“In pathetic music Jenny Lind’s voice is heard to much advantage.  Indeed, her vocal powers seem best adapted to demonstrate the more gentle and touching emotions.  For this reason her solo singing is almost that alone in which she makes any extraordinary impression.  In ensemble singing, excepting in the piano, her voice, being forced beyond its natural powers, loses all its beauty and peculiar charm, and becomes, in short, often disagreeable....  Her voice, with all its charm, is of a special quality, and in its best essays is restricted to a particular class of lyrical compositions....  As a vocalist, Jenny Lind is entitled to a very high, if not the highest, commendation.  Her perseverance and indomitable energy, joined to her musical ability, have tended to render her voice as capable and flexible as a violin.  Although she never indulges in the brilliant flights of fancy of Persiani, nor soars into the loftiest regions of fioriture with that most wonderful of all singers, her powers of execution are very great, and the delicate taste with which the most florid passages are given, the perfect intonation of the voice, and its general charm, have already produced a most decided impression on the public mind.  By the musician, Persiani will be always more admired, but Jenny Lind will strike the general hearer more.”

Another contemporaneous judgment of Jenny Lind’s voice will be of interest to our readers:  “Her voice is a pure soprano, of the fullest compass belonging to voices of this class, and of such evenness of tone that the nicest ear can discover no difference of quality from the bottom to the summit of the scale.  In the great extent between A below the lines and D in alt, she executes every description of passage, whether consisting of notes ‘in linked sweetness long drawn out,’ or of the most rapid flights and fioriture, with equal facility and perfection.  Her lowest notes come out as clear and ringing as the highest, and her highest are as soft and sweet as the lowest.  Her tones are never muffled or indistinct, nor do they ever offend the ear by the slightest tinge of shrillness; mellow roundness distinguishes every sound she utters.  As she never strains her voice, it never seems to be loud; and hence some one who busied himself in anticipatory depreciation said that it would be found to fail in power, a mistake of which everybody was convinced who observed how it filled the ear, and how distinctly every inflection was heard through the fullest harmony of the orchestra.  The same clearness was observable in her pianissimo.  When, in lier beautiful closes, she prolonged a tone, attenuated it by degrees, and falling gently upon the final note, the sound, though as ethereal as the sighing of a breeze, reached, like Mrs. Siddons’s whisper in Lady Macbeth, every part of the immense theatre.  Much of the effect of this unrivaled voice is derived from the physical beauty of its sound, but still more from the exquisite skill and taste