A Daguerreotype of Jenny Lind, taken in New York on September 14th, 1850 by her Swedish friend Poly Von Schneidau from Chicago. Lind had recently arrived for a two-year tour of the USA, organised by now legendary showman P. T. Barnum, to a rapturous welcome. On her return to Europe, jaded by Barnum’s commercial energy, she married composer and pianist Otto Goldschmidt, and in 1855 settled in England to continue her career at a less frenetic pace. Goldschmidt founded London’s Bach Choir and was a friend and associate of Sir William Sterndale Bennett. Lind’s last public performance was the title role in his oratorio ‘Ruth’.
Part 1 of 2
I AM somehow reminded of a good story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it and an actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn there was a tremendous furore about Jenny Lind,* who, after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning.
The moment her carriage was outside the gates, a party of rampant students who had escorted it rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets, and wore them in strips as decorations.
An hour or two afterwards a bald old gentleman of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to breakfast at the table d’hôte, and was observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a student came near him.
Johanna Maria ‘Jenny’ Lind (1820-1887). Lind settled in England in 1855, a country she had come to know and love as a friend of Felix Mendelssohn. She became a favoured performer of his music, as well as an acclaimed interpreter of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Schumann and Dickens’s friend Meyerbeer. In 1882 she was appointed professor of singing at the Royal College of Music in London.
Précis
In 1847, Charles Dickens recounted an anecdote about a recent visit of opera singer Jenny Lind to Germany. It seems that after she left her hotel, besotted student admirers sought out her room in order to grab mementos of her visit, and in doing so badly scared a harmless old English gentleman staying at the same establishment. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Haymarket Opera House in London, as it was in 1809. Jenny Lind premiered Verdi’s ‘I masnadieri’ (the Bandits) here in 1847, a few months after the events in Dickens’s anecdote. The theatre was destroyed by fire in 1862; ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’ now stands on the spot.
AT last he said, in a low voice, to some people who were near him at the table, ‘You are English gentlemen, I observe. Most extraordinary people, these Germans. Students, as a body, raving mad, gentlemen!’
‘Oh, no,’ said somebody else: ‘excitable, but very good fellows, and very sensible.’
‘By God, sir!’ returned the old gentleman, still more disturbed, ‘then there’s something political in it, and I’m a marked man. I went out for a little walk this morning after shaving, and while I was gone’ — he fell into a terrible perspiration as he told it — ‘they burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are now patrolling the town in all directions with bits of ’em in their button-holes.’
I needn’t wind up by adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber.
Précis
The antics of Jenny’s fans had disturbed the old English gentleman more than one might have expected; but as it turned out, the students who had (as they thought) stripped Jenny’s room in the search for mementos had actually stripped his, and until he learnt the truth the poor man feared he had been targeted by political activists. (58 / 60 words)
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