One of the most celebrated opera performers of the nineteenth century, Swedish-born Jenny Lind dazzled European and American audiences with her radiant soprano voice and with an image that emphasized wholesomeness and purity.
Background
Johanna Maria Lind, better known as Jenny Lind, was born at Stockholm, Sweden on the 6th of October 1820. Her parents, Niklas Johan Lind and Anna Maria Radberg, finally married when she was 15, but during her girlhood her father, from whom she inherited her musical gifts, was generally absent by reason of his considerable skills as a tavern musician.
Her mother, whose life was beginning to stabilize, gave her lessons on the piano and in the French language, and those around her began to realize that Lind's talent was something special.
Education
Mile Lundberg, an opera-dancer, first discovered her musical gift, and induced the child's mother to have her educated for the stage; during the six or seven years in which she was what was called an "actress pupil, " she occasionally appeared on the stage, but in plays, not operas, until 1836, when she made a first attempt in an opera by A. F. Lindblad.
Career
On the completion of her studies Jenny sang before G. Meyerbeer, in private, in the Paris Opera-house, and two years afterwards was engaged by him for Berlin, to sing in his Feldlager in Schlesien (afterwards remodelled as L'Etoile du nord); but the part intended for her was taken by another singer, and her first appearance took place in Norma on the 15th of December 1844.
She appeared also in Weber's Euryanthe and Bellini's La Sonnambula, and while she was at Berlin the English manager, Alfred Bunn, induced her to sign a contract (which she broke) to appear in London in the following season.
In December 1845 she appeared at a Gewandhaus concert at Leipzig, and made the acquaintance of Mendelssohn, as well as of Joachim and many other distinguished German musicians.
In her second Berlin season she added the parts of Donna Anna (Mozart's Don Giovanni), Julia (Spontini's Vestalin) and Valentine (Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots) to her repertory.
She sang in operas or concerts at Aix-la-Chapelle, Hanover, Hamburg, Vienna, Darmstadt and Munich, and took up two Donizetti roles, those of Lucia and "la Figlia del Reggimento, " in which she was afterwards famous.
Her debut had been so much discussed that the furore she created was a foregone conclusion.
She sang in several of her favourite characters, and in that of Susanna in Mozart's Figaro, besides creating the part of Amalia in Verdi's I Masnadieri, written for England and performed on the 22nd of July.
In the autumn she appeared in operas in Manchester and Liverpool, and in concerts at Brighton, Birmingham, Hull, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Norwich, Bristol, Bath and Exeter.
At Norwich began her acquaintance with the bishop, Edward Stanley (1779 - 1849), which was said to have led to her final determination to give up the stage as a career.
After four more appearances in Berlin, and a short visit to Stockholm, she appeared in London in the season of 1848, when she sang in Donizetti's L'Elisire d'amore and Bellini's I Puritani, in addition to her older parts.
In the same year she organized a memorable performance of Elijah, with the receipts of which the Mendelssohn scholarship was founded, and sang at a great number of charity and benefit concerts.
At the beginning of the season of 1849 she intended to give up operatic singing, but a compromise was effected by which she was to sing the music of six operas, performed without action, at Her Majesty's Theatre; but the first, a concert performance of Mozart's II Flauto magico, was so coldly received that she felt bound, for the sake of the manager and the public, to give five more regular representations, and her last performance on the stage was on the 70th of May 1849, in Robert le Diable.
Her debut had been so much discussed that the furore she created was a foregone conclusion.
Nevertheless it exceeded everything of the kind that had taken place in London or anywhere else; the sufferings and struggles of her well-dressed admirers, who had to stand for hours to get into the pit, have become historic.
She paid visits to Germany and Sweden again before her departure for America in 1850.
Her trip to the United States was organized by the great showman Phineas T. Barnum, best remembered today for his association with the circus that bears his name, but the promoter of various kinds of public events during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
He may never have had a greater triumph than his launch of Lind's tour: tickets for her concerts were auctioned and reached astronomical prices, and Lind's image soon adorned an incredible range of consumer items.
Barnum profited handsomely, and Lind became perhaps the first person who could be described using the distinctly modern term "celebrity. "
For some years after her return to England, her home for the rest of her life, she appeared in oratorios and concerts, and her dramatic instincts were as strongly and perhaps as advantageously displayed in these surroundings as they had been on the stage, for the grandeur of her conceptions in such passages as the "Sanctus" of Elijah, the intensity of conviction which she threw into the scene of the widow in the same work, or the religious fervour of "I know that my Redeemer liveth, " could not have found a place in opera.
In her later years she took an active interest in the Bach Choir, conducted by her husband, and not only sang herself in the chorus, but gave the benefit of her training to the ladies of the society.
Her last public appearance was at Dusseldorf on the 20th of January 1870 when she sang in Ruth, an oratorio composed by her husband.
Never classically attractive, lacking confidence in herself, and generally seeming shy and quiet to people she met, Lind was an entirely different person on stage. The supreme position she held so long in the operatic world was due not only to the glory of her voice, and the complete musicianship which distinguished her above all her contemporaries, but also to the naive simplicity of her acting in her favourite parts, such as Amina, Alice or Agathe.
Connections
In Boston, on the 5th of February 1852, she married Otto Goldschmidt (1829 - 1907), whom she had met at Lubeck in 1850.
In September of 1853 Lind had a son, Walter.
Their daughter, Jenny, was born in 1857, and a second son, Ernst, was born in 1858.
