NINE
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THE VOICE
Barnum’s most remarkable success as a showman began just as his relationship with drink was ending. The new venture would put to use all his skills and imagination as a promoter, and as fulfilling as the interlude at home had been, this undertaking would get him back on the road, giving him ample opportunity to moonlight as a temperance lecturer. It would also give him a chance to move beyond the days of Joice Heth, the Fejee Mermaid, the Woolly Horse, and even the most famous little man in the world, to establish himself as something more than a mere promoter: a serious purveyor of high-brow culture. It would also, conveniently, make him far, far richer than he had ever been.
Three months to the day after Barnum and the Strattons sailed home from Liverpool, a new sensation appeared in London, and a delirium outstripping the one associated with Tom Thumb seized the British public. The Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, who was already acclaimed on the Continent, made her debut at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket on May 4, 1847, performing the role of Alice in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Roberto il Diavolo. Attempts to bring Lind to England had been protracted and very public, and even the Encyclopaedia Britannica declared years later that the ruckus created by the debut’s elegantly attired ticket holders had “become historic.” They began to gather outside the theater at 4:30 p.m., eventually blocking the street, and when the doors finally opened three hours later, the ensuing stampede left the evening coats and gowns of many ladies in disarray. Once calm was restored and the crowd seated, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert swept into the royal box along with the Queen Dowager Adelaide and other royal personages. Among those in the audience were Lind’s close friend Felix Mendelssohn and the celebrated actress Fanny Kemble.
When Lind first appeared on stage, she received a standing ovation, and in the third act, as she sang the maiden’s love song “When I Left Normandy,” the audience applauded each verse and, at the end of the aria, interrupted the production for twenty minutes, “rapturously” calling for encores “with the most enthusiastic waving of hats and handkerchiefs,” as The Times of London reported. At the first of Lind’s three curtain calls following the performance, Queen Victoria herself tossed a huge bouquet at the singer’s feet. In the next day’s Times, the music critic wrote of Lind’s voice, “The delicious quality of the organ—the rich, gushing tone was something entirely new and fresh. The auditors did not know what to make of it. . . . The sustained notes, swelling with full richness, and fading down to the softest piano, without losing one iota of their quality, being delicious when loud, delicious when whispered, dwelled in the public ear, and reposed in the public heart.”1
Victoria would attend all fifteen subsequent operas in which Lind performed during that season in London, ending on August 21, and each engagement would feature the same crush of elegantly dressed fans and other royals, including the Duke of Wellington, who would call out a greeting from his box when she appeared on stage. People traveled from as far away as the Continent not only to hear Lind sing but also to watch her act, charmed by her naturalistic style. One special performance, for the Queen’s birthday on June 15, added trumpets and the singing of the national anthem in Her Majesty’s honor, once the nine carriages transporting her party had arrived. On July 22 Giuseppe Verdi himself conducted the premiere of his ambitious but not wholly successful opera I Masnadieri, commissioned for Her Majesty’s Theatre and written in part with Lind in mind.
