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SIX

CHRISTINE NILSSON.

IXTEEN years ago—in the June of 1857-a fair was being held at Ljungby, a small town in the maritime district or laen of Kalmar in Sweden. Ljungby lies at a distance of about two hundred miles to the south of Stockholm and immediately to the north of Carlskrona. A fair there is in many respects very much like a fair anywhere among our English country towns or larger villages. Booths are erected upon some open space in impromptu lanes of canvas and hoarding. Flags flutter, cheap ware, toys, cakes, gilt gingerbread, dolls, trinkets, are displayed in profusion. There is a roar of voices, interrupted or accentuated every now and then with the sound of laughter, the rattle of drums, the chime of some choral song from a drinking-tent, the stentorian voice of a showman vaunting the attractions of his entertainment and announcing that the performance is about to begin. It was in the midst of just such a merry babel as this that, exactly sixteen years ago, in the Swedish burgh already mentioned, a little girl, prettily bedizened, fairhaired, blue-eyed, and rather slender in her proportions, hushed the crowd into silence by stepping to the front, bearing in her left hand a violin and in her right its bow. She was not yet quite fourteen. She was of the very humblest parentage. Her father was a poor labouring man of Wexiö. But the child thus strangely born to him, as though she had been some fairy changeling, soon enough turned from the cygnet to the swan-sooner by far than the Ugly Duckling familiar to us all in the beautiful apologue of Hans Christian Andersen. When other little ones would have begun to prattle, she began singing, though with an artless grace that said just as plainly as the laureate

"I do but sing because I must,

And pipe but as the linnets sing.",

Charming though her features, from her carliest girlhood she could not have insisted with the saucy maid in the ballad,-when

"My face is my fortune, sir,' she said."

For her voice was that, also, quite as much; and her bright intelligence, her rare intellectual gifts, her genius, in a word, far more than her dulcet singing and her beautiful countenance both put together. Here, in effect, was a veritable lusus natura. Here was a pink pearl, a pearl of priceless value and of lustrous splendour, found, as it were, in an oyster-shell in a dust-bin. A nettle by the wayside had blossomed for once an asphodel. Out of a sparrow's nest had flown. a light-winged dryad of the trees," with the song of the nightingale and the plumage of the bird of paradise. The horny-handed labouring-man's daughter at Wexio warbled by instinct-played equally well, according to her fancy, upon wind and stringed instruments. Flute in hand, she needed no hints like those dropped from the lips of Hamlet when offering the recorders to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-"Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with

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your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music." With the perforated tube at her lips, she was from the very outset, as one would say, a born flutist. So, also, it might have been said in her regard, directly her sensitive nature had become accustomed to the familiar handling of the wizard bow of strained horsehair, with which the violinist makes his (or her) weird incantations. She fingered the tightened catgut and waved her imperious wand almost from the first with a subtle mastery over many of the resources of that wondrous art-the supreme and in some respects unapproachable art of the violinist. To the accompaniment of her own playing, moreover, on the strings of the instrument nestled under her chin, she would sing-as she did, in point of fact, upon the memorable June day here referred to in the fair at Ljungby! The nobly-syllabled words and their running accompaniment resembling the duplex effect of Paganini's playing as described by Leigh Hunt where the latter says

"Some twofold strain,

Moving before him in sweet going yoke,

Rode like an Eastern Conqueror round whose state
Some light Morisco leaps with his guitar."

That day in the rustic fair near Kalmar was, in truth, especially memorable for the poor Wexiö peasant's daughter, for among her audience was a Swedish gentleman of great influence, as well as of rare sagacity, the discoverer of this "gem of purest ray serene,' of this flower that but for him might just possibly have been—

"Born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Honour to his name-a name henceforth congealed in the amber of Christine Nilsson's fame, as that of Mr. F: G. Tornérhjelm. As he gazed at the girlish figure, as he watched her graceful movements and listened to her evidently untutored performance, he was filled just simply with amazement. Here, indeed, in the person of this unsophisticated child, of this mere itinerant

musician was one who could—

"From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part

And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." Touched by her voice, her beauty, and her many rare and most exceptional gifts both as a vocalist and as an instrumentalist, he resolved upon rescuing her at once, if possible, from her career as a vagrant performer. To this end he took upon himself the responsibility of seeing to her education. He found, upon inquiry, that the pretty child was literally, as we have said, the offspring of a poor working man of Wexiö, a man in the very humblest circumstances.

