Chapter VII: The Swedish Nightingale in the American Woods (3)

When Otto Goldschmidt joined the concert party, he did not add to her popularity. Jenny Lind had first met him in England, where she was attracted to him from the fact that he was a pupil of her friend, Mendelssohn, and because of his ability as a pianist. He played at one of her concerts for charity in England, and he also played solos at several of her provincial concerts. He came to America, and at her suggestion took Julius Benedict’s place. Soon he fell in love with her, or she fell in love with him; there is no record. But eventually they fell in love with each other. There had been rumors of Jenny Lind’s engagement to many persons while she was in this country. Once she told Barnum that she had just heard a rumor that he and she were to be married and asked him how he supposed that had ever originated. “Probably from the fact that we are engaged,” he answered. According to Maunsell B. Field’s book, Signor Belletti was frantically in love with Jenny Lind. Field wrote that “the baritone of the troupe which accompanied her, who was in the same house [The New York Hotel], was madly in love with her, and he used to lie in bed all day, weeping and howling over his unrequited affection.” Before Otto Goldschmidt joined the party at Niagara Falls, where Jenny Lind was resting, she had seemed to show interest in Belletti. She invariably selected him as a companion in her walks, and she appealed to him for advice on all subjects. But the serious young German, who was eight years younger than she was, soon became the dominating force in her life. Belletti despaired and left the company soon after Otto Goldschmidt arrived.

Whenever Otto Goldschmidt played piano solos at her concerts, Jenny Lind sat near him on the stage and fixed her attention on the player. The audience took the hint and applauded his playing,--or possibly her presence. Goldschmidt was apparently a good musician, but there is plenty of newspaper evidence that the public found him dull, and that Jenny Lind found it necessary to force her friend upon her audiences. In Philadelphia he was led to foreshorten his performances on the program because of the excess of obviously ironical applause, but Jenny Lind met him as he came off the stage and defiantly shook his hand in public.

They were married at Boston in February, 1852, and lived quietly for several months at Northampton, Massachusetts. Jenny Lind had never had congenial home life, and she always enjoyed the happy surface surroundings of the families she visited in Germany. There was in her character from the beginning of her womanhood a tendency to shrink from the world, with its dangers, into the arms of a protecting husband, whose intimacy would be a refuge from the distrust she always felt for strangers.

After her marriage Jenny Lind gave a few concerts, and the advertisements always read “Madame Otto Goldschmidt (late Mlle. Jenny Lind).” But she was tired of public life, and although Otto Goldschmidt was in favor of a few more profitable concerts, she was anxious to return to Europe as soon as possible. This decision was wise, if we can judge from a Philadelphia newspaper of December 19, 1851:

“Jenny Lind has resolved to give no more concerts in Philadelphia;
few persons will regret her determination, unless she should be
able to better suppress the evidences of ill temper and vexation
than she did on Tuesday evening last. She looked as stingey as a
hive of wasps, and as black as a thunder-cloud, and all because the
house was not crowded. The fact is that Jenny Lind’s attractions
were not strong enough to counteract the dullness of Goldschmidt’s
piano playing, or the merely mediocre ability of Burke on the
violin. The absence too of orchestra was a disgusting exhibition
of parsimony, and a determination to make the most money she
possibly could. Miss Lind has never succeeded since she left the
guardianship of Mr. Barnum; and then she has had poor advisers, and
has been in ill humor when even the homage paid to her talent was
not manifested with the greatest enthusiasm. The nightingale has
feathered her nest well in our country, and she can go back to her
Swedish home where we wish her long health, a better disposition
and a good husband to cheer her declining years.”

Barnum saw her several times after the end of their agreement, for they were still very friendly to each other. She told him that she found it annoying to give concerts under her own management, because people were constantly cheating her.

Madame Otto Goldschmidt (late Mlle. Jenny Lind) announced her farewell concert at Castle Garden for Monday, May 24, 1852. The concert was well attended, but not crowded. It rained heavily on May 24, 1852, and that may have been one reason for the moderate attendance, but one cannot believe that Barnum would have allowed rain to interfere with the positively last appearance in America of The Swedish Nightingale. It was estimated by a newspaper that the receipts for the last concert were $7,000; the receipts of the first concert under Barnum’s management had been $17,864.05, and none of his concerts held in Castle Garden yielded less than $10,000.

Jenny Lind sang a “Farewell to America,” the words of which were written specially for her use by C. P. Cranch, but it did not cause enthusiasm. The _New York Herald_, her erstwhile champion, and many of the other New York newspapers, did not trouble to review her farewell concert, contenting their readers with short notes concerning it. The _Herald_ that had called Jenny Lind the most popular woman the world had ever known, the same _Herald_ that had compared her genius to that of Raphael, Shakespeare, Columbus, Eli Whitney, Napoleon, Bacon, Dante and Michael Angelo, sent her from America with these words: “There has been very little of the classic or pure artistic in her concerts; and she has been applauded not as an artist, but as a clever vocalist.” That sun, whose spots the _Herald_ said were “swallowed up and lost in the glorious effulgence,” was setting more rapidly, perhaps, than a real sun should, and the _Herald_ itself with characteristic inconsistency would doubtless have admitted that possibly it was only a sky rocket.

Barnum visited Jenny Lind in her dressing room after her last concert. She told him that she would never sing in public again, but he reminded her that her voice was a gift Providence had invested in her for the edification and delight of her fellow men, and that she owed it to God and man to devote that voice to charity and mankind’s enjoyment, if she herself no longer needed money. “Ah! Mr. Barnum,” she answered, “that is very true, and it would be ungrateful in me to not continue to use for the benefit of the poor and lowly that gift which our kind Heavenly Father has so graciously bestowed upon me. Yes, I will continue to sing so long as my voice lasts, but it will be mostly for charitable objects, for I am thankful to say I have all the money which I shall ever need.” The New Messiah and her advance agent in pious obeisance paid tribute to their idea of a beneficent Providence, whose all-seeing eye watches over both a Swedish Nightingale and a Connecticut Yankee.

