements to religious fanatics and a relentless series of operatic and concert performances in Britain and northern Europe, she suffered another nervous collapse and announced her retirement from the stage.
She was only 28.
At this point, however, in stepped Phineas T. Barnum, a New
York huckster and promoter best known for freak shows and circuses. He had never heard Lind sing a note, but he decided on the basis of a report that he could market her to a wide-eyed American public. The contract he offered her to sing 95 concerts over a year was so lucrative that she could not refuse — big money often trumped her principles and, to be fair, most of her earnings ended up endowing free schools in her native Sweden.
Launching her through a strategically orchestrated publicity campaign that included the fables that she had no ears and had secretly married the Duke of Devonshire, Barnum manufactured Lind into an overnight sensation. (This period of her life was overly fictionalized in the film The Greatest Showman in which she was played by Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson.)
His antics so infuriated her, however, that they parted company acrimoniously and Lind was left to manage herself. Interest in her swiftly declined once she was free of his machine, but in Boston she had met a dull dog of a German pianist called Otto Goldschmidt, nine years her junior, who converted from Judaism and ever after did her bidding. Their marriage produced three children and gave Lind the emotional stability she had previously lacked.
In 1852 she settled back in England and increasingly devoted herself to oratorio and sacred music. Although she was lavish in her charities, she became ever more sniffily stiff-necked and priggish. Her prejudices remained violent.
“You see that boy?’ she was heard to say once, pointing to an innocent Italian child selling muffins in the street. “I am trying to conquer myself — to bear with him — but, he is a Roman Catholic!”
As is often the case with national treasures, Lind may not have been quite the paragon that she seemed, but after her funeral in Malvern, where she ended her days at the age of 67 in 1887, one mourner wrote that “the hillsides around the church and cemetery were fairly black with people, not only from the vicinity, but from distant villages, whose tearful demeanour was remarkable,” and she remained the benchmark by which her successors would be judged.
As one of those rare classical musicians who genuinely brought her art to “the masses,” her bicentenary year deserves some commemoration.