Christine Nilsson had been born not far from that inland city of Sweden, at Wederslöf, on Thursday, the 3rd August, 1843. She had evidenced from the first an instinctive love of, or rather passion for, music. As we have said, she had somehow learnt to sing, to play the flute, and to play the violin. Carrying her fiddle with her, child as she was, she was already earning her livelihood by going from fair to fair, by attending one popular out-door entertainment after another. From this perilous life

refined assemblage of English gentlemen and English gentlewomen, it was impersonated by Christine Nilsson with such consummate modesty and delicacy throughout, that while, as a work of art, doing violence in that way to anything like truth to nature, it wielded over every hearer and beholder a very spell of fascination. As a rendering of the part, it followed the lead rather of Madame Bosio than of Madame Piccolomini. It was the victim exclusively, and not the bewitcher as well, who was represented. The fresh and youthful voice, with its wonderful range or compass and its astonishing flexibility, did the rest in rousing the usually impassive audience into an outburst of enthusiam. Everyone present, moreover, recognised in the new comer something at least of the nameless charm of Byron's Zuleika

She

every

"The light of love, the purity of grace

The mind, the music breathing from her face."

carried us with her whithersoever she listed-at
cadence-at every roulade-even in those-
"Short swallow flights of song, that dip

Their wings . . . and skim away!"

she was, now, sixteen years ago, happily extricated, in the midsummer of 1857, by her new benefactor. Mr. Tornérhjelm had her at once placed at school in Halmstadt, on the Kattegat. Thence, later on, he had her removed to the great Swedish capital of Stockholm. And there it was that she came under the instruction of Franz Berwald. Subsequently, with a view more especially to the completion of her musical education, she was sent to Paris, where she was placed in turn under the tuition of Masset and Wurtel. Strictly speaking, before going to the French capital to that end, Christine Nilsson, in the early part of 1860, had made her first appearance on the operatic stage at Stockholm. Her real début, however, in its full value and significance, the occasion upon which she actually stepped to the very front in the glare of the footlights as a great European cantatrice, was later on in the following autumn. This was on the evening of Saturday, the 27th October, 1860, when the new prima donna appeared at the Théâtre Lyrique as Violetta in Verdi's tainted, but exquisite, opera of La Traviata. At the close of every solo the stage was a parterre. When the curtain fell at the end of each act she was recalled by acclamation. The finale was the signal for That first season of hers in London had not far an outburst of enthusiasm rarely awakened among the advanced, when, on Saturday the 15th June, 1867, the ordinarily captious and certainly fastidious Parisians. Violetta of yesterday appeared at Her Majesty's as the The triumph achieved by the débutante was such that, Margaret to Signor Gardoni's Faust in Gounod's capo upon the morrow of it, she was pledged to a three d'opera. When the opening scene revealed her, with years' engagement. Her instant success was more her fair northern face and yellow hair, seated at the than confirmed by her subsequent impersonation of spinning-wheel, it was like seeing revealed to us, under Ophelia to M. Faure's Hamlet in Charles Louis the opaline light of fairyland, the very Gretchen of Ambroise Thomas' masterpiece. The lovelorn and Goethe, the Margaret of Margarets. Lifted up on the distraught heroine of the Danish tragedy as imper- crest of the wave, so to speak, the new prima donna sonated by her took those ordinarily the most phleg- found herself during that very season not only the matic fairly by storm. The diva Nilsson was accepted Queen of the Opera, but here, in Mayfair, in with one acclaim by the Paris opera-goers as an object Belgravia, in Tyburnia-floating down the via lactea of of almost unmeasured admiration. It was not until fashion among the crême de la crême. And it was with the season of 1867 that London was allowed to judge a marvellous grace that she held her own, perfectly as to the merits of the new soprano-this later, and, from the outset, in private society, among the as some said, greater, Swedish Nightingale ! Her haughtiest ladies, by whom she found herself thus coming hither was only delayed until then by reason of suddenly surrounded. Perfectly well do we remember, her engagements. Once heard at Her Majesty's, her upon the morrow of one of these more exclusive victory was as complete as that gained by Julius gatherings, being told by one of the most fastidious Cæsar, at Zela, over Pharnaces. She came, she sang, observers of his generation, that he had taken her in she conquered. For some time previously the popu- to dinner overnight, that there were three Duchesses larity of that great lyrical establishment had been present there at table, but that she-the peasant's declining. It was revived by her upon the instant as daughter-was the greatest lady of them all. An at the stroke of an enchantress. For all that, as it interval of little more than ten years only had elapsed even now seems to us, it was by an error of judgment since, as a vagrant minstrel of thirteen, she had been -not in art, but in taste-that she made her début at singing to the treble of her own violin in the rustic Her Majesty's, as she had done seven years previously throng and clamour of the fair at Ljungby. And yet in the Théâtre Lyrique as the heroine in La Traviata. here, already, was the world at her feet, and that too Violetta is essentially a child of Lutetia. Here, in under an aspect the most alluring and intoxicating. London, she is regarded with the profoundest pity, it is Within that narrow interval of time her powers had in true, but-askance. By an odd announcement on the every respect developed. Her education had been in part of Mr. Mapleson, the opera chosen for her first no way simply professional. The child of illiterate appearance at the great theatre in the Haymarket was parents, she had, with astonishing rapidity, perfected so selected, it was said, "by desire." No wonder an No wonder an her skill as an accomplished linguist. Beyond her intimation so entirely out of place was pointed at upon own native Scandinavian-German, French, English, the instant with a finger of derision. Unwelcome Italian, were at her full command in conversation. though the character naturally was, and is, and, as we When, in the following season, that of 1868, she will hope, always must be in this country among any | appeared for the first time in London as Lucia-through

