ABSTRACT
The previous chapter ended with the Gautier song Chanson du pêcheur, and its distinguished dedicatee merits a chapter of her own in the story of Fauré’s songs. In 1872 Camille Saint-Saëns introduced his twenty-seven-year-old protégé into the salon of Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), one of the most renowned singers and musical personalities of the nineteenth century. She was born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline Garcia, daughter of Manuel Garcia, the famed singing teacher, and younger sister of that incandescent soprano Maria Malibran, the Callas of her epoch, who had died tragically young and whose life has been recently chronicled in a programme pre-sented and sung by Cecilia Bartoli. Although Pauline was married to the French critic Louis Viardot (who wrote among many other things an exhaustive series of books on the museums of Europe), she became the muse and mistress of Ivan Turgenev, whom she had met on a Russian tour in 1843. The novelist and playwright soon afterwards attached himself to her household, and she composed four operettas to his libretti. Fifty years later, in an interview with Roger Valbelle, Fauré reminisced fondly about the great Russian writer: ‘he was the big shot, a fine looking man, and of a gentleness that was even more appealing. I have kept the memory of the sound of his voice to the extent that whenever I read one of his books, it seems that I can actually hear him.’ 2
