The unanswered question: Did she sleep with Wagner? (Her opera’s streaming tonight)
OperaThe singer and composer Pauline Viardot was at the heart of artistic life in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, counting George Sand, Chopin, Gounod, Berlioz, Donizetti and Richard Wagner among her friends and admirers. Offenbach’s contagious influence also filled Paris at the time with operetta, vaudeville and opéra-comique. Reflecting this wave of dance and joyful songs, Cendrillon is a gentle hedonistic operetta first performed in the composer’s own salon, filled with waltzes, mazurkas and polkas; nostalgic music at a time when atonality was dawning. Slippedisc, courtesy of OperaVision, is streaming a new production from Palau de les Arts in Valencia. Under the stage direction of veteran Catalan director and actor, Joan Font, who has drawn his cast from the prestigious young talent of the Palau de les Arts’ Centre de Perfeccionament . He weaves into the show popular songs, a blend of traditional Zarzuela with rhythms from France, from an enormous repertoire generated in Spain between 1900 and the Spanish Civil War. This is a carnival production, which transforms the stage into an explosion of colours and shapes; a journey from France to Spain, from the intimacy of a salon to the freshness of a café cantante.
The cast includes Marcelo Solís as Le baron de Pictordu, Rosa Dávila as Cendrillon and Mariana Sofía as Armelinde.
Subtitles are in French, Spanish, English and German.
The opera is streamed on 31 March 2023 at 1900 CET/ 1800 London / 1300 NY.
The Plot: a removals company discovers a room full of curiosities among them a book of Cendrillon. What better way for a group of friends to pass the time than to perform this famous fairy tale about Cinderella and the glass slipper?
Director, Joan Font, introduces his production (subtitles available)
Performance this evening:
The famous Russian writer Ivan Turgenev “fell head over heels in love with her and thereafter followed her all over Europe, eventually resigning himself to the role of a family friend in the Viardot household”.
So, Turgenev was a love sick puppy, but lacked Wagner’s will to power?
Why, in a promotional piece for your own stream, are you talking down one of the preeminent musical stars of the 19th century? Do you want to promote her music or not? You could have mentioned that Viardot composed hundreds of songs in a long and illustrious career and that she was also an exceptional pianist, her original intended vocation, who studied with Liszt and collaborated with Chopin. But instead you’d prefer to make up some gossip. Whatever. Very few comments so far, I wonder why . . .