her bridal dress, which had been contrived under her own supervision by Mr. Worth, the then autocratic Mantalini of the Parisian grandes dames-her exquisite taste in costume was recognised even by one of her most implacable depreciators. According to him, her scales were bad, her shake was uneven, and so forth; but, at the least, he allowed that her taste in this matter was, in one word, superb. This-rememberin regard to one who had been but yesterday "strolling" through the villages of Kalmar in the tinselled and spangled rôle of an itinerant musician. Persiani and Jenny Lind might have surpassed her in vocalization in this particular opera of Donizetti's, but, under no circumstances, could either have ever approached her in her impersonation of the exquisitely beautiful Lucia di Lammermoor. Her triumphs this year, that is in 1868, were achieved on the boards of Drury Lane Theatre, Mr. Mapleson's company having, in the interval between her first and second season, been burnt out of Her Majesty's Opera House in the Haymarket. In some respects, moreover, she was under certain disadvantages at that time in the instance of one or two of the artists with whom she was then associated. Her Margaret, for example, was worthy of a better Faust than was presented by Signor Ferensi. Nevertheless, the success achieved by her during that second season was, in literal truth, something extraordinary. The shattered fortunes of Her Majesty's she very signally helped to renovate. Whenever she sang the house was crowded, in spite of all the attractions of Covent Garden. The effect produced by her was profound. It has since proved lasting. It has throughout been eminently wellmerited. Fortunately for her, happily for her hearers, she had been taught in the best school. Her voice, too, had in itself that sympathetic resonance which, to northern ears, at any rate, is far beyond the softer pathos of the south, her management of it at the same time being, in its intonation, of incomparable purity and accuracy.

