On 17 April 1847, Jenny Lind arrived in London to sing the season at Her Majesty's Theatre. Her steamer landed at Blackwall, and she and her companion Louise Johansson took a hackney coach to the London residence of Harriet Grote (1792–1878) in Eccleston Street, facing Belgrave Square. She had arranged to stay there until she could find a suitable house to rent, and was welcomed by Grote as well as by Mendelssohn, who was in London to conduct Elijah at Exeter Hall for the Sacred Harmonic Society, among other engagements. The composer had come to visit Grote unexpectedly that morning, and was a good friend of Lind's, having met her in 1844 when she sang at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig.Footnote 1 Grote took Lind to her box at Her Majesty's Theatre that evening, where (the Morning Post reported) ‘the heads of the spectators were kept as constantly turned towards her as those of pious Mussulmans towards Mecca at dawn of day’.Footnote 2
On 18 April, Grote arranged a dinner party to allow Lind to become better acquainted, socially and musically, with her new colleagues at Her Majesty's. Grote's description of the music-making that followed dinner, as noted down in her later memoir of Lind, provides a convenient point of entry into the present discussion.
A day or two after her arrival, we had a small party at dinner, including Signor Lablache, Mr Ed. Lewin, Mr Lumley, and Mendelssohn, who (the latter) put off an engagement at Birmingham on purpose to join us.Footnote 3 In the evening, Mendelssohn went to the Piano Forte, whence, after a few minutes of delightful rambling on the keys, he called out to Jenny (in German), begging she would come and sing one of his Songs (‘Auf flügeln des gesanges’ [sic]). Jenny cheerfully prepared to comply, but strange to say her voice trembled, and her emotion was so strong, that she was obliged to give it up! It was (as she afterwards explained to me) the presence of Lablache which made her so nervous, nor can one be surprised at it. Mendelssohn endeavoured, by the gentlest encouragements, to calm her nervousness, but she could not muster her courage. Lablache therefore, by way of breaking the ice, sat down himself at the Piano, and sang, with inimitable spirit and finish, some Neapolitan Songs, which amused and delighted the whole company. Then Mendelssohn played again, and at length, Jenny gathering courage as the Evening wore on, went and sat down to the Piano herself, and struck up the Swedish air of the ‘Invitation to dance’. When she ceased singing, Lablache manifested the liveliest pleasure, and complimented Jenny with unfeigned warmth. Then Mendelssohn played again, and Jenny sang to his accompaniment, until it was time to separate. So passed one of the most interesting evenings I ever took a share in.Footnote 4
In this vignette, elaborately fictionalized as it obviously is, we observe Grote providing what one might call a support system for Lind, creating a comfortable setting to facilitate entry into the professional environment. Moreover, we can observe the author's self-portrait as salon hostess and arts patroness, displaying much-prized intimacy with musicians. There are aspects here of the protagonists that are otherwise irretrievable, as Grote herself must have sensed. In this spirit, the present account of Grote's patronage of Lind during the latter's visits to London in 1847, 1848 and 1849 sets out to highlight those dimensions of patronage about which the archive is seldom explicit. These aspects are, perhaps unsurprisingly, of a more private nature than conventional concepts of patronage, and indeed of professional musicianship, seem to denote. The story of the relationship between Grote and Lind, then, may offer a potentially fruitful perspective on the interdependence of public and private dimensions of mid-nineteenth-century music culture, as well as on individual patronage.
Formulated in this way, the contribution this article seeks to make intersects a handful of focus areas within the study of Victorian music practice, including the relationship between public and private spheres of music-making, which is itself connected to renewed interest both in domestic music practice and the role of women and in patronage practices (especially individual patronage as a component of elite music culture). Furthermore, aspects of nineteenth-century opera singers’ daily lives, such as this article seeks to explore, constitutes a particular interest for the emergent field of prima donna studies, within which Lind is a prominent subject on account of her exceptional celebrity.