The Jenny Lind mania spread well beyond those who could afford to risk the integrity of fancy evening dress and spend the equivalent today of more than $500 for an orchestra seat. “The name of Jenny Lind became a household word among thousands and thousands who had never been to the opera in their lives,” writes one of her biographers, Joan Bulman, “and had no prospect or intention of going.” People stood outside the cottage in Old Brompton where she was living, hoping for a glimpse of her. Articles of clothing were now called Jenny Linds, as were certain cigars. “Her portrait appeared on chocolate boxes, matchboxes, pocket handkerchiefs,” Bulman writes, “her name was given to horses and dogs and children’s dolls, [and] a magnificent golden-yellow tulip was named after her.”2
With his many friends and professional contacts in London, Barnum would have been well aware of Lind’s conquest of queen and country. The American papers also covered it. On July 3 James Gordon Bennett himself wrote in a letter from London to his New York Herald audience about the rivalry between Lind and another opera singer performing in the city that summer, Julia Grisi: “I have heard both frequently, and they are both great artists.” Lind, he continued, “is not beautiful, but extremely interesting. Her voice is wonderful in power, compass, skill.” The rivalry had kept their respective opera houses brimming all season, “as full as they could be packed.”3
In the later version of his autobiography, Barnum wrote that, although his American Museum and many of his promotions had been aimed at the masses, “I myself relished a higher grade of amusement, and I was a frequent attendant at the opera, first-class concerts, lectures, and the like.” We know that even as a teenager living in New York he fancied himself in the know about the theater, and his time in Europe as a codfish aristocrat among the hereditary ones gave him more opportunity to develop and satisfy his inclinations toward sophistication. His exposure to both the highborn and the highbrow led to his wishing to construct a palace for himself bedecked with all the finest things the world could offer, and even more to reconstruct himself as someone sturdier than a promoter of humbugs, collector of curiosities, and manager of a dwarf. So it seems inevitable that Barnum would develop an interest in Jenny Lind, would seek to raise his own status by associating himself with a singer favored by the greatest composers in Europe. That she filled Her Majesty’s Theatre throughout her first season in London—and continued to succeed admirably in subsequent seasons—would naturally only raise the stakes for an impresario such as himself.4
When Barnum finally met Lind in 1850, he admitted that he had never heard her sing. But a large part of what interested him went beyond her musical talent and reputation. These were the same qualities that had drawn so many people to her since she had begun to make a name for herself in Sweden in her middle teens: simplicity, modesty, piety, spirituality, and later, once she had the means, philanthropy. She had been born out of wedlock in 1820 in Stockholm to an ill-tempered mother who made it plain she did not want her and indeed sent her away to live with strangers more than once. By the time Jenny’s innate musical talent was recognized at the age of nine, when she was enrolled with financial assistance in the Royal Opera School, her uncompromising Lutheranism was already unalterably established. In Sweden, as in the rest of Europe, the British Isles, and the United States, theatrical performers were morally suspect, and even the protection of the Royal Opera did not exempt Jenny from the possibility of censure. But as Bulman writes:
Those who had feared for Jenny’s moral development . . . could set their minds at rest. She detested immorality with a violent, instinctive repugnance. She was a natural Puritan; besides, art and religion were to her so intermingled, artistic gifts so clearly a gift from God, that the artist became almost by definition a sort of priest.5
Her reputation for purity became part of her public persona and was a large factor in why she was so widely loved. If in private she could be stubborn, blunt, and solitary and could at times act the part of the prima donna, there was nonetheless something authentic in her manner, and this authenticity came through on stage and off. She was both otherworldly and self-contained. She cared nothing about fashion, always dressing simply, and seemed to be made uncomfortable by too much public adulation. She truly believed that her talent for singing and acting had been divinely ordered and not earned, and thus could be taken away on any given day. Her nerve often failed her when she made a debut in a new city or country, so uncertain was she that she could call forth her talent or translate it into a different context
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These attributes made a strong impression on Barnum. When in the autumn of 1849 he began to think about proposing an American tour to Lind, he was himself trying to become a better person, a good husband and father dedicated to the family hearth, and a more moderate drinker on the road to complete abstinence. As he gave several days of thought to whether he should attempt to engage Lind, his “ ‘cipherings’ and calculations gave but one result—immense success.” One of the calculations had to do with how much an association with “the greatest musical wonder in the world” would be worth to his own reputation. “Inasmuch as my name has long been associated with ‘humbug,’ and the American public suspect that my capacities do not extend beyond the power to exhibit a stuffed monkey-skin or a dead mermaid,” he began in honest self-assessment, he felt that he could afford to lose $50,000 as long as he presented the “divine Jenny” in a way that lent “credit to the management.” That is, whatever else came of the venture, the very hefty expenditure of fifty grand would be fair value for a boost in his public profile.6
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THE TWO YEARS FOLLOWING HER London debut were tumultuous ones for Lind. In the fall of 1847, her beloved friend Mendelssohn died, leaving her bereft for many months. A second season at Her Majesty’s Theatre, in 1848, turned out to be even more triumphant than the 1847 season, and she gave the first of a series of benefit concerts for British hospitals that would raise tens of thousands of pounds. During this time she became engaged twice, first to a fellow Swedish singer with whom she had long been enamored, and then to a very young and very dull British army captain, who turned out to be a religious fanatic and a mama’s boy. Her fiancé broke off the first engagement and she the second, after the officer and his mother teamed up on her to extract promises that she would not perform in the immoral theater again and that she would renounce everything she had done in her stage career to date. During this same period, she began to perform with a young German pianist, Otto Goldschmidt, who had studied with Chopin in Paris and also with Mendelssohn, about whom Jenny and he could share their fond memories. Goldschmidt eventually traveled with her in America and, in February 1852, having converted from Judaism to Christianity, he would become her husband.