During the summer of 1869 Christine Nilsson's concerts were especial attractions here in London. She interspersed, to the surprise of many, among the operatic fragments she had chosen in them for the display of her powers, noble morceaux from the oratorios in which her breadth of singing and her tender feeling were surprisingly conspicuous. This was particularly manifested in "Angels ever bright and fair," as well as in her grand articulation of " Let the bright seraphim " to the celestial trumpet obbligato. As affording a yet further revelation of the ample scope of her powers, the fact is certainly worth mentioning that, during the autumn of that same year, 1869, she sang in another of her concerts that choicest bijou in Thomas' Mignon, the daintily delicate romance, "Connais-tu le Pays?" There was a delay in Christine Nilsson's reappearance during the following season, that of 1870, but it was a delay of only three days, and was attributable simply to those east winds which are acceptable exclusively we should presume to a pachydermatous poet like the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Announced for Saturday, the 7th of May, she really appeared for the first time that

year on Tuesday, the 10th of May, the character impersonated by her being the Lucia of Donizetti. Her rendering of the part throughout had gained in power, her seeming identification of herself with it being especially remarkable. Her Lucia was ably seconded by the Edgardo of Signor Mongini. The contract scene carried everything before it. The mad music was given with an effect that was simply electrifyingclosing with a sort of crescendo-climax with "Ardon gl'incensi." On Saturday, the 14th of May, and subsequently on the 17th and 19th, she appeared with marked success as Alice in Meyerbeer's Roberto il Diavolo. The song-bird was preening her wings, however, for a higher flight, one that carried her soon afterwards right across the Atlantic. Tempted beyond the ocean upon a tour in the United States, Christine Nilsson passed the winter of 1870 and 1871 in America with a success in some respects unparalleled. During her comparatively brief stay there, while giving a series of performances at Rochester, at Toronto, and at other cities of importance, she realised within a few months a fortune fully equal to that accumulated during a much longer interval by her countrywoman, Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt. Within less than a year, in fact, she amassed fully thirty thousand pounds sterling. Her passage through America called forth at the same time a sickening amount of adulation. of her skirts the goddess was recognised. The musical critics of the United States' newspapers-critics? eulogists, adulators, deifiers, rather call them-gushed into the wildest and loftiest tall-talk or high fallutin. If, according to Pip and Herbert Pocket, Mr. Waldengarver's Hamlet was "massive and concrete," the Nilsson in everything she attempted, according to her transatlantic panegyrists, was "abnormal" and "superhuman." If music might have been hyperbolically said in her to have "drawn an angel down "-they certainly did their best to "raise a mortal to the skies!" At the close of her brilliant and wonderfully lucrative successes in North America, Christine Nilsson returned to the lyrical stage of Europe and to the concerts of Mayfair in the summer of 1872. On Tuesday, the 28th May, she resumed her place upon the boards of Drury Lane, the then temporary home of Her Majesty's, in the part in which she had first been introduced to the music-loving Londoners. The French tenor, Capoul, was the Edgardo to the well-remembered Violetta of Nilsson, the bloom, the grace, the charm of which latter impersonation, however, appeared in some measure to have been rubbed off, defaced, or deteriorated by reason of her having come in contact with the American audience. Otherwise, the thrice-welcome cantatrice was in many respects visibly improved, physically, evcn, as well as histrionically. In her perfect mastery over the mezza voce her singing was recognised as matchless. The reception accorded to her was not only proportioned to the reputation she had acquired before her departure, but to the regrets created among her audience by her absence. She was recalled again and again, to find the stage carpeted with flowers. A week afterwards, namely, on Wednesday, the 5th June,

