Papers of Otto Goldschmidt concerning the Holland and Rockstro biography (1891) of...

Documents gathered by Otto Goldschmidt (1829-1907) in the preparation of a (commissioned) biography of his wife, Jenny Lind (1820-1887), the Swedish soprano. Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt: Her Early Art-life and Dramatic Career, 1820-1851, from Original Documents Collected by Otto Goldschmidt was written by Canon Henry Scott Holland and William Smith Rockstro, and published in 1891 (2 vols). The documents in the collection comprise both correspondence concerning the publication of the biography (with publishers, and between Goldschmidt and Scott Holland), and research material gathered from a variety of sources concerning the life of Jenny Lind, including contracts, letters, memoirs, concert programmes and other relevant information. Most of the papers gathered are manuscript copies, used as working documents by Goldschmidt and the biography writers. In most cases, documents in Swedish and German have been translated into English during the preparation of the biography, where extracts commonly appear. Most of the papers are concerned with Jenny Lind's life to approximately 1851, reflecting the scope of the biography.

An arrangement has been applied by the archivist, as follows:

OG/1 Papers Concerning the Publication of the Biography

OG/1/1 English Edition OG/1/2 Correspondence with Swedish Publisher

OG/1/3 Correspondence with German Publisher

OG/2 Research Material for the Biography OG/2/1 Legal and Formal Documents Concerning Jenny Lind

OG/2/2 Jenny Lind Correspondence

OG/2/3 Otto Goldschmidt Correspondence, in the Course of Research

OG/2/4 Other Biographical Material

OG/3 Other Otto Goldschmidt Papers

OG/4 Papers of Jenny Maude

Upon Otto Goldschmidt's death, in 1907, the papers passed to Jenny Maude, daughter to Goldschmidt and Lind. The materials were eventually absorbed into the collection of Lind scholar W Porter Ware. The papers that comprise the present collection were purchased by the Royal Academy of Music in July 2002, from a private dealer.

Otto Moritz David Goldschmidt (1829-1907), pianist and composer, was born in Hamburg. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory (1843-46), where he attended classes given by Mendelssohn, Plaidy and Hauptmann. On 4 December,1845, as a young man of sixteen, Goldschmidt saw a performance by Jenny Lind (the Swedish soprano he was later to marry) at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Her accompanist on this occasion was Mendelssohn. Goldschmidt's first London performance was on 31 July, 1848, at a concert given by Lind in the concert room of Her Majesty's Theatre. In January, 1850, Goldschmidt and Lind met again, in Lübeck, and in May 1851, towards the end of her long and very successful American tour, promoted by Phineas T Barnum, Lind invited Goldschmidt to New York to replace her musical director and piano accompanist, who had returned to London. Goldschmidt and Lind subsequently married in Boston, Massachusetts, 5 February, 1852.

From 1852 to 1855, the Lind-Goldschmidts lived in Dresden. They settled in England in 1858, moving eventually to South Kensington, upon Goldschmidt's appointment as Professor of Piano and Vice-Principal of the Royal Academy of Music. Their first son, Walter, was born in 1853, followed by a daughter, Jenny, in 1857, and a second son, Ernst, in 1858. After Lind's death, in 1887, Goldschmidt spent several years gathering material for his wife's biography. He engaged two writers: Canon Henry Scott Holland (theologian and Canon of St Paul's Cathedral) and William Smith Rockstro (music teacher and writer, and a friend from Goldschmidt's student youth in Hamburg). The two-volume biography, published in 1891, covered Lind's life to 1850, when she retired from the operatic stage.

Source: Grove entries for Otto Goldschmidt and Jenny Lind.