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

88 Ingela Tägil
Another strange issue is that Berg had identified Jenny’s voice as a
mezzo-soprano. He emphasised that she sounded like a mezzo even if her
vocal range was that of a soprano (Berg 1880, pp. 16–17). However, all the
sources, including the earliest from Heimdall in 1832, contradict Berg. Already
the earliest reviews talk about Lind’s high soprano voice. Dannström
pointed out that her voice was not only that of a high soprano, but also more
suited to interpreting the sweet, elegiac or tragic rather than the passionate
and heroic characters (Dannström 1896, pp. 34–35). Thus, her voice had
the sound of a lyric soprano. Holland and Rockstro have categorised Jenny’s
voice as that of a dramatic soprano, but with the flexibility of a lyric soprano
(Holland & Rockstro, 1891, part 2, pp. 262–263). Based on her greatest
characters – Amina in La Somnambula, the title characters in Norma and
Lucia di Lammermoor and Marie in La Fillé de Régiment – Jenny was definitely
a high lyric soprano and absolutely not a mezzo-soprano. Even the
roles written specifically for her, Vielka in Meyerbeer’s opera of the same
name and Amalia in Verdi’s I Masnadieri, clearly indicate that Jenny Lind
was a high lyric soprano. If Berg taught in the belief that the young Jenny
Lind was a mezzo-soprano, he may have allowed her to sing parts that were
too heavy. If she sang with her chest voice in too high a range, her high
notes may have become too “thick”.
An even more serious error of Berg’s, and one that probably caused Jenny’s
veiled voice, was his ideas about “consequence notes”. 13 Berg argued
that neither the teacher nor the student should work with the soprano’s
pitch material higher than f2 or at most g2. Berg called all higher notes
“consequence notes”, which he expected to appear by themselves as a consequence
of the work with the lower pitches (Berg 1868, p. 79; Berg, 1879,
p. 2). Thus, his students never had the opportunity to practise their high
notes, although their operatic parts required such pitches to be sung. Jenny
Lind’s register extended much higher than g2. According to Dannström,
she went at least to e3 (Dannström 1896, pp. 34–35), and according to Holland
and Rockstro, even to g3, which is a full octave above Berg’s recommendation.
However, the roles she played demanded these very high vocal
ranges. This means that, while still very young, she had to perform very
high notes without sufficient rehearsal. It appears very likely that she sang
in these high ranges with force rather than with an adequate technique,
which by itself could be sufficient reason to explain an exhausted voice.
Another aspect is the voice-break that takes place during puberty. In the
German journal Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 1845 a short comment
13 In Swedish, Konsekvenstoner.