Pauline Viardot, A Musical Light

Portrait Link (opens a new browser window)

Pauline Viardot was born July 18, 1821, into a Spanish family of singers, the Garcias (father: Manuel Garcia, mother: Joachina Sitches, brother: Manuel Garcia II, sister: Maria Malibran). She was originally trained as a pianist (taught by Meysenberg and Liszt) and composer (taught by Reicha), but she stepped into her famous sister's shoes as a singer after the latter's untimely death in 1836. Their father had died in 1832, so her mother took over young Pauline's singing lessons.

A year later, when Pauline was not yet 16, she made her debut in Brussels at a concert given by her brother-in-law, the Belgian violinist Charles de Bériot. She caused a great sensation with her three-octave range and musical versatility. During her first concert tour through Germany in 1838, together with her brother-in-law, she performed some of her own vocal compositions, accompanying herself on the piano. In Leipzig, she met Clara Wieck (later Schumann) and Robert Schumann. Schumann published one of her songs in his "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" (New Journal for Music) and later dedicated his Heine Song Cycle op. 24 to her.

Viardot made her opera debut as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello, first in London (May 9, 1839), then in Paris (October 8, 1839), and began her first engagement at the Théatre Italien in Paris, where she demonstrated her dramatic talent in a range of Rossini roles. Her ardent admirers soon included Alfred de Musset, who said, "Singing is to her as natural as breathing"; George Sand, who made her into the heroine of her novel Consuelo (1843); and Hector Berlioz. Clara Schumann wrote of Viardot, "She is the most brilliant woman I have ever met."

In 1840, she married Louis Viardot, an author and the director of the Théatre Italien. Viardot, 21 years her senior, gave up his job to accompany her on concert tours throughout Europe in the years that followed. (Their eldest child Louise, born in 1841, was brought up by her grandmother because of her parents' travels.) Pauline sang in London, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and St. Petersburg, where she was engaged by the Opera from 1843 to 1846. While in St. Petersburg, she sang works by Glinka and Dargomizhsky in Russian in addition to the Italian repertoire. There she met the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, who fell in love with her and lived next door to the Viardots until his death.

Pauline Viardot appeared in Paris only occasionally, because she was repeatedly exposed to hostility as the wife of Louis Viardot, a Republican and declared opponent of Louis Napoleon. However, the premiere of Meyerbeer's The Prophet (April 16, 1849) and her interpretation of the role of Fidès were an astounding triumph and she subsequently sang Fidès over 200 times on all the great European stages. But it was in the role of Gluck's Orpheus that her musical and dramatic artistry shone most brightly. The part had originally been written for a castrato, but Berlioz arranged it for Viardot and, as a result, the forgotten opera made its return to the stage (November 18, 1859). Other career milestones were the leading female roles in Beethoven's Fidelio, Gluck's Alceste and Verdi's Macbeth.

In 1863, at age 42, she retired from the stage and left France for political reasons. With her husband, three younger children (Claudine, born 1852, Marianne, born 1854, Paul, born 1857) and Turgenev, she settled in Baden-Baden. She taught female singers from all over the world and built an art gallery and small opera house in her garden, where she gave concerts with her pupils and children. There she also staged her own works – for which Turgenev wrote the librettos – before a cosmopolitan audience drawn from Baden-Baden society, including such luminaries as William of Prussia, Bismarck, Theodor Storm, and Anton Rubinstein at the piano. An orchestrated version of one of these pieces, Le dernier sorcier (1869), was also performed in public in Weimar (1869), in Riga and in Karlsruhe (1870). The first performance of Johannes Brahms' Alto Rhapsody (March 3, 1870) also took place during the Baden period.

The war between France and Germany and the fall of Napoleon III brought Pauline Viardot back to Paris, where she continued to teach and compose. Her compositions were mainly "salon operettas," among them Le conte de Fées (1879) and Cendrillon (1904). As in Baden, in Paris she held a prominent music salon, first in the Rue de Douai, then in the Boulevard St. Germain.

Viardot spoke fluent Spanish, French, Italian, English, German and Russian and composed in various national styles. Most of her more than one hundred songs and mélodies were published during her lifetime. Other publications included Viardot's own singing method, based on her father's Garcia school of singing, entitled Une heure d’étude; a collection of selected songs and arias with comments on phrasing, articulation, and interpretation; and a critical edition of fifty Schubert songs. In addition to her compositions and arrangements, these publications are today an important source of information about 19th century performance practices.

In the last years of her life, she nursed both her husband and Turgenev until their deaths in 1883, then continued to teach and compose until her own death on May 18, 1910, at age 89.