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  • The Life and Work of Pauline Viardot García, Volume I: The Years of Fame, 1836–1863
  • Harold Bruder
Barbara Kendall-Davies: The Life and Work of Pauline Viardot García, Volume I: The Years of Fame, 1836–1863Amersham, Buckinghamshire, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2003477 pages, $79.99

The focus of the recent revival of interest in Pauline Viardot García (1821–1910) is quite unexpected. While Viardot came from a distinguished musical family and was an important opera singer in the mid-nineteenth century, much of the current interest is centered on her musical compositions. Her songs have actually entered the mainstream after being long neglected. Outside of the well-known vocal arrangements of Chopin's mazurkas, little was performed outside of the salons during her lifetime. In part this rediscovery of a neglected nineteenth-century female composer seems politically correct in its timing, but Viardot's compositions are beautifully formed and communicate a romantic French charm. Opera Rara released a CD of her lovely salon operetta Cendrillon in 2000,1 and there have been a number of collections of her songs. Isabel Bayrakdarian's CD devoted to Viardot has brought a great deal of attention to the composer, in part because of the singer's recent Metropolitan Opera successes. The songs would have seemed to be an odd choice for an up-and-coming star, but they are a good match for Bayrakdarian's radiant lyricism and musicality. The sensitively textured accompaniments of her husband, Serouj Kradjian, also project Viardot's knowledgeable pianism.2 We know that Viardot accompanied herself in the salons.

The first volume of a complex and insightful biography of Viardot has now appeared. Barbara Kendall-Davies's The Life and Work of Pauline Viardot García, Volume I: The Years of Fame, 1836–1863 will be of great interest to those, like myself, who have been drawn to the legendary Viardot, but her life also gives the [End Page 773] reader an intimate view of the age of Romanticism. This volume covers her singing career, when she traveled throughout Europe as an unconventional star with a highly individualistic approach to operatic performance. Viardot was not the typical soprano with a beautiful face and voice to match; her rivals Giulia Grisi and Henriette Sontag better suited that description. While certainly not pretty, Viardot had a certain gestalt that made her memorable. Even today her image is immediately recognizable. While she sang soprano roles such as Desdemona, Elvira, Lucia, and Norma, she was truly a mezzo-soprano with an extended upper register, and she achieved even greater acclaim in contralto roles as her career progressed. Although Grisi and Sontag were fine actresses, descriptions of Viardot's performances reach for superlatives to detail the profound character of her interpretations.

Kendall-Davies sets Viardot's childhood years against the background of her remarkable family. Her father, Manuel del Pópolo Vicente Rodríguez García (1775–1832), the great Spanish tenor who created the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and a composer of considerable accomplishment, taught singing in both Paris and London. Besides his children, his pupils included the French tenor Adolphe Nourrit, who created several important Meyerbeer heroes including Raoul in Les Huguenots, as well as Eléazar in Halévy's La Juive. The elder García is often confused with his son, Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García (1805–1906). The younger García was originally a baritone and sang with the García troupe when they brought Italian opera to New York for the first time in 1825. His singing career was short-lived, and he began teaching upon his return to Paris. García Jr. popularized the García method and is renowned for inventing the laryngoscope as well as for teaching Jenny Lind, Catherine Hayes, and numerous others. His sister Maria-Felicia Malibran (1808–1836), fourteen years older than Pauline, is still legendary, although she died at the age of twenty-eight after a meteoric international career.

Barbara Kendall-Davies is a professional singer herself (a CD of her performance of six unusual Viardot songs is included with the book), and this...

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