Christina Bashford's work on John Ella has teased out some of the connections and tensions between the private and public realms.Footnote 5 Echoing William Weber, who argued that public and private music activities are better conceived as occurring on a continuum in this period than as mutually exclusive spheres, Bashford holds that a ‘symbiotic relationship’ existed between them, with elite patronage of musicians often occurring through private-sphere activities such as teaching, music for dinner parties and private concerts.Footnote 6 Her careful ethnography of elite music culture has challenged widespread notions (both in the Victorian era and in present-day scholarship of the period) that ‘the British nobility lacked musical sensibilities and sophistication’ and that its culture was ‘hopelessly bound up with pleasure and anti-intellectualism’ by showing how the consumption of and participation in ‘serious’ music was an important and meaningful leisure activity for both male and female elites.Footnote 7 In the field of opera studies, Jennifer Hall-Witt, influenced by the work of Peter Mandler, has drawn attention to the ways in which Victorian elites were seeking, in response to the drive for political reform, to portray themselves as exemplars of personal virtue and good taste, in contrast with Georgian notions of aristocratic exclusivism and decadence.Footnote 8 This effort extended to a new image for the patronage of individual opera singers, which shed its associations of noblemen sponsoring prima donnas in return for sexual favours and came to be seen as part of the social responsibility of the elite who possess the means to contribute to the public good.
Generally, music patronage remains a comparatively under-researched domain in the field of Victorian studies. Deborah Rohr has suggested a differentiated typology of patronage intended to challenge the 1980s stereotype that during the nineteenth century ‘individual patronage waned and was replaced by more anonymous and collective market forces’;Footnote 9 but this typology cannot accommodate the affective dimension the present article seeks to explore, since its implicit definition of patronage is the financial sponsorship of arts. Linda Whitesitt's plea (as early as 1991) for a more holistic definition of patronage, which would allow for a wider spectrum of women's activities in support of music (including, pertinently for the present article, ‘the fashioning of nurturing environments for musical culture’), has not resulted in significant changes to mainstream scholarly conceptions of patronage.Footnote 10 While the theme of (most often aristocratic) women's individual patronage of prima donnas during the nineteenth century has been touched on by Susan Rutherford, her contribution focuses on gifts of money, concert dresses, jewellery and introductions to other salon hostesses, singers or people with influence in cultural circles. Her description of the role of the (mostly male) protettori in this era (‘ranging from sexual partnership, management of business and financial affairs, and social and professional patronage’) applies her implicit patronage-as-funding paradigm less rigidly, though, and is a more productive starting-point for efforts at more nuanced explorations of patronage activities such as the present enquiry.Footnote 11
Biographical studies of Lind had already proliferated during her operatic career and her concert tour of the USA in 1850–2,Footnote 12 and she remained a popular subject for twentieth-century authors.Footnote 13 Perhaps the most extensive biographical project to date was initiated by her husband, Otto Goldschmidt, after her death; it was completed in 1891 by Henry S. Holland and William S. Rockstro (the latter a family friend who had studied in Germany under Mendelssohn).Footnote 14 In the last two decades, scholarship on Lind has explored the cultural meanings of her celebrity, and has highlighted two themes in particular: on the one hand, that her persona as portrayed in the press was informed by ideals of bourgeois femininity and respectable morality, associated with philanthropy and Protestantism;Footnote 15 on the other, that she was regarded as the embodiment of her Swedish national culture and Germano-Nordic ethnicity (the latter image, especially in conjunction with ideals of moral purity in the demure domestic female, militated against the apparent cosmopolitanism of her profession, which was disapproved of in increasingly nationalist cultures).Footnote 16 No scholarly work on Lind to date has considered extensively Harriet Grote's role during her tenure at Her Majesty's Theatre.
Nineteenth-century and present-day writers on the cultural life of London are agreed that Grote was an exceptional woman, in the sense both that she was remarkably talented and accomplished, intellectually and musically, and that her personality was highly and perhaps purposefully unconventional. Bashford calls Grote a ‘celebrated intellectual force in London society’ and observes that, because she inhabited the public sphere more than most other women of her day, there is more evidence of her intellectual life than is the norm.Footnote 17 Fanny Kemble, the daughter of the actor Charles Kemble, calls her ‘one of the cleverest and most eccentric women in the London society of my time’.Footnote 18 Grote's friend Elizabeth (Lady) Eastlake tactfully states that she ‘called a spade a spade, thereby not rarely ruffling the small decorums of some minds more tenacious of the letter than of the spirit’.Footnote 19 Kemble's description of her appearance and dress conveys a combination of these impressions:
