<P> Lind's mother ran a day school for girls out of her home . When Lind was about 9, her singing was overheard by the maid of Mademoiselle Lundberg, the principal dancer at the Royal Swedish Opera . The maid, astounded by Lind's extraordinary voice, returned the next day with Lundberg, who arranged an audition and helped her gain admission to the acting school of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where she studied with Karl Magnus Craelius, the singing master at the theatre . </P> <P> Lind began to sing onstage when she was 10 . She had a vocal crisis at the age of 12 and had to stop singing for a time, but she recovered . Her first great role was Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz in 1838 at the Royal Swedish Opera . At 20, she was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and court singer to the King of Sweden and Norway . Her voice became seriously damaged by overuse and untrained singing technique, but her career was saved by the singing teacher Manuel García with whom she studied in Paris from 1841 to 1843 . He insisted that she should not sing at all for three months, to allow her vocal cords to recover, before he started to teach her a healthy and secure vocal technique . </P> <P> After Lind had been with García for a year, the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, an early and faithful admirer of her talent, arranged an audition for her at the Opéra in Paris, but she was rejected . The biographer Francis Rogers concludes that Lind strongly resented the rebuff: when she became an international star, she always refused invitations to sing at the Paris Opéra . Lind returned to the Royal Swedish Opera, greatly improved as a singer by García's training . She toured Denmark where, in 1843, Hans Christian Andersen met and fell in love with her . Although the two became good friends, she did not reciprocate his romantic feelings . She is believed to have inspired three of his fairy tales: "Beneath the Pillar", "The Angel" and "The Nightingale". He wrote, "No book or personality whatever has exerted a more ennobling influence on me, as a poet, than Jenny Lind . For me she opened the sanctuary of art ." The biographer Carol Rosen believes that after Lind rejected Andersen as a suitor, he portrayed her as The Snow Queen with a heart of ice . </P> <P> In December 1844, through Meyerbeer's influence, Lind was engaged to sing the title role in Bellini's opera Norma in Berlin . That led to more engagements in opera houses throughout Germany and Austria, but such was her success in Berlin that she continued there for four months before she left for other cities . Among her admirers were Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and, most importantly for her, Felix Mendelssohn . Ignaz Moscheles wrote: "Jenny Lind has fairly enchanted me...her song with two concertante flutes is perhaps the most incredible feat in the way of bravura singing that can possibly be heard". That number, from Meyerbeer's Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (The Camp of Silesia, 1844, a role written for Lind but not premiered by her) became one of the songs most associated with Lind, and she was called on to sing it wherever she performed in concert . Her operatic repertoire comprised the title roles in Lucia di Lammermoor, Maria di Rohan, Norma, La sonnambula and La vestale as well as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Adina in L'elisir d'amore and Alice in Robert le diable . About that time, she became known as "the Swedish Nightingale". In December 1845, the day after her debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under the baton of Mendelssohn, she sang without fee for a charity concert in aid of the Orchestra Widows' Fund . Her devotion and generosity to charitable causes remained a key aspect of her career and greatly enhanced her international popularity even among the unmusical . </P>

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