Jenny Lind, Harriet Grote and Elite Music Patronage in Early Victorian London

ABSTRACT

This article explores the patronage relationship between Harriet Grote and Jenny Lind during the latter’s visits to London in 1847, 1848 and 1849. Aiming to highlight the often neglected affective dimensions of individual music patronage in this period, it discusses Grote’s activities as Lind’s agent and chaperone as well as her efforts to support Lind in more personal ways and to create a home-like environment for her. It is argued that Grote’s varied roles as Lind’s patron should be interpreted in the context of an intense personal interest in the singer, and are characterized by a complex combination of public and private types of support. These, in turn, correspond to public and private music practice as settings for patronage, revealing the interdependence of these two modes of music-making in the period, especially in the case of elite music culture.

Notes

1 Colin Eatock, Mendelssohn and Victorian England (Farnham, 2009), 93.

2 The Morning Post, 19 April 1847.

3 Luigi Lablache (1794–1858) was the leading bass of Her Majesty’s Theatre, and Queen Victoria’s former singing-teacher. Edward Lewin (1810–78) was Grote’s brother. He had got to know Lind when he lived in Stockholm during the 1830s, through another Lewin sister, Frances (1804–81), who lived in Sweden with her husband, Nils von Koch. Benjamin Lumley (1811–75) was the manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre from 1841 to 1853.

4 Harriet Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind (Written 1855–6)’, manuscript, Jenny Lind Archive OG/2/4/2, Royal Academy of Music, London.

5 Christina Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge, 2007).

6 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848 (London, 1975; repr. Farnham, 2004), 31–2; Christina Bashford, ‘Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 291–360 (p. 312), and Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture, 68, 102, 172.

7 Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture, 351.

8 Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Lebanon, NH, 2007).

9 Deborah Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge, 2001), 40.

10 Linda Whitesitt, ‘Women’s Support and Encouragement of Music and Musicians’, Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington, IN, 1991), 301–13. Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr’s broadened definitions of patronage, developed to accommodate American women’s endeavours since the late nineteenth century, are only partly applicable to a mid-nineteenth-century British context such as the relationship between Grote and Lind. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860, ed. Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley, CA, 1997).

11 Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge, 2006), 135, 137–8.

12 Examples dating from her London career are A Review of the Performances of Mademoiselle Jenny Lind, During her Engagement at Her Majesty’s Theatre: and their Influence and Effect upon our National Drama; with a Notice of her Life (London, 1847); Memoir of Jenny Lind (London, 1847); and Lindiana: An Interesting Narrative of the Life of Jenny Lind (Arundel, 1847). For examples of biographies from her American tour, see Samuel Putnam Avery, The Life and Genius of Jenny Lind, with Beautiful Engravings (New York, 1850); George G. Foster, Memoir of Jenny Lind, Compiled from the Most Authentic Sources (New York, 1850); Charles. G. Rosenberg, The Life of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale: Her Genius, Struggles and Triumphs (New York, 1850); and Nathaniel Parker Willis, Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind (Philadelphia, PA, 1851).

13 Edward Wagenknecht, Jenny Lind (Boston, MA, and New York, 1931); Helen Headland, The Swedish Nightingale: A Biography of Jenny Lind (n.p., 1946); Joan Bulman, Jenny Lind: A Biography (London, 1956); Gladys Denny Schultz, Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale (New York, 1962). More recent contributions include W. Porter Ware and Thaddeus C. Lockard, P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind (n.p., 1981), and Eva Öhrström, Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale (n.p., 2000).

14 Henry S. Holland and William S. Rockstro, 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, etc., Collected by Mr. Otto Goldschmidt (New York, 1893). The documents they had collected during their extensive research for the book are now housed in the archives of the Royal Academy of Music, London, and some show the annotations of Lind’s daughter, who published her own biography in 1926. Jenny Maria Catherine Goldschmidt Maude, The Life of Jenny Lind (London, 1926).