Mrs. Grote's appearance was extremely singular; ‘striking’ is, I think, the most appropriate word for it. She was very tall, square-built, and high-shouldered; her hands and arms, feet and legs (the latter she was by no means averse to displaying) were uncommonly handsome and well made. Her face was rather that of a clever man than a woman […]. Her taste in dress was, as might have been expected, slightly eccentric, but, for a person with so great a perception of harmony of sound, her passion for discordant colors was singular. The first time I ever saw her she was dressed in a bright brimstone-colored silk gown, made so short as to show her feet and ankles, having on her head a white satin hat, with a forest of white feathers; and I remember her standing, with her feet wide apart and her arms akimbo, in this costume before me, and challenging me upon some political question, by which, and her appearance, I was much astonished and a little frightened.Footnote 20
Grote's life is also exceptionally well recorded in perceptive and at times strikingly self-reflective journals, correspondence and memoirs. She was married to George Grote (1794–1871), a successful banker, a well-known historian of Greece and a radical politician who served in the British Parliament from 1832 to 1841. She was at least as involved in the political scene as he was, and her forceful personality and more radical stance often attracted criticism. The writer and cleric Sydney Smith (1771–1845) used to say that he was going to see ‘the two Mr. Grotes’, and another anonymous contemporary observer described her as ‘more of a man, but not a better man than her husband’.Footnote 21 Kemble reports that when George Grote was an MP, ‘his speeches, which were as remarkable for their sound sense and enlightened liberality as for their clear and forcible style, were not unfrequently attributed to his wife’.Footnote 22 Eastlake, in her memoir of Harriet Grote's life, carefully tries to mediate such criticisms, writing that Harriet regarded George as her ‘master’ and commending her good management of her household. She concludes: ‘Had Mr. Grote married the most ignorant simpleton in the world, his wardrobe could not have been kept in better order.’Footnote 23
Whereas the Grote money came from banking, Harriet's father Thomas Lewin had made ‘a modest fortune’ as an employee of the East India Company.Footnote 24 Harriet and George Grote were thus, in Hall-Witt's description, members of the ‘elite of wealth who were assimilating into the aristocracy’.Footnote 25 Eastlake was careful to note that ‘she belonged to the choicest portion of the English social scale – the educated and wealthy gentry class’; and, even more pointedly, that ‘Mrs. Grote was an aristocrat in mind and also in lineage, especially on her mother's side, and she prided herself on coming of a good stock, on the principle that “noblesse oblige”’.Footnote 26 Both Grote and her husband were well educated in music; during the first decade of their marriage, they played ‘duets on two violoncellos, as well as pianoforte duets’.Footnote 27 Harriet's mastery of the cello is remarkable given that the instrument was not considered appropriate for women at this time – she even held the instrument between her knees rather than side-saddle, the latter practice remaining into the 1870s and beyond.Footnote 28 She continued to play the cello and the piano domestically throughout her life, sometimes to guests who were professional musicians. Grote prided herself on developing an interest in Beethoven's music before it was widely admired in England,Footnote 29 and contemporary references to her playing include music by Bach, Beethoven, Corelli, Clementi and Mendelssohn (on the piano),Footnote 30 and there is also a wonderfully vivid account in Kemble's memoirs of her playing an extract from Gluck's Iphigenia in Tauris on the cello.Footnote 31 After George Grote left Parliament in 1841, Harriet applied herself increasingly to supporting musicians as well as other artists, these endeavours becoming an aspect of her identity that was frequently remarked upon.Footnote 32 These efforts included active support of Benjamin Lumley and Her Majesty's Theatre. Both Grote and Eastlake recruited for him informally, when most opera-recruiters were men. So extensive was Grote's involvement with the opera that she contributed large sections to Lumley's memoir of Her Majesty's Theatre.Footnote 33 Eastlake devotes considerable space in her memoir of Grote to descriptions of patronage,Footnote 34 and Kemble writes that
Her love of music, and courteous reception of all foreign artists, caused her to be generally sought by eminent professors coming to England; and Liszt, Madame Viardot, Dessauer, Thalberg, Mademoiselle Lind, and Mendelssohn were among the celebrated musicians one frequently met at her house. With the two latter she was very intimate.Footnote 35
While Grote extended patronage to male and female artists alike, she was especially committed to supporting other women. She played an important role in founding the Society of Female Artists in 1856 and was a member of the new National Society for Women's Suffrage (1867).
