University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Arts Arts Research & Publications 2011 The Musical Works of Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910) A chronological catalogue, with an index of titles and a list of writers set, composers arranged, & translators and arrangers; together with the musical incipits of works and a discography Waddington, Patrick; Žekulin, Nicholas G.; Zekulin, Nicholas G. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/48502 bibliography Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca The Musical Works of Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910) A chronological catalogue, with an index of titles and a list of writers set, composers arranged, & translators and arrangers compiled by Patrick Waddington together with the musical incipits of works and a discography compiled by Nicholas G. Žekulin New online edition, thoroughly revised, augmented and recast Heretaunga (New Zealand) and Calgary (Canada) 2011 © Patrick Waddington, 2001, 2004, 2011 and © Nicholas G. Žekulin, 2011. All rights reserved in all countries, including moral rights. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without authorisation. First published by Whirinaki Press in 2001. 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, 2004. New online edition, 2011. Viardot catalogue: introductory material ii Contents Note on the new online edition Bibliography 1. Chief published and online sources and authorities 2. Some relevant theses 3. Select modern collections and editions of the music Chronological catalogue Miscellaneous and undatable manuscripts Index of titles List of writers set, composers arranged, & translators and arrangers Chronological list of musical incipits Recordings of Pauline Viardot’s music Viardot catalogue: introductory material iii Note on the new online edition Pauline Viardot wrote a quite astonishing amount of music, yet never considered herself a composer by profession: she was rather a singer, pia- nist, teacher and materfamilias. The works that she produced arose from these other functions, and were frequently experiments, test pieces, or tasks for herself, her pupils and her children to undertake and have con- structive fun with. Some were simply adaptations of one kind or another from Chopin, Schubert, Brahms and other masters, or arrangements of popular French and Spanish airs. Her works carried no opus numbers, ex- isted in variant forms, often remained in manuscript, and were for the most part brief. As one of her pupils put it, ‘Unlike most composers, Viardot seemed unwilling to make her own compositions public. All her life she shrank from publicity in any form.’ That is not to say that Pauline Viardot’s music has no character or originality: far from it. Much of it ex- hibits that same genius and intellectual strength which distinguished her from lesser contemporaries on the concert platform or the operatic stage. As her career developed, the quantity and seriousness of what she wrote became ever more remarkable. It is both good and rewarding that a wave of modern performers should bring her fresh and enjoyable compositions to the attention of a music-loving public. But they remain essentially spontaneous and occasional, unlike that of the many composers who ad- mired her and counted her their colleague or friend: Liszt, Chopin, Schu- mann, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Berlioz, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Lalo, Hahn... It is because of her eclecticism, her ventures into many disparate fields, that Pauline Viardot’s work is best viewed from the chronological perspective of her lifetime. Among other things, the ar- rangement by year clearly demonstrates how busy and creative she was even in the long decades of her widowhood. Despite the foregoing, it should not be thought that Pauline Viardot as a composer has been ‘discovered’ only recently. As early as 1843 music critics were applauding her inventiveness, refinement, warmth and spe- cial charm. Later, Saint-Saëns among others praised her compositions highly, and in her maturity one commentator was so bold as to compare her songs to Schubert’s. At her death, Henri de Curzon stated that she had written four hundred and fifty works. How this figure was arrived at cannot be said, but it almost certainly counts as two or more each work that was reissued in a variant form or forms, for instance a song published originally in one language and later in another or others. It may well also embrace those many items not by Pauline Viardot herself which she used Viardot catalogue: introductory material iv in her Ecole classique du chant, and which for the sake of completeness are included in the present online catalogue. Four hundred and fifty is nevertheless a useful number to bear in mind as the tally of her pro- ductions creeps up, with hitherto unknown pieces continually surfacing in libraries and personal archives. Most of these are of course in manuscript, but a few published in now rare periodicals also remain to be located. This online catalogue will be able to do what its printed precursors