Tourgueniev et pauline viardot biography

Pauline Viardot (–) was one of the most extraordinary women of the nineteenth century. She was raised in a family where, as Liszt put it, “genius seemed to be hereditary.” Her father, Manuel Garcia, born in Seville in , was the first Almaviva in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville ().

In , with the backing of Lorenzo da Ponte (the librettist for Mozart’s three great comic operas, then teaching Italian at Columbia), Garcia was the first to bring Italian opera to New York City. Viardot’s brother, Manuel, a reportedly indifferent baritone, eventually settled in London, where he became the most famous voice teacher of the day and invented the laryngoscope, a rather nerve-wracking apparatus (I speak from experience) that uses mirrors to allow the vocal folds to be seen in action.

Her sister was the fabled diva Maria Malibran, Donizetti’s first Maria Stuarda and Chopin’s “queen of Europe,” who died