Grote's patronage of Lind started through Grote's sister Frances von Koch (née Lewin), who lived in Sweden and became acquainted with Lind at the beginning of her career, often inviting her to their country house and introducing her into ‘the society of well-born ladies and gentlemen’.Footnote 36 Frances had also urged Harriet to try to meet Lind if she could.Footnote 37 When Harriet Grote was visiting Frankfurt in September 1845, Lind arranged tickets for her to hear her as Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula; Grote was much impressed, sending a rave review to The Spectator from Koblenz. The piece shows what Grote appreciated in Lind's vocal quality and technique, as well as in her musical and dramatic intelligence:
And now shall I tell you my opinion of Jenny Lind's talents? To a delicious fresh soprano voice, of equal quality and wide range, naturally delivered from the chest, she adds a knowledge of her art such as reveals the most assiduous culture under the best instruction. A mistress of ornamental embellishment, she appears to possess so nice a discrimination in the use of it as to adapt her manner to the occasion in a way which satisfies the hearer that she has both intelligence and feeling. She plays with the scale like a flutist, where brilliant execution is fitting and proper; whilst, if tenderness or sad emotion is to be rendered, a touching simplicity of style carries home to the hearts of her auditory the conviction that they are listening to a child of genius. Having said thus much, I leave it to ‘stop-watch critics’ to dilate upon the details of Jenny Lind's performance; only adding, that she has achieved that very rare accomplishment: a perfect shake, – a shake which (although I deprecate comparisons) may fairly be said to excel that of any singer now to be heard in England.Footnote 38
The essay concludes with the information that Lind was to sing at Berlin during the winter of 1845 and at Vienna in the spring of 1846, ‘so that it is not likely that the fair songstress will be subjected to the dread-ordeal of the stall-holders at Her Majesty's Theatre in London next season, even should its enterprising manager seek to enrol her among his bright constellation’. But there is nevertheless evidence that Grote was actively recruiting Lind to perform at Her Majesty's Theatre. Grote's recruitment of Lind was no simple matter, as Lind had already signed a contract in January 1845 with Alfred Bunn to sing The Camp of Silesia and La sonnambula in English at Drury Lane during the 1846 season.Footnote 39 In the words of Lumley's memoir, she ‘repented her imprudence’ when she learnt ‘the secondary position of Mr. Bunn's theatre’.Footnote 40 One can only speculate whether Lind would have kept her contract with Bunn were it not for Grote's intervention, but she was already trying to extricate herself from it in February 1845.Footnote 41 Convinced that performing in London was a logical next step for Lind and, moreover, that Her Majesty's Theatre was ‘the more fitting place for Jenny to appear in on first coming to London’, Grote offered to negotiate with Bunn for a release from his contract so that Lind might be free to enter into a contract with Lumley.Footnote 42 Although at first it seemed that Grote would succeed in obtaining relatively lenient terms of release, these negotiations turned into a convoluted process of more than three years, partly (from Grote's perspective) because of Lind's interference.Footnote 43 Because Bunn threatened Lind with lawsuits and media campaigns against her if she appeared at the rival theatre, she would not consider a contract with Lumley.Footnote 44 A letter from Grote to her sister in June 1846 indicates that she had given up on the project: ‘I have striven to arrange her affairs so as to get her to London, but after making all smooth she won't have anything to do with England, which I most sincerely regret, as her renown will be incomplete without the stamp of English admiration.’Footnote 45
Lind signed a contract with Lumley in October 1846, which she subsequently refused to honour.Footnote 46 While this reluctance may again have stemmed from intimidation by Bunn, Henry Chorley's more sceptical interpretation was that she (or, in fact, Lumley) was deliberately creating a sensation around her first appearance at Her Majesty's.Footnote 47 For Lumley, succeeding in his venture to attract Lind was a last hope of saving his theatre, as his musical director Michael Costa had resigned and taken most of the cast with him to Covent Garden after a quarrel with Lumley.Footnote 48 Acting on Grote's advice, Lumley first paid for Grote's brother Edward Lewin, by then well known to Lind through the von Kochs, to follow Lind to Vienna to persuade her to fulfil her contract with Her Majesty's, and when this proved unsuccessful, he travelled there himself and at last convinced her.Footnote 49 She finally arrived in England on 17 April, three days after she was supposed to have started rehearsing at Her Majesty's according to her contract. Grote reports that another round of persuasion from her and Lewin was necessary before Lind was able to overcome her sudden ‘insurmountable dread of appearing before an English audience’, which had caused her once again to consider breaking her contract with Lumley, and could begin rehearsals on 26 April.Footnote 50 Grote's and Lumley's relief when Lind gave her début to rave reviews on 4 May 1847 may be imagined. That evening, Grote took her usual box at the opera, accompanied by Sir Charles Lemon and Fanny Butler (née Kemble), who, after Lind's first aria had been attended to in unusual silence then applauded vigorously, told Grote ‘your protégée is safe’. George Grote and Mendelssohn sat in the stalls to be closer to the stage.Footnote 51 During the 1847 season at Her Majesty's Theatre (May–July), Lind appeared in Robert le diable, La sonnambula, La figlia del reggimento, Norma and Le nozze di Figaro (as Susanna) to great critical acclaim; she also appeared in I masnadieri, which was not popular and received only three performances.Footnote 52 The following season, she returned to Her Majesty's, repeating La sonnambula and La figlia del reggimento and adding Lucia di Lammermoor, I puritani, L'elisir d'amore and Le nozze di Figaro, as well as an adaptation of Robert le diable.