she gave a concert here in London, in which, by her varied efforts, she appeared to be bent upon surpassing all her former evidences of versatility. During that one afternoon she sang "Angels ever bright and fair," from Handel's oratorio of Theodora. She sang, to the flute obbligato of M. de Vroye, the mad scena from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. To the violin obbligato, charmingly arranged by M. Gounod, and exquisitely performed by Madame Norman-Néruda, she sang the "Ave Maria" based on Bach's Prelude. Added to which, she took part with Mr. Santley in the duetto "Tutte le Feste," from Verdi's Rigoletto, and with Mr. Sims Reeves in the "Mira la bianca luna" of the Maestro Rossini. Few among her audience were in any way aware of what must have been so vividly in her own recollection that afternoon, that, but fifteen years before, she herself might, with M. de Vroye's flute at her pretty lips, and with Madame Néruda's violin upon her fair shoulder, have played, as a mere girl, the accompaniments to the words she was now singing, in the pride of her womanhood, as a soprano of all but unrivaled pre-eminence. When the ball was first rolled to her feet, at Paris, she was content, for a while, at the Théâtre Lyrique to sing second to Madame Caroline Miolan-Carvalho. Times were changed, however, and she with them. The fumes of the incense she has since then been breathing have had for her an effect so far intoxicating that, at rare moments, they have elicited a display of hauteur otherwise incomprehensible. Yet, for all that, this peerless child of the people has been so true to her own order, and to her high calling as an artist, that, instead of marrying some grandly-titled personage, she accepted as her husband, in obedience to the simple dictates of her heart, and not of her ambition, an accomplished gentleman of the middleclass of society like M. Rouzeaud. Remembering this, one might almost forgive her disdaining, as little less than an insult, an invitation to sing at the State Concert while the Heir Apparent was away at the Vienna Exhibition. Pride like that is born from her own vivid consciousness of her admitted supremacy as one of the Queens of Song-one bearing on her brow and lip, nay, in the mere glance of her eye, the sign manual of the royalty of genius.

Since she originally stepped upon the Italian stage, first at Paris, and afterwards at London, in 1860, at the Théâtre Lyrique, and in 1867 upon the boards of Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket, her course has been marked in those two great capitals by a series of triumphs of a wholly exceptional character. Several of her finest impersonations, those she has, in a more notable way, made peculiarly her own, have grown in beauty and in perfection alike upon her audience and upon herself. Her Margherita, for example, she never seemed to have played, or even to have looked in" any respect so superbly as when, on Saturday, the 8th June, 1872, she first appeared as Goethe-and-Gounod's Gretchen to the Faust of M. Capoul, and to Signor Rota's sardonic embodiment of the arch-fiend Mephistopheles. If for a moment now and then she betrays any passing carelessness, eh bien! has she not a right to? For, is it not Tasso himself

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who has sung in his "Jerusalem" that to those who are friends of nature, of love, and of the heavens, negligence itself is at times a perfecting art? Here, in effect, is the lovely couplet of Torquato-the aptest motto (as though culled from some choicest bonbon) for Christine Nilsson, and for no other—

THE

THE

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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

HE enemies of the Church of England have never sustained a more disastrous defeat than in the matter of religious education in primary schools. Notwithstanding all their devices of Time-table Conscience Clauses, School Boards, and the like, they have altogether failed to obstruct the religious teaching of the children of the poor; nay, more, they appear rather to have given it a fresh impetus. Instead of a triumphant number of withdrawals from religious teaching, the parents of the children, whether Churchmen or Non-conformists, seem to have shown a dogged determination to allow their children to gain as many crumbs of truth as they can pick up, and the cases in which they have made objections are not only so few and far between as to be absolutely unworthy of notice, but are also, in the majority of instances, to be traced to some political or local feeling. It would, in fact, be desirable if there were a little more frequent evidence of the existence of a conscience among the masses of the people, for teachers are apt to mistake what is too often mere apathy for an active sympathy with religious education. As a whole, however, the poorer classes have answered the question whether or not they wished their children to receive something higher than mere secular teaching in the most satisfactory manner, and the result should not only gladden the hearts of the clergy, but should also be plainly laid before the country as a proof of the worthless character of the agitation which has so long been. carried on by a combined body of secularists and political dissenters. So far from the grievance to which they allude, on every possible occasion, having any real existence, the returns furnished by the diocesan inspectors throughout England and the personal testimony of a representative body of school teachers just assembled in conference at King's College prove in the clearest possible manner that the conscience clause was uncalled for, and, as a speaker at one of the meetings well put it, that if there had been no "difficulty-mongers" the so-called religious difficulty would never have been raised. The whole history of the subject is, in fact, one of the best possible illustrations of the manner in which noisy agitation too frequently frightens the legislature into the adoption of a course which experience afterwards proves to have been altogether needless, while it also shows that this same irritative process is but the outcome of a disordered system, and a perverted mind,

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