Even before the hectoring by the British officer and his mother, Lind began to have concerns about continuing her career as an opera singer. Her own religious scruples about the morality of acting fed these doubts; added to them were her worries about the exhaustion produced by singing so many demanding roles and the toll this heavy schedule might take on her heavenly instrument. Mendelssohn, whom she had first met in Berlin in 1844, had encouraged her to sing, instead of operas, oratorios—unstaged but dramatic religious-themed choral works—and he also introduced her to his songs and those of Schubert and Schumann. He wrote a soprano part with her in mind for his own oratorio Elijah. But it took her months and even years to extricate herself from opera. After all, by the time she gave her last performance, she was the most famous and best-paid opera singer in the world, and many people, especially the manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre, to whom she felt a loyal gratitude, were economically dependent on her. But her last performance in his house finally happened, on May 10, 1849, in the role she had first sung there, Alice in Roberto il Diavolo. After that night—her 678th performance in a dozen years in thirty different operas in five languages—she sang opera no more. “The applause which she received at the conclusion of the Opera was something remarkable,” the Times critic wrote of her last performance, where Queen Victoria was as usual in attendance. “She was called three times, by an audience that occupied even the obscurest nooks of the edifice, and that universally rose when she appeared; and so continuous were the plaudits, that they blended with each other into one roll of heavy sound.”7
She was set to marry the British officer six days after that farewell, but when he overplayed his hand, she put an end to the engagement and escaped to Paris in a state of near emotional collapse. Both the conclusion of her opera career and her broken relationships had taken place very much in public, and she felt humiliated by her role in the second aborted betrothal. But then “she was astonished and relieved to find that all England rejoiced that the marriage” to the prim officer—“who did nothing but read psalms and go to church,” as Jenny wrote to a friend—“had come to nothing.”8
One night in June she went for dinner to the Hôtel de Charost, the Paris house of the British ambassador, where she enjoyed meeting a famous Italian opera diva of an earlier era, Angelica Catalani. After dinner, the older singer asked Jenny to perform, saying she would like to hear her sing before she died. Jenny sang and a few days later learned that, sadly, Catalani had indeed died, the victim of a cholera epidemic that was growing in the city. Deeply rattled, Jenny and her party left the next day for Amiens, then Brussels, then Cologne and other places in Germany, ending up on doctor’s orders not to sing for at least six months and to get rest at Bad Ems, an ancient Roman town that had become a world-famous spa. By the end of the year she was in the port of Lübeck, a jumping-off point for Sweden, marooned there when her female companion, Josephine Åhmansson, came down with the measles. From Lübeck she wrote a letter to an English friend, a baroness:
My nerves are better, and I feel much less agitated and more quiet than before. I believe that my having left the stage may be the chief reason for this happy change; my whole nature and my way of feeling was always very opposite to that sort of being, who can bear the calumnies of a theatrical life.9
She thought of going to Russia to make money for her charitable causes, including music schools in Sweden and a foundation in Mendelssohn’s honor in England. And she began to sing in public again, not opera but songs of the Romantics and Swedish folk songs, sometimes accompanied by Goldschmidt. Now that she was rested and feeling mentally strong, she was more determined than ever to take control of her own life, even turning down her beloved sovereign, King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, when he asked her to perform in operas celebrating the marriage of the crown prince.
