Elisabeth Olin née Lillström (December 1740 – 26 March 1828) was a Swedish opera singer and a music composer. She performed the leading female role in the inauguration performance of the Royal Swedish Opera in 1773, and is referred to as the first Swedish opera prima donna. She was the first female to be made Hovsångerska (1773), and the first woman to become a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (1782).
Life
Elisabeth Olin was the daughter of the musician Petter Lillström and the actress and singer Elisabeth Lillström. Her parents were both engaged at the opera theater of Bollhuset, Sweden's first professional national stage, where her father was an organist in the theater orchestra, and her mother was one of the first professional actresses in Sweden, the prima donna of the theater and a member of the theater's board of directors.
Early career
Elisabeth Olin, then called Betty Lillström, debuted at the age of seven at Bollhuset in 1747 the part of Alfhild in Syrinx, called Sweden's first native Opera comique. She was a popular child actor and described as a valuable member of the theater. After the season of 1754–54, the Swedish language opera theater was dissolved when the royal Bollhuset localities were given to the French theater which was favored by the queen. The Swedish theater split into two travelling theaters, and Elisabeth Olin and her parents joined the Stenborg Troupe.
She was given singing lessons by Petter Stenborg, the leading actor of the Stenborg Troupe, and lessons in clavecin and music theory by Ferdinand Zellbell the Younger, conductor of the Royal orchestra. Elisabeth Olin is believed to have been active as a professional concert singer since at least the late 1750s. She was a popular singer at the concerts regularly performed at the Riddarhuset during the 1760s, where her earliest performance is noted to have taken place in a concert by her mentor Zellbell in 1761. A noted performance was on a concert directed by Francesco Uttini in 1769, when she was described as a very popular concert singer, who was appreciated by the nobility, often performing on private concerts.
On 19 November 1769, Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna commented: "I visited the Cavalier's concert today, so called as it was performed exclusively by music lovers and not by someone from the Royal Orchestra. Mrs Olin sang. :I dare say no one in Italy has a sweeter voice. Uncertain whether one should love her for her beauty or her divine voice, she gains love and admiration in parallel."
Elisabeth Olin was also active as a composer. In 1768, she was one of the Swedish composers who contributed with her own composition to the collection Gustaviade. En hjältedikt i tolv sånger ('Gustaviade. A heroic poem of twelve songs'), where she contributed with her own song for composition number eight.
Elisabeth Olin married the official Gabriel Olin (1728–1794) in 1760, with whom she had six children. Her husband is described as proud of her and supportive of her career.
Career at the Royal Opera
After the dissolution of the French language theater of Stockholm in 1771, the new monarch, Gustav III of Sweden, decided to establish a Swedish language theater and opera. The Stenborg Troupe, which was by then the remains of the former Swedish language opera theater that had been dissolved in 1754 and had been a travelling theater ever since, was called to perform before the monarch at Bollhuset in 1772, but when they did not prove to be up to his standards, he decided to compose an entirely new royal Swedish language opera.