Songs for the 'Nightingale': Performance Santa Fe concert to pay tribute to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind

Oct. 23—The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind ruled as the first operatic superstar.

In the 19th century, the celebrated "Swedish Nightingale" riveted audiences from the Americas to Europe, earning her admiration from the likes of Felix Mendelssohn and P.T. Barnum to Hans Christian Andersen and Queen Victoria.

Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling will pay tribute to Lind with famed pianist Emanuel Ax at Santa Fe's Cristo Rey Church on Wednesday, Oct. 25.

Fittingly, Tilling won the Jenny Lind scholarship when she was 25.

"I discovered her and I read books about her," she said in a phone interview from Zurich. "She had an opera career that lasted 10 years."

Most of Lind's biographies end when she stopped singing opera.

"She continued to sing until she was 67," Tilling said. "I want to tell that story."

Lind sang music composed by her friends — a group that included Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. Tilling will sing music from all three composers.

"I want people to think about this friendship and what friends mean to them," she said. "I'm going to talk a bit," she added. "The story is as good as the music."

Lind's shift from grand opera to art songs and lieder have remained a lesser-explored part of her career.

"She got married, and she became the wife of someone and she changed her last name," Tilling said. "So the books are just telling about this huge success. She might have been very important to these composers."

A celebrated Swedish soprano herself, Tilling grew up on a farm, where her father was always singing.

"I was a singing kid," she said. "It was basically a game for me instead of doing other things. If I was happy and content, I was singing."

She originally planned to become a singing teacher of jazz, gospel and musicals.

"I had not fallen in love with classical music," she said.

She attended her first opera at 19. It was the Giuseppe Verdi classic "La Traviata."

She didn't like it.

But a later performance of Jacques Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann" opened her ears.

"There is a character of a doll," Tilling said. "She's a high coloratura soprano. It's a comedy and you are laughing and I got really curious."

Her singing teacher said she couldn't do it because it was too hard.

"I wanted to prove that she's wrong," Tilling said.

Today Tilling has performed on the world's leading opera, concert and recital stages while simultaneously building a discography that includes orchestral works, in addition to recital collections.

She collaborates regularly with today's foremost conductors, including recent appearances under Gustavo Dudamel with both the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen with London Philharmonia Orchestra, with Gianandrea Noseda and Washington National Symphony Orchestra, with Omer Meir Welber and Orchestre national de France, and under François-Xavier Roth with London Symphony Orchestra.

She met her collaborator Emanuel Ax through her conductor.

Born to Polish parents in what is now Ukraine, Ax won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv in 1974. In 1975, he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize. His 2023-24 season will focus on the world premiere of Anders Hillborg's piano concerto, commissioned for him by the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen, with subsequent performances in Stockhom and New York.