The events surrounding Lind's initial contract with Her Majesty's Theatre were not to be the last in which Grote and her brother would promote Lind's career. In the summer of 1847, after the operatic season had closed, Lind undertook a concert tour of the English provinces, accompanied by colleagues from Her Majesty's – Frederick Lablache and his wife Fanny (also a singer), Italo Gardoni and an orchestra conducted by Michael Balfe.Footnote 53 The tour was managed by Lewin, who accompanied her and ‘direct[ed] her relations with the concert speculators’. Grote explains (somewhat defensively, since the media had reported that Lind and Lewin were romantically involved) that Lewin was the ideal person to fulfil this role as he spoke Swedish (Lind could speak little English at this time, and her attendant spoke only Swedish) and French, which seems to have been the medium for the musicians’ communication.Footnote 54 Grote joined the party at Bath and travelled with them to their performances at Clifton and Exeter, where George Grote met them and escorted them to London. Harriet's approving note in her memoir – that Lind had made ‘a considerable sum of money’ with her engagement at Her Majesty's Theatre and her provincial tour in 1847 – may be interpreted as evidence of pride in her actions for Lind's professional and financial benefit.
Although Grote's support of Lind's career was a consequence of her own interest in music, she may have sought to gain upward social mobility through voluntary service to a public cultural institution such as Her Majesty's Theatre, representing herself as a member of the reformed elite even as she supported political radicalism. Grote offered similar patronage to other foreign musicians, although not on the scale of her involvement with Lind. Two instances of private music events that presented opportunities for such patronage and supported public music-making in a concrete manner are well recorded. One is Chopin's and Lind's informal music-making after dinner, arranged by Grote presumably to suggest that Lind should perform with Chopin for his benefit. The other is a more formally organized soirée hosted by Grote with paid musicians.
Chopin had come to London in 1848 after the Paris revolutions, and because he had met Grote before in Paris, he hoped that she could introduce him to her musical circles in order for him to find pupils to teach.Footnote 55 Grote seems to have made an effort to support Chopin by bringing him into contact with Lind; one evening during that season, she invited only Chopin and Lind to dinner, and afterwards they ‘did not leave the piano from 9 till 1 in the night’, Lind singing Swedish folk songs to Chopin.Footnote 56 While Chopin remembers a discussion between himself and Grote about the possibility of Lind appearing at his benefit concert, this plan did not materialize.Footnote 57 However, Lind attended one of Chopin's public concerts that season, and her presence probably increased attendance.Footnote 58
During the 1848 opera season, Grote hired Sigismond Thalberg and two or three other instrumentalists for a concert at her London house at which Lind had agreed to perform.Footnote 59 As Grote put it, Lind ‘actually rehearsed with Thalberg’ for the purpose, although in the end she did not turn up, causing some anxiety for Grote as to the balance of the programme. These rehearsals, though, seem to have culminated in Lind's performance at a benefit concert for Thalberg in July of that year, singing the Swedish folk songs and operatic extracts that constituted her usual repertoire for private music events.Footnote 60 The concert led to further engagements for the musicians that Grote had employed: one of the guests asked her to organize a similar concert for her at her house, with the same performers. Chopin was present at this latter event, but was not among the paid performers. However, Grote recalls that ‘when there remained only half a dozen guests, or so, & the great Thalberg had departed, Chopin crept up to the Pianoforte and, seating himself at the keyboard, began playing, in his peculiar style, a whole chain of fanciful, piquant compositions, with a precision and rapidity unequalled for quality of touch & accent’.Footnote 61
A second significant aspect of Grote's support of Lind in London was chaperonage to social events – a demanding schedule, since many wished to be acquainted with the celebrity. Grote explains that she had to persuade Lind of the importance of attending high-society events, and how she accompanied her to put her at ease.Footnote 62 On other occasions, she would host parties at her own home in order to introduce Lind to influential people.Footnote 63 Perhaps Grote felt that she was continuing the task her sister had begun in Sweden, of subtly aiding Lind's intercourse with a class into which she was not born; of one particularly grand occasion, she writes approvingly that Lind ‘looked as much the lady as anyone present’.Footnote 64 At a time when the English aristocracy was only slowly shedding an attitude of disdain towards musicians, perhaps Grote, a wealthy woman