Queen of 19th Century Opera Strikes Again


Composers sought him out for major premieres: he was the first Fidès in Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” and Charles Gounod’s first Sapho. When Berlioz resurrected Gluck’s “Orpheo” for the Paris stage in 1859, Viardot was the diva he rewrote the lead role. Ten years later, Brahms chose him as a soloist for the premiere of Alto Rhapsody.

After retiring from the opera scene in 1863, Viardot continued to sing in concerts and become what we call macher today. He had the original manuscript of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, which composers including Fauré and Tchaikovsky made pilgrimages to see. In 1869 he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Richard Wagner congratulating him for his performance of “Die Meistersinger”. But the notorious anti-Semitic article “Judaism in Music”, published under his name the following month, worsened the relationship, and Wagner and his wife, Cosima, began to derisively refer to Viardot as “Jewish”. (He was not Jewish.)

Following his father, who was a talented composer and also a brilliant singer, Viardot devoted considerable time and energy to composing. His work is not as widely known in his social circle as the work of Robert Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns or others. However, his music was so deeply appreciated by his contemporaries that one went so far as to compare his talent to Schubert’s. Clara Schumann referred to her as “the greatest genius woman I’ve ever known”. An ardent advocate of his students, he died in 1910 just a month before his 89th birthday.

Today, their work is resurgent among scholars and artists, as part of the fascination with long-neglected composers like Amy Beach, Florence Price, Clara Schumann, and others.

Viardot wrote hundreds of works, mostly songs for solo voice and piano. his first “L’Enfant de la montagne” At the age of 19, Meyerbeer was published in a collection edited by Paganini and Cherubini. Like many of her songs, she was the biggest proponent of this song to showcase her vocal skills at concerts in Leipzig, Germany and other cities.



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