Christina Nilsson - in Culture

In Culture

There are many similarities between Nilsson and the character of Christine Daaé in Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of the Opera, and many believe Leroux based the character on the real-life opera singer, although evidence for this is unverified.

The Dutch artist Anton Pieck (1895-1987) has an illustration of a street corner scene, in which a sandwich man advertises a performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Opera by Christine Nilsson. At the corner, by the sign of the Old Queen's Head Inn, stands a man selling jack-in-the-boxes. At the center of the scene, which presumably takes place in England perhaps London, circa 1890, we see a man pedaling a penny-farthing.

Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence (1920) opens with a description of a performance of Gounod's Faust at the Academy of Music in New York City in the early 1870s with Nilsson performing the role of Marguerite. It is possible that Wharton's impressions actually originated from performances at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1880s (she was still a child in the early 1870s). Nilsson is also mentioned in later portions of the novel.

Nilsson is mentioned briefly in Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.