Jenny Lind the Artist

Jenny Lind the Artist by Henry Scott Holland

Henry Scott Holland's *Jenny Lind the Artist* presents a thorough examination of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, arguing that the popular English image of her as a beloved operatic sensation of a few London seasons is incomplete and misleading. Holland contends that Lind was recognized by the greatest musical minds of Europe as a supreme and unique artist, and that Mendelssohn himself regarded her as the greatest musician he had ever known. The book sets out to justify this elevated estimate by tracing the full arc of her artistic development across the twenty years from her entry into the Royal Theatre in Stockholm around 1830 to her departure for America in 1850. Holland begins with Lind's difficult early life. Born in Stockholm in 1820, she was the daughter of a weak and convivial father and a forceful but harsh mother who struggled financially. Lind spent her earliest years in a country village and later in a widows' home, where her gift was first noticed when a neighbor heard her singing to a cat and reported it to a dancer at the Royal Opera. Through the intervention of the singing master Croelius, who was moved to tears by her voice, and despite the initial reluctance of the theatre's director, Lind was admitted to the Royal Theatre's school of pupils at roughly nine years old. The theatre assumed responsibility for her education and maintenance in exchange for her service, and she was formally enrolled as an actress-pupil under a contract that provided food, lodging, and instruction in singing, elocution, dancing, French, piano, and other subjects. Holland traces her years as a child performer at the Royal Theatre, where she appeared in dramas, comedies, and eventually operas, displaying remarkable dramatic power long before her voice reached its full development. Critics and the public were fascinated by her acting even as a child of ten or eleven. Her home life remained painful, marked by her mother's harshness, and she eventually fled to the care of the theatre's school superintendent, then later found a true home with the family of the composer Adolf Lindblad, who had a profound influence on her artistic and moral development. The historian and poet Geijer also became a close friend and mentor, writing verses that spoke to her sense of artistic mission and duty. These relationships drew her into the highest literary and intellectual circles of Stockholm at a remarkably young age. The decisive artistic turning point came on March 7, 1838, when she made her operatic debut as Agatha in Weber's Der Freischütz. She described going to bed that night a completely transformed person, having discovered her true power for the first time. She kept that date as a second birthday for the rest of her life. Her success in the role of Alice in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable was equally overwhelming, and she sang it sixty times at the Royal Theatre over several years. Despite her triumphs at home, Lind recognized that her technical command of singing was insufficient. Her voice had been damaged by overwork and imperfect training. Against the wishes of the theatre's directors, she resolved to travel to Paris at her own expense, saving money through exhausting provincial concert tours. She arrived in Paris in 1841 and sought instruction from Manuel Garcia, the foremost singing teacher in Europe. Garcia initially pronounced her voice destroyed, but after six weeks of complete vocal rest, he agreed to teach her. She studied with him for ten months, during which her voice was restored and entirely transformed, gaining richness, clarity, agility, and what her contemporaries described as a birdlike purity in its upper register. She herself attributed only this technical formation to Garcia, insisting that the deeper qualities of her art came from within herself and from the example of birds. She returned to Stockholm in 1842, reopened with Norma, and astonished critics who had known her before with the magnitude of the change. She undertook a wider range of operatic roles, secured a legal guardian in the judge Henrik Munthe who managed her charitable distributions, and eventually persuaded her parents to relinquish guardianship in exchange for a country home she provided for them. Her charities were deeply integrated with her sense of artistic vocation; she understood her gift as a trust from God requiring expenditure on behalf of others. Holland then follows her earliest excursions beyond Sweden, to Finland and Copenhagen, where her success was immediate and overwhelming, and where she formed lasting friendships with figures such as Hans Andersen and Bournonville. Copenhagen, Holland argues, marked a new awareness in Lind that her powers could carry beyond national boundaries. She subsequently traveled to Dresden to study German intensively before proceeding to Berlin, where Meyerbeer was eager to secure her for the opening of the new Royal Opera House. Holland closes this phase of the narrative with Lind on the verge of her Berlin debut, the beginning of her conquest of the major musical capitals of Europe, and notes that her trajectory of unbroken artistic growth over these twenty formative years gave her everything that would make her subsequent career distinctive, including her mastery of both opera and sacred oratorio.

By Henry Scott Holland · First published 1891 · Genre: Biography, Music History, Performing Arts · 54 chapters · 202,162 words

First lines

Jenny Lind-the name carries music with it to English ears. The memory is very tender and fragrant of her who, to our joy, found, for so long, a home among us. And yet it may well be questioned whether we English have even yet formed an adequate estimate of her gifts and character.

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biography · opera singer · soprano · classical music · Swedish culture · nineteenth century · Victorian era · performing arts · musical career · celebrity · concert tours · European music

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