Jenny Lind
Jenny Lind

Author: Sarah Jenny Dunsmure

Publisher: Reddoor Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781910453100

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Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, was a household name in 1950 - as world-famous then as Beyonce is now. She was renowned not just as a singer but also for her charity, her generosity and, at a time when the terms 'singer' and 'actress' had scandalous overtones, her virtuous life. In this fascinating biography, Jenny Lind's great grand-daughter uncovers an extraordinary story, from the register of illegitimate births in Stockholm, to discovery by the Swedish Royal Theatre at just nine years old, to honour in the courts of Europe and a phenomenal tour of America. Jenny's story is one of huge professional triumph, offering her fame and fortune and even the interest of kings, princes and the rich and famous, yet she experienced searing heartbreak before finally finding happiness in love. A truly fascinating story, essential reading for everyone interested in music, theatre and general history.

E Pluribus Barnum
E Pluribus Barnum

Author: Bluford Adams

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780816626311

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The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective. Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today. Beginning with a discussion of Barnum's early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum's increasingly "respectable" aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women's rights and class issues in Barnum's management of these concerts. Barnum's American Museum and the "moral dramas" presented in its theater are examined, as well as the later circuses. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the on-going struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.

Live Music in America
Live Music in America

Author: Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music Steve Waksman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0197570534

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When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the U.S. in 1850, she became the prototype for the modern pop star. Meanwhile, her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for another figure of enduring significance: the pop culture impresario. Starting with Lind's fabled U.S. tour and winding all the way into the twenty-first century, Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and changing conditions of live music performance in the U.S. It covers a range of historic performances, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers expanding the sphere of African American music in the 1870s, to Benny Goodman bringing swing to Carnegie Hall in 1938, to 1952's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland - arguably the first rock and roll concert - to Beyoncé's boundary-shattering performance at the 2018 Coachella festival. More than that, the book details the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and a variety of live music producers (promoters, agents, sound and stage technicians) in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved. Live Music in America connects what occurs behind the scenes to what takes place on stage to highlight the ways in which live music is very deliberately produced and does not just spontaneously materialize. Along the way, author Steve Waksman uses previously unstudied archival materials to shed new light on the origins of jazz, the emergence of rock 'n' roll, and the rise of the modern music festival.

Barnum
Barnum

Author: Robert Wilson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1501118714

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“Robert Wilson’s Barnum, the first full-dress biography in twenty years, eschews clichés for a more nuanced story…It is a life for our times, and the biography Barnum deserves.” —The Wall Street Journal P.T. Barnum is the greatest showman the world has ever seen. As a creator of the Barnum & Baily Circus and a champion of wonder, joy, trickery, and “humbug,” he was the founding father of American entertainment—and as Robert Wilson argues, one of the most important figures in American history. Nearly 125 years after his death, the name P.T. Barnum still inspires wonder. Robert Wilson’s vivid new biography captures the full genius, infamy, and allure of the ebullient showman, who, from birth to death, repeatedly reinvented himself. He learned as a young man how to wow crowds, and built a fortune that placed him among the first millionaires in the United States. He also suffered tragedy, bankruptcy, and fires that destroyed his life’s work, yet willed himself to recover and succeed again. As an entertainer, Barnum courted controversy throughout his life—yet he was also a man of strong convictions, guided in his work not by a desire to deceive, but an eagerness to thrill and bring joy to his audiences. He almost certainly never uttered the infamous line, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” instead taking pride in giving crowds their money’s worth and more. Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, tells a gripping story in Barnum, one that’s imbued with the same buoyant spirit as the man himself. In this “engaging, insightful, and richly researched new biography” (New York Journal of Books), Wilson adeptly makes the case for P.T. Barnum’s place among the icons of American history, as a figure who represented, and indeed created, a distinctly American sense of optimism, industriousness, humor, and relentless energy.

Chopin's Dream
Chopin's Dream

Author: Icons Of Europe

Publisher:

Published: 2013-07

Total Pages: 54

ISBN-13: 9782960038538

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This paperback documents the unique gala concert The Dream of Chopin, performed as music-with-a-story for piano and voice in Christ Church, Malvern (England) mid-July 2013. Chopin masterpieces are introduced by citing dramatic elements of Jenny Lind's life. The story reveals her real identity (the king's daughter), as well as the depth of her secret and tragic romance with Chopin (implicating George Sand and Wagner) and the power of the cult she later instigated to immortalize his oeuvre. - The script and its annotations and artworks draw on a large body of period information from many years of historical research by Icons of Europe, much not published or juxtaposed before. The booklet also contains a little cadenza probably written by Chopin during a singing lesson with Jenny Lind who, incognito, was his pupil in 1841-1842. The concert and the booklet provide new insight into the life and legacy of both Jenny Lind and Chopin and into the cultural evolution of the 19th century.

P.T. Barnum
P.T. Barnum

Author: A. H. Saxon

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9780231056878

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I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a show, Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. "I don't believe in 'duping the public,' but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them." The name P.T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, "There's a sucker born every minute." Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America's most celebrated figures. In the Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum, A.H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled "Prince of Humbugs." Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes. Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for "curiosities," whether animate or inanimate. His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the "161-year-old nurse of George Washington," and the Fejee Mermaid-the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image-managing the irreproachable "legitimate" attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance crusade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus-much of his daily existence continued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed "notoriety." His famous autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. "Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it," he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, "Such is the fact-and if it wasn't, why still it ain't a bad announcement." The Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum captures the magic of this consummate showman's life, truly his own "greatest show on earth."