who was not aristocratic herself, was uniquely able to assist Lind. In this regard, it is important to note that Lind was invited to the high-society events described here as a guest, rather than as a performer, and indeed the astonishment that Grote expresses in her memoir at Lind's nonchalance about such invitations registers the exception to the norm they represent. While Grote's overriding motivation seems to have been an admiration for Lind's talent and personal qualities, her patronage contributed significantly to her own status, as Grote came to be perceived as Lind's gatekeeper: according to Kemble, ‘Mrs. Grote engrossed Mademoiselle Jenny Lind in so curious a manner that, socially, the accomplished singer could hardly be approached but through her.’Footnote 65
Grote's role as Lind's chaperone was not confined to escorting her to public events, but encompassed broader aspects of the singer's reputation. This is especially evident in Grote's correspondence about her brother Edward's involvement with Lind at the time of Lind's 1847 provincial tour. In October 1847, Grote wrote to her sister Frances of her discomfort with the situation:
You will expect that I should mention Edward Lewin, but to tell the truth we are far from being satisfied with his behaviour from first to last in regard to Jenny Lind, and we have been a good deal embarrassed how to act in reference to the intimacy which has subsisted between them. However, up to this time I have said nothing to either party.Footnote 66
In April 1848 she was still worried, writing again to her sister that ‘Edward will become alienated from me unless I sanction his perpetual presence, which I cannot do’,Footnote 67 and a subsequent letter to Frances in July 1848 suggests just such a breakdown in the relationship between Grote and Lewin. In the same letter, Grote reports a conversation with Lind on the subject of her relationship with Lewin:
I have had a clearing up with Jenny on this subject, and am satisfied she was not to blame; but her reputation was certainly in great peril and was freely handled in the North, and in Scotland, through his disregard of all propriety in his public attentions to her during the autumn ‘tournée’ particularly.Footnote 68
Her feeling of responsibility for her brother's actions and their implications for Lind's reputation is again evident from her long discussion (in her memoir) of Lewin's role in the 1847 tour, where she frets that Lewin's relation to Grote ‘induced [Lind] to rely (perhaps too firmly) on the shield which my tolerance of Edward's close attentions might be supposed to throw over her maidenly reputation’.Footnote 69
When Lind became romantically involved with another member of Grote's family at the end of 1848, Grote's involvement may be interpreted as concern for the singer's professional as well as personal welfare; as in her role as ‘agent’, she enlisted friends and family to help. In the summer of 1848, Lind had undertaken another post-opera-season tour, this time organized by Lumley.Footnote 70 Lind and Grote stayed in Newcastle with Joseph Grote, George's brother, and there met Claudius Harris, who was the brother of Joseph's wife. Harris became infatuated with Lind and followed her around for the rest of her tour; they became engaged in January 1849, Lind having broken her engagement to Julius Günther (a tenor with whom she had sung in Stockholm and her fiancé since 1845) in October 1848. In April 1849, Grote wrote to her sister that while Harris ‘got into rapport with Jenny through us last Autumn’, Grote herself ‘had no hand in making the match’, and that Harris had ‘won Jenny by his intense passion for her, and also by his virtuous character tending toward the pious, which falls in with her present leanings’.Footnote 71 Harris's Evangelical faith was indeed a point of common interest between them, and Lind's religious leanings may have contributed to her decision to leave the stage, which had been confirmed by the time she met her fiancé.Footnote 72 Supporting Lind at the time of her engagement, Grote had asked her friend Nassau Senior (1790–1864), an economist who was also qualified as a lawyer, to draw up the marriage contract, which proved difficult because Harris, out of religious objections to the theatre, wished Lind to commit never to act on stage again. He also objected when Senior wanted to stipulate that Lind should maintain control over her own earnings, deeming this ‘unscriptural’.Footnote 73 Meanwhile, Lind had promised Lumley a final series of operas to be given in concert version, rather than staged, at Her Majesty's Theatre. The first of these, Il flauto magico (Mozart's Die Zauberflöte), was a failure, and Lind agreed to give six final staged opera performances after Grote, Lumley and Senior pleaded with her (the subtext seems to have been that her retirement would ruin the opera house financially).Footnote 74 These performances escalated the conflict over the marriage contract, and finally the parties broke off their engagement in May 1849. Lind immediately left for Paris, where she joined Grote and Senior for a holiday.
