Tea at Trianon: Jenny Lind in America

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Jenny Lind in America

From Smithsonian:

The remainder of the Herald’s six-column front page was largely devoted to the arrival in New York of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. Long popular in Europe, this was Lind’s first visit to the United States. For the next 21 months, thrilling accounts of Lind’s American concert tour would dominate newspapers, but the triumphs of the Swedish Nightingale would not eclipse the national debate over slavery which was polarizing America. In the words of Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish reformer visiting America in 1850, “Jenny Lind, the new Slave Bill, and the protests against it in the North, Eastern, and Western States are…the standing topics of the newspapers.” The two issues would continue to appear side-by-side in the newspapers, and before long, Lind herself would be drawn into the national debate over slavery.

October 6 marks the 200th anniversary of Lind’s birth in Stockholm, Sweden. “[Lind] was hugely famous,” says historian Betsy Golden Kellem. The child of a single mother, Lind began training to sing opera in her tween years. Writer Hans Christian Andersen, who would befriend and unrequitedly pine for her, recalled in The True Story of My Life the night she conquered Denmark. "Through Jenny Lind,” that night in 1843, “I first became sensible of the holiness of Art.” He added, “No books, no men, have had a more ennobling influence upon me as a poet than Jenny Lind.” That performance inspired Andersen to write “The Nightingale,” which helped spread Lind’s fame throughout Europe (Lind’s rejection of Andersen’s affections supposedly inspired him to write “The Snow Queen,” on which the Disney film, Frozen is based). After her triumph in Denmark, she found similar success in Germany and Austria. The composer Felix Mendelssohn, who collaborated with Lind during this period, gushed in a letter to his friend Andersen, “There will not in a whole century be born another being so gifted as she.” (Read more.)