Pauline Viardot-García, a French born singer and composer of Spanish descent, was a leading figure in late-19th century musical life throughout Europe. She was born into a famous musical family; her father, Manuel García, was an esteemed vocal pedagogue and her older sister, Maria Malibran, was one of the most adored opera singers of her time. Viardot quickly became a sensation after her operatic debut in London and enjoyed an international career of stardom that she maintained for most of her adult life. She made significant contributions to the operatic stage, music composition and in the world of music salons, which she often held in her home. She also had a tremendous influence on the careers of many of France’s most well known composers including Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Gounod, Berlioz, Meyerbeer and Fauré.

 While her voice was the instrument through which she achieved her great career and was able to provide guidance to the many French composers that admired her, Viardot’s operatic success only spanned a period of twenty-two years due to the strain she put on her voice and her insistence to sing any music she enjoyed, whether it suited her or not. Her later life was devoted to teaching voice and composing music.

As a composer, Viardot was drawn to dramatic texts. She wrote 100 songs in several different languages and styles with the technical abilities of herself and her students in mind. She set poems by Musset, Turgenev, Pushkin, Gautier, Mörike, and Goethe. Most of her music was published while she was still alive, a testament to her popularity and to the quality of her compositions. She often worked with publishers in France, Germany, and Russia, to ensure her music was distributed to a wide variety of people. Some of her most well known songs were transcriptions of 12 Chopin mazurkas, for which she received permission from Chopin to write. In addition, she arranged some of Schubert’s waltzes, one of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances as a duet, and several movements of Haydn’s string quartets for voice and piano. Beyond her song output, Viardot composed four operettas (three with with libretti by Ivan Turgenev), an opera, Cendrillon, chamber music, and several small-scale piano works. She also wrote cadenzas for well-known arias both for herself and for her students. Some of these have been published.

Source: A Modern Reveal