Pauline Viardot was born Pauline García in Paris in 1821, into a family of musicians of Spanish origin. Her mother Joaquina Sitches was a singer, her father Manuel García a famous tenor, her elder sister Maria Malibran was one of the most renowned singers of the 19th century, and her brother Manuel García junior became a well-known voice teacher. She learned to play piano at a young age, with both Chopin and Liszt lauding her talent. As an adolescent, she studied composition privately under Anton Reicha, but stopped before learning orchestration. Despite wanting to become a pianist, she was forced by her mother (who was her voice teacher) to begin a career as a singer, becoming a famous diva like her sister. In 1843, a vocal album she published was lauded for its form and the quality of the piano parts, placing her at the vanguard of the mélodie. Her 1850 album served as further confirmation of her inspiration. She ended her singing career in the 1860s, and from then on intensified her work as a composer, leaving behind over three hundred pieces: most of these are for voice and piano and based on poems in French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, and English, and mark her as one of the greatest composers of mélodies of the 19th century. A very in-demand voice teacher with a strong attachment to the musical salon, she also composed several operettas with piano on librettos by her friend Ivan Tourguéniev, which served to initiate her students into operatic singing. One such operetta, Le Dernier Sorcier, was first performed at her villa in Baden-Baden in 1867 and reprised to great success in Weimar in 1869, with orchestration by Eduard Lassen. This led to a commission for an opera, which she turned down. It can be supposed that, like her planned – and ultimately abandoned – collaboration with George Sand on La Mare au Diable, her deficiencies in instrumentation prevented her from fully expressing her creativity through opera.

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]