You Haven't Lived Until You've Heard

In 2005, Elvis Costello was commissioned by the Royal Danish Opera to write a chamber opera about Hans Christian Andersen, Jenny Lind, and P.T. Barnum. 

This became The Secret Songs, a suite of tunes that ultimately remains unfinished. The completed pieces were performed by EC in Denmark in October 2005, for a series of three concerts featuring orchestral accompaniment and Gisela Stille performing the role of Jenny Lind. Announced for March 2007, that debut instead became a concert performance of The Juliet Letters paired with selections from The Secret Songs. 

“The Famous Artificial Bird” uses the image of a Victorian-era automaton to capture a distant, fictionalized impression of the dynamics at play between Lind, Andersen and Barnum. 

[Usual disclaimer: I am not an academic, just a decent Googler with curiosity, so take this with sufficient grains of salt.]

Andersen met Lind in 1840 when she was just a phenomenon in Sweden, her native country. He fell fast and hard and penned a story inspired by her, “The Nightingale.” That story was so widely recognized as being about Lind that it earned her the nickname “The Swedish Nightingale.” But it wasn’t enough to win the singer’s heart, as she wrote him in 1844, “God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister.” 

A few years later, P.T. Barnum invited Lind to tour the United States and took the occasion to transform thie singer into the first global music superstar. He even had little Jenny Lind paper masks printed up so that when she showed up in America, she saw a bunch of kids and weirdos running around wearing her face. She did not like that, but continued with the tour anyway. (The recent Hugh Jackman vehicle The Greatest Showman suggests that Barnum and Lind had some kind of romantic entanglement, which is not true.) 

So three entertainers, entwined together by passino and performance. “The Famous Artificial Bird” is sung from Anderson’s point of view and seems to capture his frustration with Barnum’s crass exploitation of the woman he loves. He’s “the huckster who put Jenny on display.” 

Andersen’s “The Nightingale” details the story of a Chinese emperor who demands to hear the song of a nightingale but remains unimpressed, until he’s presented with a mechanical bird that he believes to be more beautiful. Unfortunately, the mechanical bird breaks but the nightingale’s song lives on. 

Meanwhile, a big part of Barnum’s stock-in-trade was mechanical contraptions; I only found one clear example of his interest in a mechanical bird, an illustration from 1863. 

The image of the “mechanical bird” carries a few meanings, literal and otherwise. For Andersen, Lind has possibly become a “mechanical bird,” performing on command just like the one in his story—not the natural, beautiful songbird he fell in love with. Under Barnum’s direction, Lind may feel like just another of his attractions, no more or less prized than a mechanical bird or other contraption. For Barnum, the “mechanical bird” may be Lind’s voice today, or some other invention tomorrow—it’s the fickle and ever-hungry maw of American popular culture that requires constant feeding.

Woven through with gorgeous accompaniment from the assembled musicians, the song expresses a resigned ache that stretches across the ocean and into a new world. 

Although four songs from The Secret Songs later appeared in different arrangements on the 2009 album Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, “The Famous Artificial Bird” has never been officially released, and only performed three times, for those concerts in Denmark. You can listen to a clandestine live recording of it here, if you are quiet, and careful.