In important respects, Grote's assistance to Lind in the roles of ‘agent’ and chaperone should be interpreted in the context of a profound personal commitment to and investment in the singer that was intimate and domestic in nature, and found expression partly in the effort to create a home-like environment for Lind in England. Lind was a frequent guest at the Grotes’ London residence as well as at their country home at Burnham Beeches, and the Grotes accompanied Lind for portions of both of her post-opera-season British tours. Certainly, a degree of familiarity must have existed between them when Lind fled to Grote in Paris in her distress over her broken engagement, sharing her lodgings there for a number of weeks.Footnote 75 Contemporaneous commentators are agreed that the extent of Grote's involvement with Lind was remarkable. Eastlake described it as ‘maternal care’, and there are indeed important respects (for example, her concern over Lind's reputation during her 1847 provincial tour) in which Grote acted like a ‘stage mother’ to Lind.Footnote 76 In contrast with Eastlake's benign characterization of Grote as a mother-figure, Kemble wrote acerbically that ‘Grote became absorbed by a passionate enthusiasm for Mademoiselle Jenny Lind, of whom she was an idolatrous worshipper’.Footnote 77 Grote herself remembers in her memoir that Lind ‘won upon my affection to so high a degree that my time was principally taken up with “dancing attendance” upon her, and with seeking to contribute to her happiness & enjoyment by every means in my power’.Footnote 78 That the relationship was also difficult and complicated is evident from Grote's frank correspondence with her sister. In April 1848, she wrote:
I thank you very cordially for […] the indulgence you show to my fond partiality for [Lind], which I own is great, but which nevertheless does not prevent me from regarding my ‘liaison’ with her as fraught with those liabilities to bitter regrets and disappointments which I fear must ever attend similar ties. Children of fire and children of every-day life are sure to clash at some period or another, though I am myself a born genius and ought to have been on the stage, where I should have cut a figure and preserved my health; still my destiny having engendered a social, conventional form of existence, of course I feel fettered by it, and my attachment to Jenny is by so much complicated, and difficult to manage. The intimacy between her and brother Edward for instance is a Gordian Knot, the untying of which must cut my fingers.Footnote 79
In the context of this document, it is difficult to unpack what Grote gave and stood to gain from her highly involved support of Lind. The letter seems to indicate that Grote realized she was prone to overinvesting energies in Lind's career out of dissatisfaction with her own and a consequent vicarious desire to see Lind succeed professionally on the stage. But how far can we trust Grote's own insight into the motivations of her attachment to Lind? Of course, this role overlaps with the social chaperonage related above, so that the closer the bond seemed between Lind and Grote, the greater the social-status reward for Grote. This interpretation of Grote's patronage activities as stemming in part from her own ambitions may be corroborated by the decline of their friendship when Lind left the stage. It is interesting, too, on this point, to note Frances's assessment of Harriet's character in 1844, that ‘her natural and simple character is more than ever obscured by worldly ambition and a constant attempt to succeed […] by trying to play her part adroitly and be a fashionable, now no longer a political, performer’.Footnote 80
To take another possible line of argument, does it go too far to draw a connection between, on the one hand, the account of her absorbed patronage of Lind and, on the other, contemporary descriptions of her ‘manliness’ and the punning similarity between her name and the word ‘grotesque’ (a nineteenth-century term for lesbian) which occurred to more than one observer?Footnote 81 This possibility of a subtext of unarticulated sexual attraction on Harriet Grote's part might perhaps be contextualized by the documents surrounding the Grotes’ patronage of the danseuse Fanny Elssler in 1839–43: this episode is probably what Grote had in mind when she described the ‘bitter regrets and disappointments which I fear must ever attend similar ties’. The Grotes took charge of Elssler's illegitimate daughter while she toured the United States, and Elssler created a trust fund for the child with George Grote as trustee; but after two and a half years, she removed the child from their care and accused George of embezzling the trust money.Footnote 82 In this case, both Grotes were extraordinarily attached to Elssler. The attraction was physical on George Grote's part, as Harriet admits to her journal in 1875 when she decided to destroy the poetry that he had written to the ballerina.Footnote 83 Five years earlier, she had similarly deleted those parts of her own history of Elssler that had described ‘the romantic sentiment she (Fanny) inspired in me and Mr. Grote’ and ‘the details of our intimate relations with her’.Footnote 84 Even if it is clear that the terms ‘romantic sentiment’ and ‘intimate relations’ had different connotations at the time from those they have in the present day, the painful experience that the episode turned out to be and Harriet's sense of regret over transgressed boundaries (even if George's attraction to Elssler did not result in a physical relationship with her, as Harriet notes with some relief) could yet be read as telling indicators of Harriet's misgivings about her patronage of Lind in 1848. The embarrassing memory of their involvement with Elssler may perhaps explain Harriet's slightly perplexing reassurance to George in 1847 that ‘Jenny's attachment to you is quite as profound as hers to me, though the sex [i.e. gender] draws us more familiarly together’.Footnote 85 Unlike in their previous patronage relationship, she seems to be implying, it is proper that the female protégée should be closer to Harriet than to George.
