Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Lieder Chansons Canzoni Mazurkas (And All that Jazz)

One of the most charming CDs to land on my desk in a long time is a multilingual collection of bouncy salon songs called Lieder Chansons Canzoni Mazurkas (Analekta)
written by the 19th century female singer and composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), once described by no less an authority than Berlioz as "one of the greatest artists...in the past and present history of music." Probably not, but there is certainly an enormous amount of pleasure to be had here.

Isabel Bayrakdarian, a saucy young Canadian soprano of Armenian extraction--probably the only world-class canary to hold a degree in biomedical engineering�breezes through these lively songs in French, Italian, Spanish and German with just the right sunny, bright touch needed to bring them to life for a new age. She is greatly abetted in this effort by Canadian-Armenian pianist Serouj Kradjian.

By any standard, Viardot-Garcia was a musical phenomenon, befriended by the most distinguished musicians and writers of Europe. In 1862 Charles Dickens wrote of one of her more than 150 appearances as Orpheus in Gluck's Orfeo et Euridice that it was "a most extraordinary performance - full of quite sublime acting." In addition to her singing career, she found time to compose four operettas (three to librettos by her lover Ivan Turgenev), and more than 200 songs and a few instrumental works. Some of her French songs were based on the mazurkas of Chopin who was said to be delighted with them. Robert Schumann's Op 24 and Saint-Sa�ns' Samson et Delila are dedicated to her.

Viardot-Garcia was born into a family of famous French singers of Spanish origin, several of whom were famous: her father, Manuel Garcia, who, among other things, had premiered the role of Figaro in Rossini�s The Barber of Seville; her mother, Maria Joaquina Sitches; her elder brother, Manuel Jr.; and her elder sister Maria, a living legend by her early twenties known as �La Malibran,� the surname of her first husband. La Malibran died accidentally at the age of 28 in 1836, and Pauline, then barely 16 with a range of three and a half octaves, was encouraged to fill her shoes.

In 1840, Pauline Garcia married the writer and director of the Th��tre Italien in Paris, Louis Viardot, who was 21 years her elder. Shortly after their wedding, he resigned his position to manage his wife�s career, accompanying her to cities such as Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, London, St. Petersburg�wherever fame took her. While they were in Russia, Turgenev fell so deeply in love with her that he hovered near the Viardot family for the rest of his life.

In 1863, at the age of 42, Viardot-Garcia retired to Baden-Baden, where she began to teach using her father�s method and compose. The fall of Napoleon III and the creation of the Third Republic in 1890 allowed the Viardots, confirmed republicans, to return to Paris, where Pauline lived until her death in 1910 at the age of nearly 90.

Georges Sand predicted in 1840 that "The appearance of Miss Garcia will be a shining moment in the history of women�s art. The genius of this musician, both accomplished and inspired, demonstrates a progress of intelligence that has never before been so conclusively manifested in the feminine sex." A bit patronizing, perhaps, but as this splendid recording demonstrates, Pauline Viardot-Garcia was more than just a footnote in the lives of great men.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/03/2005