Pauline Viardot as Salonniere

Abstract

Pauline Viardot was one of the foremost opera singers of her day, praised by audiences, critics and peers for her vocal abilities and dramatic sensibilities. Attracted by her musicality, her intelligence and the range, flexibility and quality of her voice, the biggest names in nineteenth-century European musical life hastened to enlist her talents. As a practicing composer, producing 150 original songs and 200 vocal arrangements across her lifetime, Viardot cultivated the careers of aspiring composers whose work she admired. At the same time, she nurtured a studio of pupils who were introduced in her salons to a circle of influential friends and colleagues drawn to the great salonniere. The ..