15 George Biddlecombe, ‘The Construction of a Cultural Icon: The Case of Jenny Lind’, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies III, ed. Peter Horton and Bennet Zon (Aldershot, 2003), 45–61 (pp. 60–1); Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid-Victorian London’, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (New York and Oxford, 2011), 21–41 (p. 31); Hilary Poriss, ‘Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism’, ibid., 42–60 (p. 57); Gunilla Budde, ‘Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Female Opera Singers in Britain and Germany in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, ed. Olivier Janz and Daniel Schönpflug (New York, 2014), 184–99 (pp. 105–6).

16 Celia Applegate, ‘Mendelssohn on the Road: Music, Travel, and the Anglo-German Symbiosis’, The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford, 2011), 228–44 (p. 232), and Budde, ‘Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism’, 195. A considered reading of responses to the Lind ‘phenomenon’ in Victorian Britain, probing the commercial publications as well as the revealing but seldom-considered parodic and satirical reactions, is forthcoming in Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Coming to Terms with Jenny Lind in Victorian Britain’. I am grateful to the author for sharing with me a draft version of this article prior to its publication.

17 Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture, 141, 155.

18 Frances Ann Kemble, Records of Later Life (New York, 1882), 209.

19 Lady Eastlake [Elizabeth Rigby], Mrs. Grote: A Sketch (London, 1880), 19.

20 Kemble, Records of Later Life, 220.

21 Joseph Hamburger, ‘Grote [née Lewin], Harriet’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), available at <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11678> (accessed 7 May 2016)

22 Kemble, Records of Later Life, 209.

23 Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 4, 8.

24 Hamburger, ‘Grote [née Lewin], Harriet’. This ‘modest fortune’ of £3,000 per year, combined with Harriet’s having 11 siblings, was objectionable to George’s father, and the couple eloped to be married in 1820.

25 She mentions the Grotes as specific examples of this category of opera-goers. Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 177.

26 Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 3, 24.

27 Harriet Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote, Compiled from Family Documents, Private Memoranda, and Original Letters to and from Various Friends (London, 1873), 41.

28 Bashford, ‘Historiography and Invisible Musics’, 307. This is why she calls Grote an ‘early example of a female cellist’ (p. 319).

29 ‘[From a family at Langdown, near Hythe, of the name of Tate], I learned to take interest in Beethoven’s compositions, which were played continually. They were scarcely introduced into England at this time; and even by the Tates voted almost too scientific and crabbed to be generally relished. But I remember that this music used to affect my imagination powerfully as I listened for hours to it.’ Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 35. Eastlake quotes these sentences from autobiographical notes by Grote that have not survived. Eastlake states that they covered only the first 13 years of Grote’s life up to 1805, so that Grote’s memory of the Tates’ early interest in Beethoven, even if she overestimated how young she was at the time, definitely predates the 1830s enthusiasm for his music in England, on which see Roger Parker, ‘Two Styles in 1830s London: “The Form and Order of a Perspicacious Unity”’, The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Benjamin Walton and Nicholas Mathew (Cambridge, 2013), 123–38. Grote’s memory of the Tate family correlates with Fred and Clare Murley’s information that Langdown House near Hythe was built for George Tate in 1797. Fred and Clare Murley, Waterside, a Pictorial Past: Calshot, Fawley, Hythe and Marchwood (New York, 1991), 79.

30 See ‘H. G. H.’, ‘Letter to the Editor: The Late Mrs. Grote’, The Spectator, 11 January 1879, 16, for the mention of Grote playing Bach, Corelli and Clementi into her old age, and Kemble, Records of Later Life, 640, for a reference to her playing Mendelssohn on the piano. Mary Simpson mentions in her memoirs that Grote played the piano part of a Beethoven trio in a domestic concert at the age of 84. M. C. M. Simpson, Many Memories of Many People (London, 1898), 77.

