Pauline Viardot-García: Queen of Bel Canto

The daughter of the great Romantic tenor Manuel García was born two-hundred years ago today.

To celebrate Viardot-García’s bicentennial, the New York Times published a scholarly article by Hilary Poriss, an associate professor at Northeastern University, focusing on the great singer’s compositions which are finding their way back into the public eye.

(Why we say “eye” and not “ear” is worth contemplation, don’t you think?)

Of course, she was more than an able composer, speaking multiple languages fluently without accent; first a world-class pianist, then an operatic star, and finally a voice teacher without peer.

Her famous brother Manuel García—touted as the inventor of the laryngoscope—called her “the genius of the family,” while musicians who sought her counsel referred to her as the “Oracle of Paris.”

I believe we see something of Viardot-García’s gravitas in the photo for this post: the great mezzo, who sang whatever she wanted, is seen in repose late in life in a Paris park, accompanied by her student, Mathilde de Nogueiras, who assumed the role of companion and caretaker after being trained by Viardot-García and given the stage name “Marcella.”

Nogueiras made her debut at La Scala, singing the role of Lucia in the 1880’s, then capped her career by singing the role of Marie in Viardot-García’s Cendrillion in 1904—very possibly when this photograph was taken. By this time, as noted by Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times in 1969, “She Was No Beauty, But—”, Viardot-García was…

“... confided to her apartment—bedridden, hard of hearing, almost blind from cataracts. Only her good friend Saint-Saëns remained from the old days. It remained for him to sum up what she stood for. Pauline Viardot, he wrote, had a voice that was super-human rather than human. She had a strange and powerful fascination. She had one defect: she plunged so furiously into every role that she ruined her voice. Then it was genius contending with adversity, and an entire generation knew her “only in a guise unworthy of her.”

Well, she wasn’t confined on this day, was she? Nor have her teachings been confined to the past, having been carried into the 20th century, principally by her student Anna E. Schoen-René and her student Margaret Harshaw—my entry to all things bel canto.

Viardot-García is said that have had a queenly grandeur about her, yet also a simplicity, appearing before her students in either black or lavender colored silk dresses with lace at the neck. And taught she did, much longer than she appeared as a singer, retiring from the stage when she was forty-two in 1863. Viardot-García lived until 1910, the same year that another great teacher of voice died, that being Giovanni Battista Lamperti.

It was the end of an era.

Photo Credit: New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.