could achieve only with difficulty and at great extra cost, namely to add from time to time such new items as may appear, as well as to correct or revise particular entries on the basis of fresh information. But our database has further aims. Ever since The Musical Works of Pauline Viardot-Garcia first appeared as a brochure in 2001, certain lim- itations then acknowledged have been hovering in the background. Some were partially addressed in the revised and enlarged second print edition (2004), but others still remained. With the veritable eruption of new in- terest in Pauline Viardot over recent years, especially in her composi- tions, and with the widespread diffusion of these both in recordings and on internet sites such as the MUGI Grundseite which has incorporated all the titles of her works that I had previously listed, it seemed appropriate to add to the present pioneering catalogue a register of musical incipits and a more comprehensive discography. The earlier editions included on- ly a selected list of recordings, and carried no incipits because of technic- al difficulties and my own relative musical illiteracy. My good friend and colleague Nicholas Žekulin, who has helped me with this work since the beginning and to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, has kindly supplied the needed sections. We have together taken the opportunity also to thoroughly revise the whole, making corrections of detail, expanding entries where necessary, and adding a number of new ones where works by Pauline Viardot have come to light since the last edition in 2004. By making the fruits of our research available on the internet we are, of course, laying ourselves open to the daily plundering of that medium, which gobbles up most of what is published despite the laws of intellectu- al property. Just as when one searches someone’s life on Google a dozen versions come up with an almost identical text, each claiming to be origi- nal, even so the findings in our catalogue will doubtless quickly appear on a number of different sites. We can only urge users to comply with our copyright but, more still, to respect those genuine historical sources and authoritative works that we rely upon, rather than the half-truths of blog- gers. The phenomenal explosion of interest in Pauline Viardot has gener- ated much solid research but has led also to a previously unimagined pop- ularisation of her life and work, sometimes to the point of extravagance. The inevitable errors which occasionally occur even in dependable pub- Viardot catalogue: introductory material v lished works and in theses about her, once not harmful in themselves, un- fortunately now have a way of becoming so by their constant replication on multifarious, sometimes highly inaccurate websites. For instance, an album called L’Oiseau d’or had nothing to do with Pauline Viardot, and I can find no justification for the often repeated statement that she wrote or published in 1879 a stage work entitled ‘Le Conte de fées’ (L’Ogre was of course so described in 1868). We are nevertheless fully aware that there may be deficiencies in our own work, and will welcome any fact-based comments or suggestions, whether for additions, corrections or improvement. ********************* Most sections of the present work should be self-explanatory, but it is necessary to say something more about the catalogue proper. The vast majority of published compositions by Pauline Viardot included there are held in the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Other important collections are to be found at the British Library, at Cambridge University Library, and in the Women Composers Collec- tion at the University of Michigan. The Malibran Society of Los Angeles, under the initiative of Carol Russell Law, has done excellent work in reprinting original scores. Numerous manuscript compositions are held in private archives, often referred to here but not named for reasons of con- fidentiality. The most significant public collections are at the Média- thèque Hector Berlioz in Paris, and in the Pauline Viardot-Garcia papers (MS Mus 232 and MS Mus 264) at the Houghton Library, Harvard Col- lege Library, Harvard University; both contain many printed works also. Most of the now public archives derive from the Chamerot-Decugis and Duvernoy-Beaulieu sides of the Viardot family; the Chamerot-Maupoil ones are still largely in private hands. Although many publishers’ records have disappeared, including those of Ries & Erler lost during World War II, it has been possible to supple- ment standard library information about Pauline Viardot’s compositions from music bibliographies such as the Hofmeister Monatsberichte (re- ferred to below as Whistling) and Pazdírek’s Universal-Handbuch. These often help with the challenging problem of dating published scores, few of which carried a year of issue, and many items can also be correctly placed in sequence thanks to accession stamps, press reviews, or refer- ences in the correspondence of Pauline Viardot’s friends and colleagues, including in particular the great Russian novelist Ivan Sergeyevich Tur- genev.