Legend in Lindsborg

Amid a great swirl of dust little Lindsborg (pop. 2,016) became once again last week the most vital music centre in Kansas. From eleven States visitors poured into the town, fairly fought for parking space. The attraction was Lindsborg's longtime specialty: Handel's Messiah, performed by 500 local choristers, most of them farmers, storekeepers, mechanics, housewives, cooks.

Easter Sunday marked the 160th Lindsborg Messiah. Still singing fervently with the sopranos was Alma Swensson, 76, who with her late husband founded the Lindsborg festivals 54 years ago. Alma Swensson was 22 when she sent East for copies of Messiah, corralled a few eager pupils and taught them the great oratorio measure by measure. When her festivals were 27 years old the great Lillian Nordica was a soloist and in Lindsborg that occasion has become legendary. The enchanted choristers pulled her carriage through the streets, received in return roses from her bouquet. One youth planted his bloom and it managed to take root, yielded for years the "Nordica rose." In Lindsborg Nordica roses are pressed in memory books, in massive family Bibles. In Manhattan Lillian Nordica seemed all but forgotten last week when many of her most valuable household possessions were sold at public auction for less than $4,000.

Thus went Nordica's life--from a heyday that was richly spectacular to an ending deeply pathetic. She was born plain Lillian Norton in Farmington, Me. She sang in church choirs in Boston, toured with a brass band until she could afford to study opera in Italy. Like Lilli Lehmann, she began with light florid roles, won great success. But her ambition soared higher. She went to Bayreuth, worked with Wagner's widow, became a finished Wagnerian. As a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera she conducted herself royally. For her audiences she had unfailing charm; for herself, rich furs and jewels, a private car which she named ''Bruennhilde."

Nordica's three husbands brought the unhappiness into her life. First was one Frederick A. Gower who took a balloon flight over the English Channel and never returned. Second was Zoltan Dome, an Hungarian tenor as lazy as he was handsome. Third was George Washington Young, millionaire president of U. S. Mortgage & Trust Co., so lavish in his courtship that once when Nordica was singing on the Pacific Coast and he was in Manhattan he hired a messenger boy to take her an emerald necklace clear across the continent.

Social Manhattan frowned on Nordica's marriage to Young and on the litigation which accompanied her divorce from Dome. In 1913 she decided on a tour of Australia but she was 54 and her voice was worn. On the way to Batavia her steamer was shipwrecked and there she wasted away to 100 lb., died of pneumonia in the spring of 1914.

Nordica's funeral was in King's Weigh House Chapel in London where she and George Young were married. Her casket was a teakwood trunk, carved to represent a lotus, the flower that she loved best. On his return to Manhattan, George Young walked down the gangplank bearing a box under either arm. One contained Lillian Nordica's jewels, the other her ashes.

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