IN THE 1960s when I lived with some fellow students, occasionally we went out hiking in the middle of the Danish light summer nights in a forest near Copenhagen to enjoy the amazingly clear and wonderful song of a little grey bird – the nightingale.
Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish fairy tale writer, whose 200th birthday was celebrated in 2005, was also fascinated by this bird’s song. When Andersen, who never married, fell in love with a much-admired Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind, she inspired him in 1843 to write the fairy-tale The Nightingale, which addresses the wonder of natural song in ...
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