And a Most August Album and Edition,
on the Bicentennial of Pauline Viardot-García
Few musical dynasties compare to the one that included Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), née García. Anyone who knows any classical-music history knows of the dynasties whose most famous exponents were J.S. Bach, and W.A. Mozart, and Johann Strauss II; most also know of the dynasty that began with Richard Wagner; and many are familiar with the musical clans that included Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn, or Clara Wieck Schumann and Robert Schumann.
But the dynasty whose central figure was Pauline Viardot is arguably the most formidable in all of music history – or, perhaps better, music herstory. It includes not only Viardot-García herself, but also the legendary soprano Maria Malibran (her older sister, 1808-1836) and the great baritone and vocal pedagogue Manuel García fils (her brother, 1805-1906), inventor of the laryngoscope. The siblings’ parents were the great tenor, composer, and vocal pedagogue Manuel (del Pópulo Vicente Rodríguez) García (1775-1832) and the renowned actress and soprano María Joaquina García, née Sitches Irisarr (1780-1864). Viardot’s sisters-in-law and nephew, as well as the latter’s wife, son, and daughter-in-law, were also renowned singers and pedagogues who composed. Taken together, the members of this family were central and in many ways seminal figures of the world’s musical stages from the Napoleonic era to the death of Florence Storm Taylor (wife of Viardot’s great-nephew) in 1986 (nineteen eighty-six!).
Pauline Viardot was the center of it all.[1]Though often described as a singer, she did not officially take up that vocation until after Malibran’s death in 1836; by then she had already acquired a reputation as a pianist (she studied with Liszt and Meysenberg) and composer (having studied with Antoine Reicha, best known today as the teacher of Berlioz). Her enormous range (three octaves) and stylistic versatility were the stuff of legend, and her performances of her own songs, accompanying herself at the piano, were sufficient to impress Robert Schumann, who published one of her songs in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and dedicated his Heine Liederkreis (Op. 24) to her. Her vocal artistry and brilliant, engaging personality inspired composers as diverse as Berlioz, Chopin, Fauré, Gounod, Liszt, Massanet, Meyerbeer, Saint-Saëns, Schumann, and Wagner. I can’t resist pointing out here that she corresponded extensively with Clara Schumann and performed piano duets with her, or that she was also an active salonnière, an organist, an editor of music, and an important figure in the nineteenth-century French revival of interest in Gluck.)
And we’ve just celebrated her bicentennial. Born in 1821, for nearly three-quarters of a century, from Malibran’s death to her own death in 1910, she was not only materfamilias of an extraordinary musical dynasty, but also a teacher whose pedagogy touched countless lives, a singer who thrilled all who heard her, and a composer whose talent and versatility were unanimously acknowledged by musicians who, let’s face it, agreed on little else.
So it seems appropriate for me to close my cycle of 2021 blog posts with a few remarks on some of this bicentennial’s acknowledgments of Viardot’s great and enduring legacy – specifically, one edition of music and one album[2]:
The Edition: Pauline Viardot: Five Spanish Songs, ed. Patricia Kleinman ([Worcester, Mass.]: Hildegard Publishing, 2021). Viardot spoke fluent English, French, German, Italian, and Russian, as well as her native Spanish, but because of the geography of her professional life as well as the politics of classical music her songs in her native tongue have maintained only a peripheral presence. This edition is a welcome corrective to that cultural chauvinism – and those who use it will immediately recognize the stylistic differences between what might be termed Viardot’s “Spanish countenance” and the one that she adopted for other national styles. It’s authentic and beautiful Spanish romanticism (pace, fans of Carmen), joyous and rich and playful and thoughtful and probing. This is just the most recent of Hildegard's editions advocating musically for Viardot, incidentally: they also published her Twelve Lieder (ed. Catherine Sentman Anderson), her Six Morceaux for violin and piano (ed. Linda Plaut), and her Sonatine for violin and piano (ed. Linda Burian Plaut).
(Readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of Hildegard Publishing in general – I turned to them early on when I began planning my series of editions of the music of Margaret Bonds – because they produce high-quality editions of music by women, and do so with a commitment that’s not to be taken for granted in the male-dominated world of music publishing. So maybe I’m biased – but I’m biased for a reason, and it’s a good one!)
The album: The Unknown Pauline Viardot: Chamber Songs and Duets (Cezanne Producciones CZ090, 2021). This album includes the five Spanish songs just mentioned along with fourteen other songs and duets in English, French, and Italian. All but two of the tracks are world-première recordings. Along with Lori Laitman’s Are Women People? (about which more here), it’s arguably the most important album of 2021 – a sonic snapshot of the multifaceted and incredibly genre-fluid creative personality of the central figure in one of the nineteenth century’s truly seminal musical dynasties. My own favorite tracks are probably “El Corazón triste,” the duet “Fandango,” “Canción Española” (with an absolutely gorgeous cadenza near the end), and the beautiful setting of Byron’s “There Be None of Beauty’s Daughters” (Stanzas for Music, track 7) – but honestly it’s hard to choose . . .