31 Kemble remembers a party at the Grotes’ country house, with the guests assembled in the garden: ‘I [Kemble] was sitting in a swing, and my sister [Adelaide Kemble, who had a short concert career as a singer before her marriage, her first concert given in Grote’s drawing room], [Viennese composer Josef] Dessauer, and [Athenaeum critic Henry] Chorley were lying on the lawn at my feet, […] [Grote entered] into a most interesting and animated discussion upon the subject of Glück’s music; and suddenly, some piece from the “Iphigenia” being mentioned, she shouted for her man-servant, to whom on his appearance she gave orders to bring her a chair and footstool, and “the big fiddle” (the violoncello) out of the hall; and taking it forthwith between her knees, proceeded to play, with excellent taste and expression, some of Glück’s noble music upon the sonorous instrument, with which St. Cecilia is the only female I ever saw on terms of such familiar intimacy.’ Kemble, Records of Later Life, 212–13.

32 Hamburger, ‘Grote [née Lewin], Harriet’.

33 Hall-Witt has even claimed that this book was ‘almost entirely’ written by Grote. Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 160. Lumley dedicated the book to Grote, as follows: ‘To her who through life has united a cultivated taste in art with a kindly sympathy for its ministers, to Mrs. Grote, as a mark of my respectful admiration and regard for one in whom intellectual power is tempered by womanly grace and gentleness, this volume is by permission inscribed.’ Benjamin Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera (London, 1864).

34 She writes that ‘Mr. Grote went hand in hand with her in the largest and most liberal patronage of artists and intercourse with them’ and that this represents ‘a succession of curious chapters [in their life history], associated with such names as Fanny Ellsler [sic], Ary Scheffer, Jenny Lind, Mendelssohn, Adelaide Kemble, Chopin, Liszt, Lablache, and with almost every musical name of repute’. Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 83.

35 Kemble, Records of Later Life, 209.

36 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 7–8.

37 Ibid., 25.

38 H[arriet] G[rote], ‘The Swedish Prima Donna’, The Spectator, 13 September 1845, 15.

39 Alfred Bunn, The Case of Bunn Versus Lind (London, 1848), 6–7. For more on Bunn’s aspirations for the English opera at Drury Lane Theatre, see George Biddlecombe, English Opera from 1834 to 1864 with Particular Reference to the Works of Michael Balfe (New York and London, 1994).

40 Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera, 153.

41 Bunn, The Case of Bunn Versus Lind, 8.

42 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 28.

43 According to Grote (ibid., 30), Lind would originally have had to pay a penalty of £500, or of £300 plus one free performance in Bunn’s theatre. However, Lind wrote to Bunn independently of Grote in October 1845 to ask for an unconditional release, arguing that she found it impossible to learn English, and that she had been surprised into signing the contract with him in the first place. This letter is mentioned in Grote’s memoir and reproduced in Bunn, The Case of Bunn Versus Lind, 9. Lind later explained to Grote (‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 20) that she had been pressurized by Bunn and Lord Westmoreland (the British ambassador to Berlin) into signing the contract during an interval between two acts of an opera in which she was performing. Although Grote does not mention the role of Meyerbeer, he seems to have been instrumental in setting up the 1845 contract with Drury Lane for the production of his opera there and in persuading Lind to sign (Bunn, The Case of Bunn Versus Lind, 7, 10). Eventually, Bunn sued Lind, and Lumley paid the £2,500 damages awarded to Bunn by the court in February 1848. Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera, 208–9.

44 Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera, 163, and Bunn, The Case of Bunn Versus Lind, 25.

45 The Lewin Letters: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of an English Family, 1756–1884, ed. Thomas Herbert Lewin, 2 vols. (London, 1909), ii, 40.

46 Grote commented on the contract as follows: ‘The terms were to be fr. 120,000 or £4800 from 14 April to 20 Aug. A house to be provided at Manager’s expence [sic], also a carriage & pair, and farther, a sum of £800 if Jenny chose to go and pass once month in Italy, prior to début at Opera; and liberty to cancel engagement if, after her first appearance on the boards, she felt inclined to abandon farther performance. The whole tenor of the engagement is generous and indulgent in the extreme towards Madlle Lind. I imagine that she never could have had any thing at all equal in point of pecuniary emolument offered to her, up to this period.’ Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 34.