At one o’clock of the morning of Jenny Lind’s departure, only a few hundred people gathered for a farewell serenade. The hour, and the fact that it was still raining, undoubtedly prevented a larger attendance, but the conviction that she was no longer a goddess contributed somewhat to the neglect. The firemen were her only faithful admirers. In gratitude for her donations they presented her with a copy of Audubon’s _Birds and Quadrupeds of America_ in a rosewood case, and also with a gold box, seven inches by three inches, the largest gold box made in America up to that time, they said. The Musical Society was not present at the serenade, but the same number of firemen, three hundred, with their red shirts and their lighted torches, waited in the rain under her window.

“Jenny Lind O! Jenny Lind O!
Come to the window!”

But in spite of the cries of several hundred admirers, Madame Otto Goldschmidt and her husband refused to appear on the balcony.

At the dock when her ship left two thousand people gathered to make a noise, in contrast to the thirty thousand who had shoved their way to greet her. The _Herald_ on the morning of her departure gave her this parting thrust: “She has been principally engaged in singing pieces of operas and catches of all kinds, which were considerably more of the clap-trap style than in accordance with the rigid rules of classical music. When she returns to London and makes her reappearance in opera, she will have to prune away a great deal of her _ad libitum_ redundancies in which she indulged during her career in this land.” This was the same woman whose song seemed to the _Herald_ of a little more than a year before to be “melting into the song of the seraphim” until it was “lost in eternity.”

After her return to England, where she and her husband settled eventually, Jenny Lind was rarely heard in public. She and Otto Goldschmidt lived at Malvern Hills, where near by there are the three things she admired most, “trees, water, and a cathedral.” She gave a few oratorio concerts in England and several concerts for charity on the Continent, but after her marriage her retirement was practically complete. It is significant of her character that without a pang of regret she could still her voice as soon as she changed her name from Jenny Lind to Madame Otto Goldschmidt. After 1863 she was seldom heard in public, even for charity, although she was only forty-three years old. Her last appearance took place in 1883, and in 1887 she died at Malvern Hills, England, after suffering from complete paralysis for five weeks.

At one time Jenny Lind intended to write an autobiography, but when the public did not receive Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_ with the applause she thought it deserved, she abandoned her idea with the comment, “No! let the waves of oblivion pass over my poor little life!” There must have been moments in those later years of uninterrupted existence along common family lines when Jenny Lind was restless--for what, she did not know; but, unfortunately for the development of her talents, in such moments she could always take quick refuge in God. Some pagan influences might have made her a great woman, for the God she adored had done all he could in the way of native gifts. If she had listened to the dictates of her emotions with half the unresisting attention she paid to the Bishop of Norwich and Josephine Åhmansson, the world to-day would know of Jenny Lind as something more than the spiritual toy of its grandfathers. The development of her talents and personality into genius was thwarted by suppression of the ordinary aims and aspirations of men. She smothered her desire for money by an inordinate indulgence in charity; a more natural appetite for worldly possessions might have led to artistic tastes, of which there is absolutely no indication beyond the technical development of her voice. Even in music there is no important discrimination and no predilection for the great, and of literature and art she knew nothing, because she did not allow herself even the little mental freedom necessary for their wide acquaintance. The desire for fame was lost in a constant consideration of God, making man’s aspirations unimportant in her mind. She could write to a young boy who was just entering the University of Heidelberg, when she herself was still under thirty: “You are just going to begin life, dear Rudolph; and life has quite as much joy as it has sorrow: but I, for my part, prefer the sorrow: for there is something exalted about it, whenever one’s heart is full of pain: for then it is that we first feel how poor we are on earth, how rich in heaven.” Any tendency towards intellectual supremacy through the agency of her great natural voice was thwarted by her weak dependence upon the advice of others, leading eventually to the retirement of marriage.

It was rumored that Jenny Lind’s last years were unhappy, that she was treated with indifference by her husband, and that her grave in 1890 had fallen into neglect. This story, printed in a London newspaper and reprinted by the _New York Tribune_, was denied vigorously by Barnum. He said that he had visited Otto Goldschmidt in London, and that he happened to know that Jenny Lind’s husband sent fresh flowers to her grave every day. The London newspaper had printed that she died broken-hearted, but Barnum declared confidently, “Her whole life was a song, and her last days were spent in singing for indigent clergymen.”

In their introduction Jenny Lind’s biographers wrote: “And, certainly, the tale of Jenny Lind may well be told for the sake of bearing splendid witness, to all those who feel themselves stirred by some inherent native power, of the unconquerable force with which a pure and strong individuality, if it be true to the inner light and loyal to the outward call, can dominate circumstances, however harsh and rude, and can, with a single eye on the far goal of artistic perfection, and upheld by faith in God, move straight to its aim with an unswerving and irresistible security, shaping its passage, amid pitfalls and snares, over this perilous earth with a motion as free and sure and faithful as a star that passes, in unhindered obedience, over the steady face of heaven.” This is not, to my mind, the main interest of Jenny Lind’s life. In her existence and triumphs lies a tale wherein is contained the extraordinary circumstances by which a mädchen who wanted most to be a hausfrau attained by means of a sweet and charitable disposition and a superb voice to a celebrity as well, and failed to become a great artist because she succeeded so well in becoming a hausfrau.