The Moment
Copenhagen, Denmark, 1843. Dusk.
Tivoli’s lanterns are new enough in 1843, that people stop and stare. Hans Christian Andersen stops too, in August, for the opening, dazzled like everyone else by the pagodas and the artificial lake and the whole confected East nobody in the crowd has ever actually seen.
In September, Jenny Lind arrives in Copenhagen, and Andersen is swept into infatuation. Her gentle rebuff — “God bless and protect my brother…” — devastates him. “The Nightingale” will become his sublimated love letter. The bird's refusal to live in captivity will echo Lind’s refusal to be claimed romantically. But the tale will help cement her international brand, “The Swedish Nightingale.”
As Signe Toksvig long ago put it, his adoptive family’s adoration for the aristocratic literary elite irritates him — this praise of the smooth, the artificial. But: “Had not even Jenny suffered the same? Had not many people in high society preferred the jingle of a mediocre Italian opera company to her divinely natural tones?” — adding that “Melting her and himself together, he wrote, almost at one sitting, ‘The Nightingale.’”
By October he is back at Tivoli, not long after watching rooms full of Lind’s admirers turn, on a duller night, to some lesser concert. He writes in his diary that evening only that he is starting “the Chinese fairy tale.” Two days later it will be finished.
Tivoli’s flash will become his fictional Emperor’s court: ornate, artificial, obsessed with spectacle. It will give shape to Andersen’s deeper unease about the age arriving around him — an era preferring the reproducible over the singular. His mechanical bird will embody that fetish for repetition without soul. The real nightingale, spontaneous and imperfect, will carry his Romantic insistence upon natural genius. That only the real bird can save the Emperor’s life is Andersen’s argument in miniature.
Denmark in the 1840s is edging away from absolute monarchy toward constitutional reform. Andersen, a cobbler’s son, understands both the seductions and the dangers of court life from the inside. The nightingale’s final promise — to sing of “good and evil” hidden from the Emperor — mirrors Andersen’s own self-image: close enough to power to be heard, never quite trapped inside it.
The Real
In the path to adulthood, the seeker may somehow lose his or her way, whether due to chasing after a luxurious “golden-tassled” life; the moral deadening which results from the dirty, dirty bargains of commercial or political power; or the endless artificial entertainments of mass culture. But though stiff and pale, he or she is not dead yet. Primordial Nature is still outside the open window; the moonlight still streams into the darkened room.
Oppressed by the burdens imposed by a lifetime of wrong choices, the soul can hardly breathe. Like a weight on the chest, it becomes an urgency so intense that finally it opens one’s eyes. Finally now, with honest vision, one can see one’s good and bad deeds for what they really amount to.
The Testimony
But the emperor was not dead yet. He lay stiff and pale in the gorgeous bed with its velvet hangings and heavy golden tassels. There was an open window high above him, and the moon streamed in upon the emperor, and the artificial bird beside him. The poor emperor could hardly breathe, he seemed to have a weight on his chest, he opened his eyes, and then he saw that it was Death sitting upon his chest, wearing his golden crown… Round about, from among the folds of the velvet hangings peered many curious faces: some were hideous, others gentle and pleasant. They were all the emperor’s good and bad deeds, which now looked him in the face when Death was weighing him down.