47 Henry Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2 vols. (London, 1862), i, 301–2.

48 James Davison takes a cynical view of this situation: ‘Mr. Lumley at the end of his season for 1846, deserted by the best of his company, appeared in somewhat doleful plight. He was, however, a man of daring and resource and saved himself from extinction by a grand coup – the engagement of Jenny Lind, notwithstanding her contract with another manager.’ James William Davison, Music During the Victorian Era, from Mendelssohn to Wagner (London, 1912), 84. See also Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 259–60.

49 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 38.

50 Ibid., 41–2; date from Louise Johansson’s diary cited in George Biddlecombe, ‘Secret Letters and a Missing Memorandum: New Light on the Personal Relationship between Felix Mendelssohn and Jenny Lind’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 138 (2013), 47–83 (p. 60).

51 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 44. Sir Charles Lemon, Second Baronet of Carclew (1784–1868) was a Whig MP. James Davison reported that ‘the one shout that burst spontaneously from three thousand throats made the roof of the edifice vibrate and tremble. It was a multitude of insensate madmen, in a sea of hats and handkerchiefs.’ Musical World, 8 May 1847.

52 Verdi had been commissioned to write an opera for Lind to replace one that Lumley had hoped Mendelssohn would compose with a title role for Lind and for which the libretto of Shakespeare’s The Tempest had been suggested. Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 287–9.

53 Frederick Lablache was the son of Luigi. Gardoni (1821–82) sang opposite Lind in 1847 and 1848.

54 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 52.

55 They had met at the home of Manuel Marliani, the Spanish consul in Paris, and his wife, and after this introduction Grote visited him in his own apartment in the place d’Orléans to hear him play, since the Marlianis’ piano was a little out of tune. ‘I remember that his manner of playing seemed to me something bordering on the supernatural or unearthly. Madame Georges Sand was present, & encouraged Chopin by her admiring exclamations at intervals.’ Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 60.

56 Chopin thought the Swedish folk songs ‘as distinctive in character as our things. We have something Slavonic, they something Scandinavian, which are totally different; and yet we are nearer to each other than the Italian to the Spaniard.’ Chopin’s Letters, ed. Henryk Opienski and E. L. Voynich (New York, 1931), 355, 372.

57 Chopin reports: ‘But that she never sings anywhere except in the opera, not even at great functions, she would have sung for me, so Mrs. Grote said. But I had never dreamed of asking her to do so, although she is a kind girl and we are on excellent terms.’ Ibid., 373.

58 Chopin writes: ‘Miss Lind came to my concert! ! ! which meant a lot for the fools; she cannot show herself anywhere without people turning their opera glasses on her.’ Ibid.

59 The house, at 12 Savile Row, is still in existence and bears a plaque to indicate that George Grote died there. The other instrumentalists hired were presumably a violinist and a cellist, as they played ‘the grand trio of Beethoven in E-flat (the one in common time)’. Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 57.

60 ‘Rusticus’, ‘The Lind Fever’, The Spectator, 22 July 1847, 12.

61 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 58.

62 Once, Lind refused to attend an event (a fête champêtre that Lumley had arranged at his villa) unless Grote accompanied her, and Grote cut short a visit to the Isle of Wight for this reason. Ibid., 50.

63 Shortly after Lind’s arrival in England, Grote hosted a dinner party to ‘afford her an introduction to English society’. Among those present, Grote mentions the Marquis of Lansdowne, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice (1780–1863), an influential Whig MP; Charles Buller (1806–48), also an MP who shared the Grotes’ views on reform; and Charles Greville (1784–1856), a clerk of the Privy Council whose memoirs elucidate George Grote’s political career. Charles C. F. Greville, The Greville Memoirs (Second Part): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 (London, 1885). At this party, it was hoped that Lind would sing after dinner, but instead she only played ‘some trifling airs’ on the piano. Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 44.

