5 Songs

Morirò

L’enfant et la mère

Grands oiseaux blancs

Bonjour mon coeur

Aime-moi (1848)

Pauline Viardot did not think of herself as a composer: she know far too many distinguished representatives of the art – Rossini, Berlioz, Chopin, Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner – to harbour any illusions about the quality of her own creativity. She made her reputation as a singer, creating a sensation soon after the early death of her elder sister Maria Malibran in 1836, and she dominated the operatic stage until she retired in 1863. She did, however, write four operettas, three of them to libretti by her lover Ivan Turgenev, and more than 100 songs which, acccording to Saint-Saëns, “are proof of a consummate ability.”

Moriró, a passionate setting of anonymous poem from Tuscany, is a good example of her concern for local colour, while L’enfant et la mère, a domesticated derivative of Schubert’s Erlkönig, illustrates Viardot’s skill in vocal characterisation. One of her most ambitious songs, Grands oiseaux blancs, applies operatic gestures to a Louis Pomey poem unfortunately less than worthy of them. Bonjour mon coeur, on the other hand, is a delightful combination of flirtatious text by the 16th century poet Pierre de Ronsard with an appropriately light-hearted setting offering just a hint of archaism here and there. Aime-moi is one of the several Chopin mazurkas (Op.33 No.2 in this case) which Viardot arranged as songs. In spite of Pomey’s words, Chopin liked them so much that he insisted on accompanying her in performing them.