At about this time she received a visit from an Englishman named John Hall Wilton, who had traveled to Lübeck all the way from New York with the hope of meeting her. Several letters from him had made little impression on her, but a musical contact had eventually made the connection. He was the representative of P. T. Barnum and was authorized to sign her to a contract for an American tour managed by the famous showman.10
Four other promoters had approached Lind with the idea of an American tour, among them a man named Henry Wikoff, who in 1840 had taken the Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler to the United States for a successful two-year tour. According to Barnum, Wikoff—a man of dubious morals whose later friendship with Mary Todd Lincoln would damage her reputation as first lady—tried to undermine him when he heard from Lind that Barnum’s agent had approached her. He warned her that, as Barnum put it, “I would not scruple to put her into a box and exhibit her through the country at twenty-five cents a head!” This alarmed Lind sufficiently to move her to write to a London banker who knew Barnum. In reply, the banker promised her “that she could place the fullest reliance upon my honor and integrity,” Barnum claimed. Later she would tell Barnum that she had also been reassured by the stationery Wilton had used to write to her, which featured a large engraving of Iranistan. The magnificence of his house, Barnum would have us believe, had reinforced her confidence in his substance as a businessman.11
Once Lind realized that she should take Barnum seriously, she demonstrated that she was the showman’s match as a negotiator. Barnum gave Wilton elaborate instructions about how to negotiate with her, including incentives that would reward the agent in inverse proportion to how much he spent to convince her to agree to the tour. Barnum made clear his willingness to pay every imaginable expense, which included footing the bill for an entourage to accompany her on tour, complete with a music director, a male singer, two servants, and a companion. Although he hoped that Wilton could engage her to share in the risk
and profits, he authorized Wilton to, as a last resort, guarantee Lind $1,000 per performance for up to 150 “concerts or oratorios.” Wilton’s financial incentives notwithstanding, Lind quickly took him for everything, including a pledge that all the money Barnum would pay her—$187,500—be deposited in a London bank before she set out. So much for her “fullest reliance” on the showman’s integrity.12
Lind wrote to a German friend that she was very happy with the deal that would take her to America: “The offer from there was very brilliant and everything was arranged so nicely, that I would have been wrong in declining it. . . . I shall be able to gain there in the course of one or two years a very large fortune.” She would use this money, she said, to create schools in Sweden, and thus saw it as “a gracious answer to my prayers to Heaven!”13
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BARNUM MAKES MUCH OF HIS trouble in coming up with so much money in advance, averring that Wall Street thought his scheme would bankrupt him, topping the story by saying that the last $5,000 he needed to reach his goal was loaned to him by a clergyman. If this were not proof of divine intervention in the matter of Lind’s tour, it at the very least underscored the impeccable spiritual qualities of the performer herself.
Barnum exaggerated the problems he faced in introducing her to the American public. Given her subsequent fame, he later wrote, “it is difficult to realize that, at the time this engagement was made, she was comparatively unknown on this side the water.” He underscored this point with an anecdote about a conversation he had on a train. On his way home from Philadelphia, where he was working when he heard from Wilton that the contract had been signed, Barnum chatted with the “gentlemanly conductor,” whom he knew from his previous travels on that line. The deal with Lind had been announced in the papers that morning, so Barnum asked what he thought people would make of her tour. “Jenny Lind!” the conductor responded. “Is she a dancer?” Perhaps this trainman had been too much of a gentleman to take notice of the back columns of newspapers, but beginning as early as 1845, the American press had begun to follow Lind’s successes in Europe, and her more recent triumphs in England had turned her into the sort of celebrity whose romantic attachments, real and imagined, regularly became tidbits for the news columns. In the advertising columns were notices of Jenny Lind blouses and other articles of Jenny Lind clothing. Even so, she had not yet become the cultural icon that Barnum would endeavor to make her.14
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