And that’s not the point anyway. What is the point is that this album is a creative enterprise of the highest order, as indicated by its already having won the Melónamo de Oro Award from the Spanish music periodical Melónamo Digital. Its artistic director, Patricia Kleinman, is a musicologist who has a brilliant record as a student of, and advocate for, unpublished compositions by women – one with considerable strengths in the increasingly rare disciplines of the study of musical manuscripts (philology, stemmatics, musical paleography, and the like), and the founding director of Proyecto CompositorAs, a creative venture dedicated to bringing reliable editions of women composers’ music to light in performance. U.S. Mezzo soprano Anna Tonna and Argentine soprano Corina Feldkamp are both superb, with brilliant technique and a gift for lyricism and crystalline delivery that is perfectly suited to this repertoire’s styles. Their duets are also an absolute delight. And pianist, jurist, and activist Dr. Isabel Dobarro, a collaborator with Anna Tonna in the initiative Women in Music, gives a vivid impression of Viardot’s understanding of that instrument, with sparkling and rich tones that complement the vocal writing perfectly. If you want to hear five of the many facets of Pauline Viardot’s extraordinary personality – as soprano, as mezzo-soprano, as duettist, as pianist, and as composer, then this album comprised almost entirely of world-premiere recordings is for you. (We do not get to see Viardot the teacher, alas – not directly, anyway.)
Many (maybe most) readers of this post are teachers; even more are musicians; and a few are musicologists. All know that I spend much time complaining about the inertia-bordering-on-solipsistic-stasis of the world of classical music, and of musicology as a discipline – about our tendency to rehearse things we already know, repeat music we’ve already heard, focus on the known while fleeing from the unfamiliar, the unknown, the obscure. And about our tendency to indulge in critique while displaying little interest in the subject (music) that is ostensibly at the heart of all we, as musicians, do. And so this review (thank you for sticking with me) celebrating the importance and originality of an edition and an album that were willed into existence through the scholarly expertise of Patricia Kleinman and the vision, courage, and artistry of Corina Feldkamp, Anna Tonna, and Isabel Dobarro will come as no surprise to anyone: the world of classical music needs scholarship like this, editions like this, albums like this, and artists like this a thousand times more than it needs another fifty recordings of the Süßmaier-Mozart Requiem, the odd-numbered symphonies, late sonatas, and middle quartets of Beethoven, or any other works by dead White European male composers who have been sacralized beyond recognition and ground into the ground through endless repetition in the imaginary museum of musical works that constitutes the Western musical canon. Rendering the “unknown” in The Unknown Pauline Viardot factually incorrect is a far nobler, and far more musically rewarding, cause. It is a cause that acknowledges an august composer who was the epicenter of an august musical dynasty on the august occasion of that composer’s bicentennial. And it is the cause taken up by this edition and this album.
So there’s work to do, and lots of it. If you don’t know much about Pauline Viardot-García already, you have two days (and counting!) to do so before you’ve missed the bicentennial. Beatrix Borchard’s article in Grove Music Online is a great starting place for those who read English, and the German counterpart to it in the “Lexikon” section of Musik und Gender im Internet (MUGI) is great for those who read German. There also two catalogs of her work as a composer: Patrick Waddington’s The Musical Works of Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910) A Chronological Catalogue, with an Index of Titles and a List of Writers Set, Composers Arranged, & Translators and Arrangers . . . together with the Musical Incipits of Works and a Discography compiled by Nicholas G. Žekulin (2001, rev. 2004; revised and published online, 2011); and Christin Heitmann’s Pauline Viardot: Systematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (VWV), begun in 2007 and freely available (also in English) since 2012. These resources are fine starting points – but there is a great deal yet to do, especially where understanding Viardot’s work as a composer and her influence as a teacher and salonnière are concerned.
Let’s get started.
[1] The married name comes from Louis Viardot, a theatrical director, art historian, critic, and noted republican opponent of Louis Bonaparte. [2] It’s actually been a banner year for Viardot editions. In addition to the two volumes commented on here, Miriam Alexandra issued the first volume of a planned series of volumes of selected songs (Pauline Viardot-García: Ausgewählte Lieder, Bd. 1 [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2021]), as well as 5 toscanische Gedichte (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2021). Furore-Verlag (Kassel) headed into the year already late in 2020, with the release of the collection Pauline Viardot singt Pushkin: 16 Lieder für eine Singstimme mit Klavier, ed. Marc Pierre with support from Marie-Hélène Pierre. I have not yet been able to examine these volumes.