Author: Henry Scott Holland

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-07-16

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9781331515661

Excerpt from Jenny Lind the Artist, 1820-1851: A Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, Her Art-Life and Dramatic Career, From Original Documents, Letters, Ms. Diaries, &C., Collected by Mr. Otto Goldschmidt Jenny lind - the name carries music with it to English ears. The memory is very tender and fragrant Of her who, to our joy, found, for so long, a home among us. And yet it may well be questioned whether we English have even yet formed an adequate estimate of her gifts and character. For what is it which we have in our minds as we recall her name? It is, first, some tale of the wonderful days when all London went mad over her singing. We have heard people tell, as their eyes kindle with the Old passionate delight, how she came tripping over the stage in the Figlia, and how the liquid notes came rippling Off her lips. We hear of the hours they waited in the historic crush at the Opera in the Haymarket Of the feverish energy with which they toiled to catch one glimpse of her passing. We remember, with a smile, some picture in an old copy Of Punch, or the Illustrated London News, of scenes in the Opera passages on a Jenny Lind night. And then we add to this memory of that surpassing triumph, the thought of one whose purity and simplicity won all hearts to love the girl who, in the hour of her overwhelming success, re membered others rather than herself, and poured out her money in charities, and devoted her marvellous gifts to the relief of poverty and the healing of pain. That is our English picture, and it is good and pleasant enough and it is quite true, so far as it goes. But it is strangely imperfect and fragmentary. It assumes that her operatic career is to be identified with the brief passage of those London seasons, and that her fame is a private possession of our own here in England, Where She lived and died. There prevails no general conception that the English visits were but the latter episodes of a long dramatic experience - an experience which had begun, with extra ordinary promise, before she had passed out Of her childhood, and which had already won to her the same enthusiasm which greeted her in England, not only In her own Swedish home and In the kindred capital, Copenhagen, but in the great musical centres Of Germany - Berlin, the Rhine, Leipzig, Munich, and Vienna. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.