This text is part of:
[254]
was at once admitted to the training-school attached to the royal opera.* There she had the benefit of highly competent instructors, as well as the inspiring companionship of children engaged in the same pursuits.
The pupils of the training-school were required, now and then during the season, to perform in little plays written and arranged expressly for them.
It was in one of these, in the eleventh year of her age, that Jenny Lind made her first appearance in public.
The part assigned her was that of a beggar-girl, -a character which her pallid countenance and slight person fitted her to represent.
She acted with so much simplicity and truth, and sang her songs with such intelligent expression, as to secure the favor of the audience in a high degree.
She made what we now call a hit. Other children's plays were written for her, in which for two winters she delighted the people of Stockholm, who regarded her as a prodigy.
At the height of her transient celebrity, her brilliant prospects clouded over.
She observed with alarm that her upper notes grew weaker, and that her other tones were losing their pleasure-giving quality.
By the time she was thirteen years of age her upper notes had almost ceased to exist, and no efforts of her teachers could restore them.
It was as though the heiress of a great estate were suddenly informed that her guardian had squandered it, and that she must prepare to earn her livelihood by ordinary labor.
The scheme of educating her for the opera was given up, though she continued for four years longer to be an assiduous member of the school, studying instrumental music, and the theory of composition.
One of the severest of her trials was being forbidden to use her voice, except for a very short time every day in very simple music.
Her seventeenth birthday came round.
The master of the
* This anecdote and some other particulars are derived from “Queens of song,” by Ellen Creathorne Clayton: London and New York, 1865.
S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.