“I was in love with her, with her compositions, with her conversation, with her wit … She was the prototype of a cosmopolitan European woman, creator and muse of creators.” Pauline Viardot elicited an irresistible mix, “talent” and “a magnetic character”. This is how Andrés Moreno Mengíbar, music critic of the Joly Group and coordinator of the symposium that from this November 25 brings us closer to the figure of this Parisian of Spanish descent whose bicentennial celebrates with pleasure and success the Spanish Music Festival of Cádiz.
“And there are already several years in which this festival has concerned itself with recovering some of Viardot’s works. In fact, in previous editions his two complete chamber operas have been heard, Cinderella and The last sorcerer”, Recalls the expert on the work of the Ministry of Culture to make visible the composer daughter of the Sevillian tenor Manuel García, “Which by the way, began his career in Cádiz in 1791 until he went to Madrid in 99 as responsible for the tours of the theaters in the capital,” he adds.
And it is that Pauline Viardot, born Paulina García (Paris, 1821-1910), is part of a saga of composers and performers that will also be treated during the cycle of conferences and concerts that begins today and that will run until next Saturday within the framework of the Cadiz festival. Activities organized with the aim of getting closer to the figure of a woman whose living room was the center of the European intelligentsia of her time.
“Pauline, who was first trained as a pianist, was tested by her parents as a singer when her sister, María García, a true singing diva, let’s say the María Callas of the time, died suddenly two months after suffering a fall from a horse. Pauline was then 15 years old and her mother then tested her voice and told her that she had to be heir to the place her sister had left ”. An enormous weight that the young woman not only faced but also overcame becoming “an interpreter among the number 1 in Europe,” she says. Moreno Mengíbar.
Therefore, la Viardot had a first musical life as a professional singer and many composers created music for her, “in addition to being an excellent singing teacher as was her father.”
“Already married to the French Hispanist Louis Viardot and living together with the Russian writer Iván Turguénev, in a very fruitful intellectual and loving threesomeIt was when his home in Paris became the scene of a series of creations composed by Viardot and by different musicians friends. Their evenings became a very cosmopolitan cultural nucleus to which every self-respecting creator wanted to be invited ”, says the expert who puts together a series of conferences for the festival“ which should have been held last year but with the restrictions due to the alarm health care was not possible ”but now“ we have focused more on Pauline Viardot for her bicentennial ”.
A symposium entitled Pauline Viardot. Heart of europe that this Thursday will focus precisely on the artist’s origins, “in the García family, at the García singing school, a teaching method that begins with Manuel, which continues with his son Manuel García, the author of a very important musical treatise, and with Pauline herself and that reaches even her daughters and has reminiscences to this day “, details the music critic .
To address these aspects, the appointment will include Mar Donaire, singing teacher at the Conservatorio Superior de Granada, “who has thoroughly studied the García school, especially the figure of Manuel Jr. and the contributions of Pauline and her daughter Louise” , who will dialogue with Malgorzata Kubala, musical researcher and musicologist, Master of Singing at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw, “who has investigated and applied the García singing school with his students to demonstrate its viability,” says Moreno Mengíbar that points out that “each day will culminate with a concert”. Thus, on this first day, it will be the violinist Javier Comesaña and the pianist Ricardo Alí who will show chamber music on the Pauline Viardot program, “some of those compositions that emerged in the heat of those salon evenings”. From 6 morceaux for violin and piano from Viardot itself at 3 romances for violin and piano op.17 of Clara Schumann going through Sonata for violin and piano No. 1 in A major op. 13 of Gabriel Fauré a Isoldes’ love death from the opera Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner.
Tomorrow, Friday, her facet as a composer of “operetta songs and chamber music” will be discussed with the participation of the Argentine musicologist Patricia Kleinmann, “who is a scholar of Viardot’s scores and knows his manuscripts well in her search for lesser-known works. ”, And the musicologist from the Conservatory of Seville Miguel Ángel López,“ who is the one who has made the critical edition of the latest discovery about Viardot, a series of 20 songs in Spanish of which there was no record”, Details the expert who, together with a musicologist, was the author of the finding at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. A corpus of songs that can be heard on Saturday night at the Palacio de Congresos in the voices of Natalia Labourdette and Helena Resurreiçao, with Francisco Soriano at the piano and in the musical direction, in what will be “a premiere of these compositions in times modern ”.
That same Saturday, the theoretical day will revolve around Pauline Viardot “as the center of that European cosmopolitan culture”, A subject that will be faced by professor Alberto González Troyano and baritone Jorge Chaminé, director of the European Music Center installed in the Villa Viardot de Bouguival, which was Pauline’s family home.
The concert on Friday, for its part, is linked to this day on Saturday with the title An evening at Bougival, a recital where the soprano Ruth Rosique and the pianist Juan Carlos Garvayo will give life to part of those creations related to the passionate life of the love trio in Bougival, a place where personalities such as Chopin, Liszt, Verdi, Brahms, Lamartine, Dickens, Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, the Dumas, Maupassant, the Goncourts passed. , Delacroix, the Schumanns or Wagners, who were some of the close friends of the hosts of the house.
“Pauline had a long life, she died at the age of 90 and was composing almost until the end of her life”, summarizes Moreno Mengíbar who adds that, however, her compositions were forgotten during “too long stages” and that only “timidly ”Some interpreters sang some of his pieces. “We could say that It has been 15 years now when it has been investigated in the many documents and manuscripts that are preserved of Pauline ”and this bicentennial has given“ the definitive impulse ”to her work, which has already begun to be established in the regular program of the singers”.
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