12/31/2023 0 Comments Jenny lind was married to franz lizt![]() ![]() ![]() He launched a public-relations blitz, selling America not only on Lind’s artistry, but on her character, which he described as “ charity, simplicity, and goodness personified.” Having staked his financial future on this enterprise, Barnum realized, “’I have to get people aware of who she is by the time she’s here to start this tour,’” says Kellem. Lind, skeptical of Barnum’s reputation, demanded full payment of her fee, $187,000 ($6.2 million in 2020), be deposited in her London bank before setting off for the 150-concert tour. “Barnum at that point was mostly famous for the American Museum, and things like the Feejee Mermaid. “At the time Barnum booked Jenny Lind, he had never heard her sing,” says Kellem. Barnum convinced Lind to undertake a concert tour of America. When she announced her retirement from opera in 1849, at the age of 28, the queen attended her final performance. The composer Felix Mendelssohn, who collaborated with Lind during this period, gushed in a letter to his friend Andersen, “ There will not in a whole century be born another being so gifted as she.”īut it was in England that “Lindomania” really took hold, where Queen Victoria attended Lind’s 1847 debut at Her Majesty’s Theatre and where the press reported, “The crowd was immense both without and within the theatre.” Lind enjoyed a career in England for the next two years, where she would learn English but continue to struggle with it. After her triumph in Denmark, she found similar success in Germany and Austria. ![]() ![]() "Through Jenny Lind,” that night in 1843, “ I first became sensible of the holiness of Art.” He added, “No books, no men, have had a more ennobling influence upon me as a poet than Jenny Lind.” That performance inspired Andersen to write “ The Nightingale,” which helped spread Lind’s fame throughout Europe (Lind’s rejection of Andersen’s affections supposedly inspired him to write “The Snow Queen,” on which the Disney film, Frozen is based). Writer Hans Christian Andersen, who would befriend and unrequitedly pine for her, recalled in The True Story of My Life the night she conquered Denmark. The child of a single mother, Lind began training to sing opera in her tween years. “ was hugely famous,” says historian Betsy Golden Kellem. October 6 marks the 200th anniversary of Lind’s birth in Stockholm, Sweden. In the words of Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish reformer visiting America in 1850, “ Jenny Lind, the new Slave Bill, and the protests against it in the North, Eastern, and Western States are…the standing topics of the newspapers.” The two issues would continue to appear side-by-side in the newspapers, and before long, Lind herself would be drawn into the national debate over slavery. For the next 21 months, thrilling accounts of Lind’s American concert tour would dominate newspapers, but the triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale would not eclipse the national debate over slavery which was polarizing America. Long popular in Europe, this was Lind’s first visit to the United States. The remainder of the Herald’s six-column front page was largely devoted to the arrival in New York of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. The Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, predicted, “In another week there will be but little anxiety entertained in relation to the question of slavery, the public mind will be so fatigued that it will be disinclined to think of the matter any further.” The Compromise of 1850, a collection of laws passed that month, would decide not only which new territories would permit slavery, it would include the Fugitive Slave Act, a measure that directed federal officials throughout the land to aid in the recapture of African Americans who had escaped bondage. The lead item in the pro-slavery New York Herald on September 2, 1850, was an editorial advocating that Congress swiftly pass a pending bill that would “ dispose of the slavery question forever” in the United States. ![]()
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