Selling the Nightingale

Abstract Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind made her American debut on September 11, 1850, at New York’s Castle Garden. At the time that she first arrived in the US, Lind was far from the first foreign musical celebrity to tour the country. But no previous touring artist engendered such widespread desires, such longing to hear her treasured voice and see her expressive countenance; nor did any previous artist give rise to such an explosion of efforts to represent her, both verbal and visual. Above all, no earlier touring artists, and few who came in the following decades, were met with such crowds at every turn. With Jenny Lind, music entered the American public sphere in a new way. It became part of something akin to what would, in the twentieth century, become termed “mass culture.” Performing just a year after cultural divisions had erupted in New York with the Astor Place Riot, Lind and her manager, P.T. Barnum, sought to present the singer as an icon of ideal femininity whose appeal crossed divisions of gender, race, and class. Yet they could not escape the social divisions of the era, and Lind’s concert tour was increasingly beset by conflict as it proceeded.