If it is difficult to determine the nuances of Harriet Grote's affective patronage of Lind, it is no easier to determine Lind's own perceptions of it. In the first place, much less of Lind's correspondence survives, and no correspondence between Lind and Grote has been preserved.Footnote 86 Holland and Rockstro acknowledge Grote's support, but they reserve the role of Lind's English ‘family’ for the Stanleys (the family of the bishop of Norwich), explicitly stating that Lind's religious sympathies caused her to feel more at home with the Stanleys than with the atheist Grotes. They maintain that after the 1847 season and summer tour, during which Lind was dependent on Grote, her primary confidants in England were the Stanleys.Footnote 87 While Holland and Rockstro may have emphasized the Stanleys’ role deliberately because it tied in well with the legacy of Lind's piety which their book was solidifying, the primary sources do signal the sense of a withdrawal of intimacy on Lind's part from the Grotes during 1848.Footnote 88 For her second season in London, Lind brought Isak Berg, her Swedish voice teacher, and his wife and daughter with her to stay as her companions.Footnote 89 In a letter Grote wrote to her sister in July 1848, she complains that ‘Jenny has only been once to Burnham this summer, as she could not bear to leave the Bergs out of politeness’.Footnote 90 On the other hand, Grote seems to have visited Lind quite often: Holland and Rockstro call her ‘a constant visitor’ to the house she had helped Lind to rent during 1847 and 1848.Footnote 91
After the French holiday in 1849, the relationship between Grote and Lind seems to have suffered, perhaps inevitably given Lind's discontinuation of her association with Her Majesty's Theatre and her decision to leave England and the stage. Grote was probably disappointed in Lind's dealings with Lumley in the 1849 season, and she strongly disapproved of her American tour because of the commercialized nature of its impresario P. T. Barnum's initiatives.Footnote 92 She also felt exploited by Lind, writing in July 1851 that ‘Jenny Lind is making a colossal fortune in the United States. I do not expect her back before September. Your few words about her are truth itself – I never shall allow myself to be made use of again.’Footnote 93 Both Grote and her sister seem to have felt suddenly and unfairly slighted by Lind after her retirement from the stage. When Lind was in Stockholm in 1850, Frances indicated this sentiment to Harriet, exasperated in particular by Lind's religious scruples about the stage:
Whatever reason Miss Lind may think she may have to cut me, I am indifferent to it as well as to the circumstance itself, and shall not think of going to her. […] at all events my relish for her singing is damped by the annoyance of the baggage's resolving never to act any more, because the devil is in such work. They say she is a red-hot methodist; perhaps she thinks we are not holy enough for her company.Footnote 94
The next year, Harriet wrote to Frances in much the same tone, their similar choices of the terms ‘baggage’ and ‘hussy’ perhaps indicating a lingering consciousness of social distance between Lind and the Lewin sisters rather than mere indignation:
I suppose the hussy intends coming over to England in the spring; but I am growing comparatively indifferent to her proceedings, as it is natural one should, being so entirely thrown out of all participation in her joys and sorrows, her hopes and intentions. All sentiment is starved out as it were.Footnote 95
However, these sentiments were not permanent. When Lind visited England in 1852 and 1855 and relocated to London permanently in 1858, the two women, and indeed the two families, resumed a cordial relationship. Lind married her accompanist Otto Goldschmidt at the end of her tour of the United States and introduced him to the Grotes during a visit in the summer of 1852; in 1855 Grote reports having spent a week at Ems with Lind while her husband was away in Stockholm.Footnote 96 Grote's unfinished memoir of Lind dates from 1855–6, and her correspondence makes multiple mentions of her seeing either Lind or both the Goldschmidts socially.
My description of the Grote–Lind relationship has shown how Grote's patronage activities reflected an inextricable combination of both public kinds of support (contractual negotiations, social chaperonage) and more private kinds (visits to each other's homes, consolation in emotional distress). Also, the public and private types of support outlined here bear a close connection with public and private music practice as settings for patronage, so that the two modes of music practice are likewise shown to be interdependent for performers and elite music-lovers of this period. The affect-based support described here, I suggest, underpinned a form of patronage that may be understood to be separate from that predicated on financial sponsorship, and an increased awareness of them could help clarify questions about other elite patronage of individual musicians. In this way, the affective may accentuate both the power and the frailty of Victorian patronage.
