From £37.99
From £37.99
Pauline Viardot was a seminal 19th-century opera singer, composer, and teacher whose friends included Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. Loved by Ivan Turgenev, she was a fascinating woman at the heart of her age. This volume covers her later years.
This is the second volume of the Life and Work of Pauline Viardot Garcia: The Years of Grace, 1863–1910. Viardot was an international opera singer, composer and teacher who was seminal in the world of music in the 19th century. She came from a famous family of musicians, her father being the Spanish tenor Manuel del Popolo Vicente Rodriguez Garcia. Her mother, Joaquina Sitchès, was also a singer and taught Pauline; her brother Manuel Patrizio Garcia was an eminent singing teacher and inventor of the laryngoscope and her sister was the legendary singer, Maria Malibran. Her friends and colleagues are household names, including the writer, George Sand and her lover Frederick Chopin, Clara and Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Franz Liszt who gave Pauline piano lessons and on whom she had a girlish crush. Though considered ugly, she had a unique fascination and several men fell in love with her, including her husband, Louis Viardot, historian and man of letters; the Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev; Maurice Sand, artist son of George Sand; the composers Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz, as well as her mentor, the painter, Ary Scheffer.
Although famous in her day, after her death in 1910, she fell into obscurity but her songs are appearing again and her influence as a teacher of singing has spread worldwide.
The first volume of the Kendall-Davies biography covers Viardot’s international singing career from 1836 to 1863 and the second volume, although also featuring her performances, concentrates more fully on her work as a composer and teacher as well as a famous musical hostess.
In addition to being the life of a fascinating woman, both professionally and personally, the book is also a portrait of an age, culturally, socially and politically.
As Kendall-Davies’s first volume, the Life and Work of Pauline Viardot Garcia: The Years of Fame, 1836–1863, was only the second Viardot biography in English, her work has been seminal and has attracted interest worldwide. The second volume: The Years of Grace, 1863–1910, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, has been enthusiastically anticipated and includes a CD of three Viardot songs performed by baritone, Giles Davies.
This anthology of Ukrainian carols is a prism through which Ukraine’s history, culture, and vibrant spirit are revealed. It includes the original “Carol of the Bells,” music scores, translations, and the gripping narratives of choral activism that helped a nation survive.
Sonic Mediations is a collection of essays that invites readers to rethink mediation by examining the relationships between the body, sound, and technology. It addresses key questions about performance, perception, and the role of the listener.
Once a titan of opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s legacy was all but erased. Based on newly recovered private papers, this definitive biography reveals the man behind the myth, charting his downfall and modern rediscovery.
The first major book to apply the timely notion of “glocality” to music, it offers a distinctive theoretical perspective and advanced insights into how music is impacted by the interaction of global forces with local conditions.
This collection of essays provides valuable insights into the richness of sources dealing with music and musical performance scattered over 3000 years and covering a wide range of geographies, from Syria to Iberia, through Greece and Rome.
Ludwig Minkus is one of music’s biggest mysteries. An influential composer for Imperial Russia’s ballet, he was scorned by critics. Now his works Don Quixote and La Bayadère are taking the world by surprise. This study discovers the man behind the powerful music.
Esteemed composer Jennifer Higdon writes fascinating and profound choral music. This book explores her works, citing the extensive relationship of the music to the texts. It presents compositional characteristics, analysis, and insights directly from the composer.
The role of scents in opera and its influence on perfumery has long been neglected. In the first book-length study on the topic, Professor Mary May Robertson explores the previously undiscussed connection between the two, revealing their ultimate marriage in Operatic Perfumes.
Once regarded as a great figure of music, with an impact as great as Rossini’s, Daniel-François-Esprit Auber is now neglected. The time has come to reassess his life and work, especially his collaboration with master librettist Eugène Scribe, and hear his elegant music again.
Once famous, now obscure, Pauline Viardot Garcia was one of the most important singers of the 19th century. A superb singer, composer, and pianist, she was a muse to composers, a friend of Chopin and George Sand, and loved by Ivan Turgenev.
A superb singer and composer, Pauline Viardot Garcia was a 19th-century muse to Brahms and Meyerbeer. Loved by Turgenev for forty years, she was a musical genius. This first comprehensive biography in English reveals the life of this forgotten powerhouse.