64 Ibid., 46.

65 Kemble, Records of Later Life, 218.

66 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 51.

67 Ibid., 54.

68 Ibid., 61.

69 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 52.

70 Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera, 227.

71 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 65.

72 Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 376–92.

73 Simpson, Many Memories of Many People, 90, and Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 390–2. Mary Simpson was Nassau Senior’s daughter.

74 Simpson, Many Memories of Many People, 88–9.

75 Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote, 192.

76 On stage mothers, see Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 120–35.

77 Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 91, and Kemble, Records of Later Life, 218. Holland and Rockstro observe that Grote ‘evidently threw herself in, heart and soul, with her young friend’s fortunes’. Jenny Lind the Artist, 368.

78 Grote, ‘Memoir of the Life of Jenny Lind’, 56.

79 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 53–4.

80 Ibid., 31.

81 The references to Grote as ‘grotesque’ occur in Kemble, Records of Later Life, 221; Chopin’s Letters, ed. Opienski and Voynich, 372; and Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences: 1819–1899 (Boston, MA, and New York, 1899), 93. For the remark that ‘grotesque’ was a nineteenth-century term for ‘lesbian’, see Molly Engelhardt, ‘Marie Taglioni, Ballerina Extraordinaire: In the Company of Women’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 6/3 (2010), <http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue63/New%20PDFs/NCGS%20Journal%20Issue%206.3%20-%20Marie%20Taglioni,%20Ballerina%20Extraordinaire%20-%20Molly%20Engelhardt.pdf>, note 38.

82 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 2–5. The episode is also commented on in Eastlake, Mrs. Grote, 84–8, and in Kemble, Records of Later Life, 211.

83 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 324.

84 Ibid., 288.

85 Ibid., 50.

86 Indeed, why Lind’s letters to Grote are lost is a tantalizing unanswered question. They may have been too few and perfunctory for Grote to think them worthy of preserving, or she may have destroyed them in her irritation with Lind’s retirement from the stage, which is evident from her and her sister’s correspondence of the early 1850s. Indeed, Grote complains to her sister in a letter of December 1851 that Lind’s correspondence has just about dried up. Ibid., 110.

87 ‘Bishop Stanley brought to her the watchful care of a father; Mrs. Stanley gave to her a motherly devotion, to which she could entrust her tenderest confidences. And, then, there was Mary Stanley, the daughter, her close friend, for years, full of character and interest; and there was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the son, whose enthusiasm for her was the spring of an enduring intimacy, which lasted until his death, in the Deanery at Westminster, in 1881.’ Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 369–70. The Stanleys, the Grotes and the Seniors belonged to the same circle, and Mary Simpson explained that ‘the Stanleys and ourselves had a common subject of interest in Jenny Lind, whose principal friends in England were the Grotes, Whatelys, and Stanleys’. Simpson, Many Memories of Many People, 282. The Whatelys were the family of the archbishop of Dublin.

88 On Holland and Rockstro’s role in establishing Lind’s legacy as the ideal female Victorian artist (a concept that included ‘intense religiosity’), see Biddlecombe, ‘The Construction of a Cultural Icon’, 55.

89 Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 322.

90 The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 61–2.

91 Holland and Rockstro, Jenny Lind the Artist, 330.

92 In September 1849, she reported to her sister that Lind ‘writes to me somewhat stiffly, and not as of old, and has I suspect received a somewhat bitter lesson, viz.: that in England one cannot play these tricks without paying the price of one’s folly’. The Lewin Letters, ed. Lewin, ii, 66. In June 1850, she wrote: ‘I hate her being farmed by that showman Barnum.’ Ibid., 70.

93 Ibid., 79–80.

94 Ibid., 68.

95 Ibid., 110.

96 Ibid., 161.