The ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind, earned how much money for her 93 concerts on tour in the U.S. in 1850?

The Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887) was often called the “Swedish Nightingale”. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music beginning in 1840. In Sweden and across Europe she performed in soprano roles and then completed an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the U.S. in 1850.

It was at the invitation of P.T. Barnum (1810-1891), an American showman who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus (1871-2017) that Lind travelled to America and completed 93 large-scale concerts under his management. She earned more than $350,000 in 1850 that equates to $10,887,800 in 2020 USD. Much of her earnings were donated to charities, principally the endowment of free schools in Sweden and a few charities in the U.S.

Lind became uncomfortable with Barnum’s relentless marketing of her concerts and severed her ties with him, but continued to give concerts under her own management. Her American tour is a plot in the 1980 musical ‘Barnum’ and the 2017 film ‘The Greatest Showman’.

While on tour in the U.S. she met her future husband who served as her pianist and conductor. She married Otto Moritz David Goldschmidt (1829-1907) on February 5, 1952 in Boston, Massachusetts and together they returned to Europe in 1852.

Lind continued to give occasional concerts over the next three decades, settling in England in 1855. Beginning in 1882 and some years, she was a professor of singing at the Royal College of Music in London.