Preface: On Sunday, January 7, 2018, Rudy & I went to Cinelux Almaden Theatre and saw Michael Gracey's
The Greatest Showman (4:15-6:15 pm).
Rudy loved this musical starring Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum and
gave this film a "10+". Rebecca Ferguson starred as the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind.
So impressed with
P.T. Barnum that I want to read more about him. Of all the books in my library,
only Geoffrey Grigson's
People,
A Volume of the Good, Great, Eccentric Who Illustrate the Admirable Diversity of Men (1957) had
a paragraph about him. None on Jenny Lind
or Felix Mendelssohn who fell in love with her, attending many
of her concerts. Mendelssohn
wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him
in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure
upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death.
Despite the rain, I stopped by the Los Altos Library on January 8, and checked out two Barnum books—
Michael Daly's Topsy (2013)
and
Howard V. Chaykin's Barnum! in Secret Service to the USA (2003).
There was no mention of
Charity (Barnum's wife)
or Jenny Lind in the Index of Topsy. It turns out
that this is a book about Topsy the Elephant which
P.T. Barnum had in his circus. Topsy was electrocuted
to death by Thomas A. Edison in 1903 with 6,600 volts
of alternating current as proof that it was much more
dangerous than direct current in an ongoing dispute
between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.
The other book Barnum! in Secret Service to the USA
is a comic book with U.S. Secret Service deputizing
P.T. Barnum as a spy and secret agent as his train
toured the country to see what Nikolai Tesla was up
to, as he planned to overthrow the U.S. government
with the powerful gadgets he had invented.
Many of the circus characters in Barnum's show
are in the comics, but none of Charity or Jenny Lind.
Went
to Foothill College Library on January 9
and checked out
James W. Cook (Ed.) The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader (2005)
(GV1811.B3.B37.2005)
and
Edward Wagenknecht's Seven Daughters of the Theater (1964)
(PN2205W3) with first chapter on Jenny Lind (pp. 1-49). Finished reading this chapter last night, and am
typing below some interesting highlights on Jenny Lind from the book (The author lived to 104 years old).
Web links were made to the famous poets, artists, writers, and politicians who witnessed her singing.
"I want to be near trees; and water; and a cathedral." — Jenny Lind, 1849
"She passed through life. That is what she made one feel:
she was on her way somewhere else: it was a movement across
a scene— her life. On she passed: often in perplexity
and surprise at what she found here." — Henry Scott Holland
"A feeling of uplifted life spread over the metropolis. She melted
the souls of thousands, and purged the craft of money getting.
We came away from her as from a higher realm."
— Edgar Lee Masters, Children of the Market Place (p. 2)
More than a century ago, our ancestors went mad over a simple Swedish woman, not generally considered a beauty
and austerely disdainful towared most of the fetching idiosyncrasies of the prima donna, whom a great museum
impressario and self-styled professor of the art of humbug had brought to the United States for an extensive
concert tour.
It was the first such tour ever undertaken by a European celebrity, and it still remains
the most spectacular and successful of them all. Like printing, the art of ballyhooing a singer was born
at a very high point of development, and the name of its Johannes Gutenberg was
P.T. Barnum.
In the large cities the box office was not good enough for her tickets: they must
be sold at public auction.
The record "high" was reached in Boston, where the first ticket was
purchased for $625 by a minor vocalist named Ossian F. Dodge...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
being a mere poet and college professor, could not hope to compete in such a running: he spent
$8.50 and sat in the gallery. (p. 3)
When Jenny Lind arrived in New York
on Sunday, September 1, 1850,
30,000 people
turned out to meet
the boat. In the excitement several persons were injured, and one man was
swept off the dock into the water.
The crowd trailed along to the Irving House, and by night
Broadway was completely blocked. Escorted by
the Fire Department, the New York Musical Fund
Society gave a concert in her honor which did not terminate until well past midnight...
Barnum mentions Jenny Lind gloves, bonnets, riding hats, shawls, mantillas, robes,
chairs, sofas, pianos. Songs and poems were dedicated to her, and dances were named
after her. Her name
and her picture appeared on water carafes. Hotels served their
choicest dishes à la Jenny Lind. (p. 4)
To a woman of Jenny Lind's combined idealism and pudeur the fact
that she was born out of wedlock,
in Stockholm, on October 6, 1820, necessarily must
have occasioned much grief of mind... As a baby,
she had been separated from her mother
at the earliest possible moment and placed in the care of one
Carl Ferndal, organist
of the parish church at Ed-Sollentua, fifteen iles from Stockholm. (p. 6)
"As a singer," wrote Washington Irving, "she appears to me of the very first
order; as a speciment of womankind, a little more. She is enough of herself to
counterbalance all the evil that the world is threatened with by the great
convention of women." Longfellow declared: "She is very feminine and lovely.
Her power
is in her presence, which is magnetic, and takes her audience captive
before she opens her lips. She sings like the morning star; clear, liquid,
heavenly sound." The great Victoriam actor
Macready called her "the most
charming singer and actress I have ever in my life seen. Her energy, vivacity,
archness, humour, passion,
and pathos are equally true." Best of all, perhaps,
is the tribute of Mendelssohn: "She is as great an artist
as ever lived; and the greatest I have known." (pp. 8-9)
She had a range of two octaves and three-quarters, from B below the staff
to G in the fourth line above it. Her high F-sharps were of unusual beauty, and it was
with the idea of displaying them advantageously that Mendelssohn composed his
"Hear ye, Israel." (p. 10)
Some of Jenny Lind's listeners have attempted to describe not her voice
alone but their own emotional reactions to it. "At the first tones of her voice,"
wrote John Addington Symonds, "I quivered all over.
