La Voix Éternelle: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Pauline Viardot (Part One)

Contralto, Melissa Elsman and pianist Kathryn Southworth will be performing part one of this lecture–recital exploring the life and music of Pauline Viardot — 19th-century composer, opera prima donna, and celebrated vocal pedagogue. This first installment of La Voix Éternelle traces her extraordinary beginnings — from a child prodigy studying piano with Franz Liszt, to her operatic debut as Desdemona at Her Majesty’s Theatre at the young age of seventeen. She quickly became an international star, captivating audiences with her fire and dramatic intensity.

Viardot’s musical salons were attended by the greatest musicians, writers, and artists of her day. She helped launch careers of many and her artistry inspired a number of composers to write for her voice including Meyerbeer, Schumann, Brahms and Fauré. The novelist George Sand based the title character of Consuelo on her, while Russian writer Ivan Turgenev — deeply devoted to Viardot — drew lasting artistic inspiration from her.

The first major foreign opera star to perform in Russian, Viardot also introduced Russian music and literature to Western Europe. In this program, we explore French translations of her songs set to Russian poetry. Multilingual and cosmopolitan, she drew from many cultures, and we also perform her imaginative transcriptions of Frédéric Chopin’s Mazurkas, transforming beloved piano works into expressive pieces for voice and piano.

Despite being one of the most influential musicians of her era, Viardot’s legacy was long overshadowed — a fate shared by many women of her time — and only in recent decades has her remarkable artistry begun to receive the recognition it deserves.

This private event will take place at Pleasant View Retirement in Concord, NH. This event is a part of the Concord Community Music School’s Classical Concert Series, made possible by the New Hampshire Charitable Fondation’s Ellen Downing Waite and Edward Osgood Wait Fund.