Jenny Lind
Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was a Swedish opera singer. She became famous after her performance in Der Freischütz in Sweden in 1838. She is believed to have inspired three of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales: “Beneath the Pillar”, “The Angel” and “The Nightingale”
About Jenny Lind in brief
Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was a Swedish opera singer. She became famous after her performance in Der Freischütz in Sweden in 1838. Within a few years, she had suffered vocal damage, but the singing teacher Manuel García saved her voice. In 1850, Lind went to America at the invitation of the showman P. T. Barnum. She gave 93 large-scale concerts for him and then continued to tour under her own management. She earned more than USD 350,000 from these concerts, donating the proceeds to charities, principally the endowment of free schools in Sweden. She is believed to have inspired three of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales: “Beneath the Pillar”, “The Angel” and “The Nightingale” She was the illegitimate daughter of Niclas Jonas Lind, a bookkeeper, and Anne-Marie Fellborg, a schoolteacher. Lind’s mother had divorced her first husband for adultery but refused to remarry until after his death in 1834. She had a vocal crisis at the age of 12 and had to stop singing for a time, but she recovered. She was in great demand in opera roles throughout Sweden and northern Europe during the 1840s, and was closely associated with Felix Mendelssohn. The composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, an early and faithful admirer of her talent, arranged an audition for her at the Opéra in Paris. In December 1844, through Meyerbeer’s influence, Lind was engaged to sing the title role in Norma’s opera Norma in Berlin, Austria.
Among her admirers were Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and Ignaz Moscheles. She died in London in 1855 and was a professor of singing at the Royal College of Music in London from 1882, for some years, until her death in 1901. She left a legacy of more than $1.5 million to the Swedish Opera and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, among other things, including a collection of photographs of her with her family and friends, including her husband Otto Goldschmidt, her children and great-grandchildren. She also left a fortune of over $1 million to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and the United States, including $500,000 to Sweden and $1,000,000 for the Swedish Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm, and £1,500 to Norway and the University of Oslo. She wrote a biography of her life, “The Jenny Lind Story: A Biography of a Swedish Opera Singer, 1838-1855” She is buried in Stockholm, Sweden, with her husband, Otto Gold Schmidt, and their three children, and is survived by her son, Hans Christian Lind, and her daughter, Johanna Maria, who was born in 1836, and two step-granddaughters. Lind died in Stockholm in 1901, aged 80. She has been described as a “soprano of the highest order” and a “great singer of the 20th century”
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This page is based on the article Jenny Lind published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