It was not her wonderful
execution, her pathos, varying expression, subtle flexibility, that surprised me,
but the pure timbre which so vibrated and thrilled my very soul that tears came
into my eyes." And Henry Cabot Lodge always remembered her as he heard her in
his youth, on a European holiday: "She was a plain woman, very simply dressed,
and looked elderly to my youthful eyes. She sang, among other things, one or two
English songs, which I particularly remember, and her voice seemed to me the most
wonderful I had ever listened to. It had a quality of beauty which dwells with me
still & which I have never heard surpassed. (p. 11)
She was of medium height— five feet, five inches— though it is
said she appeared taller. In her Berlin days, an observer who saw her first sitting
at the piano before a private concert was able to discern only "a thin, pale,
plain-featured girl." Frederick Locker-Lampson pronounced her "a fair-haired
and blue-eyed Puritan— an excellent woman, with serious enthusiasms and
a plain but impressive personality. (p. 24)
Jenny Lind's admirers have never claimed beauty for her: what they
do claim is that her features were extraordinarily transparent, expressive, and
alive. "When she smiled," says Madame de Hegermann Lindencrone, "which was not
often, her face became almost handsome." Longfellow said, "There is something
very fascinating about her; a kind of soft wildness of manner, and sudden pauses
in her speaking, and floating shadows over her face." When she sang she became
another woman. (p. 25)
As a lover of nature, however, she need yield to none. "I believe
the good God did his best when he raised the mountains," she writes; and when she
traveled through Switzerland, she was tremendously impressed by both their beauty
and the majestic commentary which the made on the petty pride of man... She spent
the first years of her life in the country, and the impressions thus early
implanted did not wear off. She loved birds, water and flowers— wild flowers,
not cultivated ones. She felt most at home among peasants, and she loathed the
city with its dirt, crowds, and excitement. (p. 27)
Barnum's account of the New Year's Eve which he and Jenny shared.
Up until a quarter to twelve she was full of high spirits. Then suddenly she
stopped the festivities. "Pray, let us have quiet; do you see, in fifteen
minutes more, this year will be gone forever!" And she sat down in silence
and rested her head on her hand... When Mendelssohn died, she was shaken
to the depth— "everything seemed to me to be dead"— and for two
years she could not bring herself to sing his songs. Later, when
Ruskin
mentioned Mendelssohn to her, she inquired had he known him. "No."
"Better for you you did not." "How so?" "The loss— too great." (pp. 33-34)
Through her charities, however, Jenny Lind in effect made friends
with all mankind. Nothing about her was more characteristic of her than her
conviction that the money she earned did not belong to herself alone but
must be invested where it would do most good for God and for mankind. (p. 35)
Nevertheless she wanted a lot of money— to give away, and
probably no other singer ever gave so much away as she dis. Her very contract
with Barnum provided that, after she had sung twice for him, in any city, she
should be free to sing again for charity if she chose. In Sweden she never
sang a note for her own profit after she became famous. Of the $10,000 she
received for her first concert at Castle Garden
she never saw a penny. It
was divided among the charitable institutions of the city, the apportionment
being determined by Barnum and the mayor of New York. As a matter of fact,
none of the money Jenny Lind earned in America was for herself. She kept it
in a separate fund, and only twice in her life did she di into it. At her
death, it was devoted to benevolent purposes. (pp. 35-36)
As to love itself, one observer declares of Jenny Lind that
"in her own character, she was not a woman to fall in love with; she was
too reserved."... It is possible that she and Mendelssohn might have loved
and married if he had been free. Hans Christian Andersen
proposed to her again and again but always received the same answer. Of
Giovanni Belletti,
who took the American tour with her,
Maunsell B. Field says that he would
"lie in bed all day, weeping and howling over his unrequited affection." (p. 37)
And then finally, there was
Otto Goldschmidt. She met him first in
Germany, where he was studying music at the time of her first great Continental
triumphs... Goldschmidt was of Hebrew extraction, but in 1851 he was converted
to the Christian faith, Jenny Lind standing sponsor for him at his baptism.
On February 5, 1852, they were married in Boston, and
Edward Everett witnessed
the ceremony. (p. 39)
But there was one absorbing interest, one abiding, all-embracing
passion that stirred Jenny Lind more deeply and thrilled her more profoundly
than all the vaied wonders of music and art. That passion, that goal for life,
was God. "I have always put God first," she told her biographer, and she quoted
with approval Janotha's saying, "What is this 'world' of which people speak?
I play for Jesus Christ." (p. 41)
To Jenny Lind it seemed, as she grew older, that she was gaining
in grace and in strength, that in return for her devotion the good God was
giving more and more of himself to her. "Ah! much, very much," she wrote
in 1850, "must one live through, before one learns to fasten on the Life,
the Higher Life." (p. 42)
Above everything else, she gave her audiences the impression that
they were seeing and listening to an exceptionally pure and high-minded woman,
and it was for this as much as for anything that she was loved. Nor were her
audiences deceived. She stood before the world as a priestess of beauty,
but she sensed the underlying harmony of beauty and goodness." Once she
spoke to J.A. Symonds of "the sorrow of sin which destroys beauty. We
who have an ideal see that, and cannot bear the discord."... And Hans Christian Andersen testifies,
"Through Jenny Lind I first became sensible
of the holiness there is in art; through her I learned that one must
forget one's self in the service of the Supreme." (p. 47)
|
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Sweden #1110: Jenny Lind
stamp (issued March 25, 1975) |
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Sweden 50 kronor Jenny Lind
banknote currency (1996) |
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