Enriching the French romance: Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s early cosmopolitan songs (1838-1850)

The development of the sentimental romance of the 1830s and 1840s into the more sophisticated genre of song known as mélodie is often linked to Gabriel Fauré and Henri Duparc’s early songs. In his seminal study, La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc, Frits Noske did much to correct this limited model by discussing the works of composers such as Charles Gounod, Hector Berlioz, Hyppolyte Monpou, and Louis Niedermeyer. The author, however, failed to consider the early songs of the influential French mezzo-soprano of Spanish origins, Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910). These compositions, close to thirty songs in French, German, Italian and Spanish, reflect the scope of her international operatic career and her facility to absorb different languages, musical styles, and cultures. Investigating the genesis of the early songs and analyzing and contextualizing them are key goals of the present dissertation. I intend to demonstrate through the examination of primary source material that the construction by influential contemporaries such as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, and Franz Liszt of Viardot-Garcia’s personality as cosmopolitan, versatile, and exotic qualified her in the eyes of the Romantic generation as a valid representative of the Other and thus a legitimate creator of a wide variety of musical styles. In particular, the consecration of young Viardot-Garcia’s fascinating musical personality in George Sand’s influential novel Consuelo (1842) determined the course and objectives of her career both as singer and composer during the 1840s. Through the publication of her two initial song albums, Viardot-Garcia contributed to the modification of expectations surrounding the typical French romance of the 1840s. Viardot-Garcia modernized its style by introducing into it foreign musical resources, thus liberating it from the formal regularity and musical weakness, which limited its expressive possibilities. The high quality of these publications in combination with the composer’s international fame pushed them into the vanguard of the revitalization tendency of French art song. Just as Berlioz and Gounod have been commonly embraced from the time of Ravel to our day as the fathers of French mélodie, Viardot-Garcia may now receive her own accolade as the mother of French mélodie.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Angélica Minero Escoba