A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career: Life of Hon. Phineas T. BarnumBenton, Joel
History
A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career: Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum
Benton, Joel
Barnum's American Museum; Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891; Circus owners -- United States -- Biography
"It was in the song from Mozart's 'Magic Flute' that we first
fully KNEW the voice and art and soul of Jenny Lind. She warmed
to that music. It is narrow criticism which imprisons such a
singer within the partial scope, albeit classical, of the Italian
School; ignores that vital part of her which may exceed the
conventional requirements of such a School, and condemns whatever
in her is most characteristic, and in contrast with its models.
It has been well said by those who make the most intelligent
reference to those models and that school, that the style of the
Swedish Nightingale is sui generis, as marked as her own
personality. True, you would not say of her, in the conventional
Italian sense of the word, what is often said in first
acknowledgment of a good singer: 'She has STYLE'--meaning the one
style which is assumed as the standard. If we are to limit style
to that sense, Mdlle. Lind has more than style; she has
genius--Northern genius, to be sure, which is precisely what she
should have to make her greatness genuine. Song is original in
her; and from her singing we drink in new life, after long
satiety of such passion-sweets as have become habits rather than
fresh inspirations in the delightful--we may almost say
perfected--but yet confined music of the Italians.
"It is, perhaps, too late to await the advent of a Queen of Song
from the warm South. The South has had its turn; it has fulfilled
its mission; the other end of the balance now comes up. The
Northern Muse must sing her lesson to the world. Her fresher,
chaster, more intellectual, and (as they only SEEM to some) her
colder strains come in due season to recover our souls from the
delicious languor of a Music which has been so wholly of the
Feelings, that, for the want of some intellectual tonic and some
spiritual temper, Feeling has degenerated into mere Sensibility
and a very cheap kind of superficial, skin-deep excitability that
usurps the name of Passion.
"We admire and feel and love the Melody of Italy. We reverence
her native gift of song, her popular sensibility to it. We have
been again and again transported by her best vocal artists who
have visited these shores, and they are not THE best--the
world-wide celebrities, we have to confess, are only traditions
to us--traditions, however, to which we yield ourselves in full
faith. From what we HAVE heard and experienced of Italian
singing, we know, as well as if we had heard Grisi, Pasta and
Rubini, that it is not IN the genius of the Italian School to
produce or hardly to appreciate such a new revelation of song as
this human nightingale or canary of Sweden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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