Explore "Jenny Lind the Artist" by Henry Scott Holland on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On Dec. 30-that is to say, a little more than three weeks after her return from Leipzig-Mdlle. Lind appeared, for the first time at Berlin, in a new and very arduous and important _rôle_-that of "Julia," in Spontini's Opera, _Die Vestalin_-which she had previously impersonated six times only, at Stockholm, during the whole of her long career- probably because it was found unsuited to the Swedish popular taste.
_Die Vestalin_ had long been a very favourite Opera, in Berlin, where it had been placed upon the stage with extraordinary magnificence, and entirely under the composer's own personal direction, when he was invited to the Prussian capital, in the character of General Music Director, by King Friedrich Wilhelm III., in the year 1820. The part of "Julia" had then been sustained by Madame Milder-Hauptmann, and since then most of the great German _prime donne_ had interpreted it in their turn. It was therefore no easy task to satisfy a Prussian audience with a new conception of the work, and as Mdlle. Lind had intimated in her letter to Madame Erikson, her reading of the leading part was quite sure to be judged by the measure of all the greatest singers who had previously appeared in it.