Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

The Björling ‘<strong>Opera</strong>’
context the “mother educators” Hartman refers to also turns the focus to
the mothers of opera singers.
In Stockholm the Berwald and Gelhaar families had daughters who were
schooled as opera singers from an early age. The driving force in the Berwald
family was the mother, the opera singer Mathilda Charlotta Berwald,
née Cohn (1798-1877), who was married to the opera concert master Johan
Fredrik Berwald (1787-1861). The story is reminiscent of that of the
Björling family: the sisters Fredrique, Julie Mathilda and Hedvig Eleonora
performed with their parents on tours and formed a well-known trio for a
time. 4 Julie Berwald (1822-1877) had a short but successful career at the
Royal Swedish <strong>Opera</strong> (Broman 1968, pp. 20-21). The Ficker sisters, better
known as Charlotta Almlöf (1813-1882) and Mathilda Gelhaar (1814-1889),
took child roles, and were enrolled in the school of the Royal Swedish <strong>Opera</strong>
where they received whatever institutional training was offered at the time,
in both singing and acting (Berg & Stålberg 1874, p. 137). Mathilda Gelhaar
in particular had great success and has been compared with Jenny Lind. She
was married to Fredrik Otto Gelhaar (1814-1889), who just like her father
Christian Fredrik Ficker was an oboist with the Stockholm Royal Court Orchestra.
They had a daughter, Wilhelmina Gelhaar (1837-1923), who rather
took over her mother’s career. Her profession as an opera singer started
early, and even before her time at the opera school she was playing minor
parts on stage (Hedberg 1885, pp. 94-97).
The domestic musical context appeared to be important in the abovementioned
cases. As Sundin (1995, pp. 61, 64) notes, the musical environment
has a strong effect on children, and the qualities to which they are
continuously exposed are transferred to their own music representation
(Sundin 1995). According to Gardner (1994), out-of-the-ordinary musical
development demands both a genetic predisposition and a stimulating social-growth
milieu (Gardner 1994, p. 103). On a more subtle level, Rosselli
(1992), focusing on how Italian opera singers were trained from 1600 up
until the twentieth century, suggests that singers are born into their profession
to a lesser extent than instrumentalists because of the physical demands
of opera singing, which are not necessarily connected to family conditions
(Rosselli 1992, p. 94). With reference to the above-mentioned cases,
through their professions members of the Gelhaar and Berwald families had
close contacts with the Royal Swedish <strong>Opera</strong> in Stockholm, and therefore
had a good idea about the opera-singing standards at the time. Not only was
4 The Berwald girls’ trio is comparable to the Björling boy’s trio, also called “The
juvenile trio” in the USA (Henrysson 1993 p. 75).
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