Original, vintage, 1871,
carte de visite photograph of Opera singer Christina
Nilsson, see below.
Has her name handwritten
(in pencil) at the bottom border.
Photograph by Le Jeune, 22 Rue de Choiseul, Paris, France.
Size of the cdv is 6cm x 10.5cm approx. (including the border).
Condition is good and
complete.
Please note, the
‘mementoes’ logo is not on the actual photo.
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Christina Nilsson, Countess de Casa Miranda, (20
August 1843 – 20 November 1921) was a Swedish operatic soprano. She possessed a
brilliant bel canto technique and was considered a rival to the Victorian era's
most famous diva, Adelina Patti. Nilsson became a member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Music in 1869.
Christina Nilsson was born Kristina Jonasdotter
on Sjöabol farm, near Växjö,
Småland, to the peasants Jonas Nilsson and Cajsa-Stina Månsdotter. From her
earliest years, she demonstrated vocal talent. She taught herself to play on
the violin and flute, and sang in the peasants' fairs in Sweden with her
brother. She was discovered by a prominent civil servant when, aged 14, she was
performing at a market in Ljungby. He soon became her
patron, enabling her to have vocal training. She was a pupil of Franz Berwald for two years.
In 1860, she gave concerts in Stockholm and Uppsala. After four years'
study in Paris, she had her operatic début 1864 as Violetta
in Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris. After
this success she sang at major opera houses in London, Saint Petersburg, Vienna
and New York City. She also appeared in the Metropolitan Opera's inaugural
performance on 22 October 1883 in Gounod's Faust. In September 1885 she was
contemplating retiring from the spotlight, and held a farewell concert from the
balcony of Grand Hotel in Stockholm. An estimated 50 000 people gathered to
hear the world-famous soprano. Suddenly a rumour spread that the scaffolding on
a nearby building was falling down, and panic spread in the crowd. 19 people
were killed in the chaos that followed, and the dead bodies and all the injured
were brought to the hotel lobby, where a horrified Nilsson met them. The
Stockholm police were criticized for the way they handled the event, and
Nilsson never got over the accident. She donated generously to the families of
the victims.
Christina Nilsson was married in Westminster Abbey to the French banker Auguste Rouzaud, who later died
in 1882. In 1887 she married Angel Ramon Maria Vallejo y Miranda, Count de Casa
Miranda, who died in 1902. In correspondence, Nilsson often signed her first
name as Christine, and during the last part of her life she was generally known
as the Countess de Casa Miranda.
She died in Vaxjö, Sweden in 1921.
Unfortunately, unlike Patti, she never made gramophone recordings of her voice.
In culture
There are many similarities between Nilsson and the character of
Christine Daaé in Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of
the Opera, and many believe Leroux based the character on the real-life opera
singer, although evidence for this is unverified.
The Dutch artist Anton Pieck (1895-1987) has
an illustration of a street corner scene, in which a sandwich man advertises a
performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Opera by Christine
Nilsson. At the corner, by the sign of the Old Queen's Head Inn, stands a man
selling jack-in-the-boxes. At the centre of the scene, which presumably takes
place in England perhaps London, circa 1890, we see a man pedalling a penny-farthing.
Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1920) opens with a
description of a performance of Gounod's Faust at the Academy of Music in New
York City in the early 1870s, with Nilsson performing the role of Marguerite.
It is possible that Wharton actually attended performances at the Metropolitan
Opera in the 1880s (she was still a child in the early 1870s). Nilsson is also
mentioned in later portions of the novel. Nilsson is mentioned briefly in Leo
Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. Sarah Elizabeth Forbush
Downs's novel Max:A Cradle Mystery (1890) refers to
visiting Nilsson performances in Chicago.