Jenny Lind, circa 1851 (Image courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
For one night in December 1850, Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale,” packed the Marshall Theater at 701 E. Broad St., a site now occupied by federal courts. The concert’s highest-priced ticket, auctioned at $105, today would amount to approximately $3,000; the cheapest, $5-$8, would now be around $200. For some couples in the audience, the show might’ve served as a Christmas present and, perhaps, a lifelong memory.
Richmond provided an early stop in Lind’s 21-month, 93-performance tour of the U.S, Canada and Cuba. This came amid a gauntlet of associated events the press characterized as “Lindomania.”
The stoked frenzy demonstrated the impressive marketing power of Lind’s manager, the “Greatest Showman,” Phineas Taylor Barnum.
This business union between “The Prince of Humbug” and the “Queen of Song” came at a crucial time — both were seeking a change in their professional lives.
Lind, born out of wedlock on Oct. 6, 1820, in Stockholm, Sweden, to an aloof mother, was taken in by a religious grandmother. A chance overhearing of Lind at age 9 singing to a street cat got her into the performance academy of the Royal Theater. Through the 1840s, she performed 677 times, in 36 operas. Her ardent admirers included Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen, whose tales made Lind cry and whose story “The Nightingale” bestowed her sobriquet. Then her rejection apparently inspired “The Snow Queen,” on which the modern-day Disney film “Frozen” is based. In Lind’s final 1849 performance in London, Queen Victoria carried a bouquet to the stage for the singer. Lind, then 28, went out on top, retiring from the opera.
A ticket for Lind’s 1850 concert in Richmond, signed by P.T. Barnum (Image courtesy The Valentine)
While she enjoyed singing, she’d grown weary of theatrical trappings. She favored philanthropy and wanted to continue in that direction.
Barnum, who’d recently sworn off alcohol, also sought another way. His notoriety rested on sensationalizing the little person named Charles Stratton as entertainer “General” Tom Thumb and perpetuating hoaxes on the public such as exhibiting “The Feejee Mermaid” (possibly the skeletal torso of an orangutan sewn to a salmon, not of Barnum’s design, but an artifact he found dating to 1800). Now, however, he reached for a higher art — to make money. The press heralding Lind’s fame beckoned to Barnum, and though he’d never heard her voice, he sensed opportunity. He sent a representative, she made inquiries, and somehow Lind became assured that Barnum’s intentions were genuine.
Lind’s financial demands — full payment in advance for herself, companion baritone Giovanni Belletti and musical director Julius Benedict, among other expenses — caused Barnum to mortgage almost his entire future. She also stipulated an out after 50 concerts if things didn’t go well. Barnum deposited into a London bank an enormous sum, $187,500, roughly $6 million in today’s dollars.
His 26-member press corps generated a cataract of print about Lind, and Barnum encouraged the sales of souvenir daguerreotypes and figurines, neckties and boots (for which she received no compensation). The promotion of garments and makeup in her name contradicted Lind’s stage appearances, during which she wore a white dress without a smidgen of rouge adorning her high cheekbones. She thought little of her looks and disparaged her “potato nose,” but the stage transformed her; luminous, she seemed taller than her 5 feet, 5 inches.
The concert’s highest-priced ticket, auctioned at $105, today would amount to approximately $3,000.
Audience members who experienced her interpretations of arias or traditional songs — Lind possessed a near three-octave singing voice and could sustain notes for 60 seconds with a single breath — reported sudden weeping, quivering and rapturous aesthetic ecstasy.
Richmond’s cognoscenti believed the Old Dominion’s state capital a required stop for such an artist.
“The societal obsession reached beyond the stores,” describes Jessi Bennett in the Library of Virginia’s UnCommonwealth blog. “The first train to pass over the completed Central Railroad line from its junction to Richmond in 1850 was named Jenny Lind, and a ship (transporting guano) named Jenny Lind docked in Richmond as well.”
John Reuben Thompson of the Southern Literary Messenger begged Barnum to come to Richmond, then pleaded with Lind through poetry. Thompson acknowledged that theaters in Northern cities exceeded the size of Richmond’s but pointed out the less than favorable notices in the New York papers and said Lind should “turn to a region less socially bleak” for a warmer welcome.
On Dec. 10, the Richmond Enquirer exclaimed, “JENNY LIND WILL BE HERE!”
A few days later, the editor of the pro-slavery Daily Union in Washington, D.C., asserted that Lind’s notable charitable giving included $1,000 to abolitionists. Barnum, eyeing danger to dates in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, stated that Lind cared too much for the country to cause a disruption.
Regardless of cost or political differences, on Dec. 20, 1850, the Marshall Theater filled to capacity while outside gathered an equally numerous crowd.
The Nightingale took the stage to deafening applause. Lind opened with the Gaetano Donizetti piece “Perchè non ho del vento,” featuring spectacular cascading trills and high-wire curlicues.
The first half ended with a trio for voice and two flutes, composed for Lind by Giacomo Meyerbeer in his pro-Prussian “Camp of Silesia.”
A program from Jenny Lind’s Dec. 20, 1850, concert at the Marshall Theater (Image courtesy The Valentine)
The balance of the second half exhibited Lind’s virtuosity. German composer Wilhelm Taubert wrote for her, with full title translated, “Little Bird, why do you sing so loud in the forest?” The song offered the delightful example of how Lind received her nickname.
She then assayed the popular tune “Home, Sweet Home” (“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” is a familiar line), adapted from Sir Henry Bishop’s melody by John Howard Payne for the 1823 opera “Clari, or the Maid of Milan.” For listeners of the day, the tune evoked a yearning for past happiness that left them blinking back tears. Lind finished big with “The Echo Song.”
The Richmond Whig, reaching for superlatives, likened her voice to “a stream of pearls flowing into a golden basin.”
Prior to her departure for Charleston, Lind made generous donations to the Richmond Female Orphan Asylum, the Richmond Male Orphan Asylum and St. Joseph’s Female Orphan Asylum.
Lind and Barnum amicably parted midway through the tour. On Feb. 5, 1852, in a private ceremony in Boston, she married her accompanist Otto Goldschmidt, viewed by outsiders as dull and not worthy of the virtuous singer. He became “The Prince Consort of Song,” though, and she Madame Lind-Goldschmidt.
In June 1852, after having read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the Nightingale gave $100 (today, around $3,000) to Stowe for the abolitionist cause. Lind-Goldschmidt returned to Europe, devoting herself to charity concerts and teaching.
