Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum

5. “Attempering This Whole People to the Sentiment of Art”: Institutionalizing Musical Ecstasy

chapter five “Attempering This Whole People to the Sentiment of Art” Institutionalizing Musical Ecstasy jJ The Varieties of Musical Skepticism In a nation where the main preoccupations had always been politics and real estate,and where many remained skeptical of the grandeur of European performance culture, music lovers at mid-century were targets for ridicule. In fact, given the increasing spectacle surrounding urban concert life, music lovers were difficult to ignore. As the most peculiar behaviors of dedicated audiences—obsessively attending every performance on a tour, evaluating the acoustics of concert halls, collecting sheet music as souvenirs, or lingering outside hotels to catch a glimpse of touring stars—started to become more public, society wits and cultural critics discovered plenty of new material. “Lind Mania” in the spring and summer of 1850 was an especially rich subject for social satire. While much of the general public seemed genuinely excited that a European opera star of Lind’s stature would soon be gracing America’s shores, the increasingly outlandish actions of her supporters— purposefully stoked by the elaborately staged promotions of her manager, P. T. Barnum—generated a veritable industry of jokes, parodies, and editorial cartoons. William Allen Butler, a New York City lawyer and part-time poet, for example, poked fun at one of Barnum’s most popular schemes: an official competition to create a “national song” for Lind to sing during her tour. Noting the absurdity of calling on the nation’s middle-class dilettantepoets (241 from Boston, 337 from New York City, and 3 from the “entire South, including 2 from Cuba”) to celebrate Lind, Butler published a pamphlet called Barnum’s Parnassus: Being Confidential Disclosures of the Prize listening and longing / 150 Committee on the Jenny Lind Song, with Specimens of the Leading American Poets in the Effulgence of Their Genius. Neither the judges nor Lind’s fans escaped sarcasm: Prize Committee man No. 2, proposed that a selection should be made of all the songs upon which postage had been paid, and that none others would be examined. Prize Committee man No. 3, hereupon rose to amend this proposition, and suggested that, on the contrary, only the unpaid songs should be opened, inasmuch as it was very evident that their authors were in need of the $200. Discussion on this amendment was becoming violent, when Prize Committee man No. 4, put a stop to it, by stating that he had been credibly informed, that the postage had not been paid in a single instance. The Committee was relieved.1 While the actual winner of the Lind song contest, novelist Bayard Taylor , crafted a sentimentally patriotic lyric that extolled a land where “song has a home in the hearts of the free,” another song published at the same time by W. H. C. West more directly expressed the dismay of some observers at the extent to which Lind had taken over daily life: If you step into a grocer’s, (Upon my word tis true!) There is Jenny Lind’s lump sugar, And Jenny’s cocoa too. We shall all become great singers, Tho’ Jenny Lind pipes high; At each snuff shop, in London, Jenny Lind’s pipes you may buy. My wife has a Jenny Lind bonnet, And a Jenny Lind visite; With Jenny’s portrait on it My handkerchief looks neat. My wife’s a slave to fashion, Against it never sinned; Our baby and the kitten Are call’d after Jenny Lind.2 The maniacal intensity of the American public was something that was not lost on New York City journalist Thomas W. Meaghan. Meaghan had made a living in the 1840s writing for salacious male weeklies like The Sporting Whip, The Rake, and other publications.3 In 1850, calling himself “Asmodeus,” he wrote a pamphlet called The Jenny Lind Mania in Boston, or, the Sequel to Barnum’s Parnassus. The story starts with Asmodeus learning that Barnum has employed nearly the entire service industry of Boston, from bill-posters to steamboat runners, to help him orchestrate Lind’s arrival. When he naively inquires with a friend whether he, too, might get Institutionalizing Musical Ecstasy / 151 in on the business, it becomes clear that this is no mere entrepreneurial venture: For two long weeks, did I hear nought in my rambles, by night or day, in barber shops and work shops, in beer shops and stables, in hotels and...