"I am counting on you to make the revolution in art that the people are currently making in politics," was the mandate that George Sand, one of the most powerful writers of her time, gave to the seventeen-year-old musician in 1848 Gave way. Pauline García was born in Paris on July 18, 1821, in a family where you literally breathed music. She was the youngest of the three children of the Spanish singer couple Manuel García père and Maria-Joaquina Sitchez. Her brother Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García later invented the larynx mirror as a singing teacher; her sister Maria Malibran became Europe's prima donna des Belcantos, who thanks to Cecilia Bartoli has been brought back into public awareness today. Pauline García spent the formative childhood years with her family "on the way",that is, outside of so-called orderly bourgeois relationships. Back then, that meant for a girl an unusually large amount of leeway beyond gender-specific expectations, as well as the promotion of all musical abilities and skills that were required in an opera company, including the production of costumes and decorations.
First she was trained as a pianist, even by Franz Liszt, then after the early death of her sister as a singer. Her career took her to the European music metropolises of the time. Germany, England, Russia were their main countries of appearance. In France she was successful in 1849 as Fidès in Giacomo Meyerbeer's “Le prophète”, then in 1859 as Orphée in a version of Gluck's opera developed together with Hector Berlioz. But at the age of 42 she withdrew from the stage to live with her husband Louis Viardot and four children in the "summer capital of Europe" Baden-Baden. In close collaboration with the Russian writer Iwan Sergejewitsch Turgenjew, she now devoted herself entirely to composing and teaching. Especially in her stage plays, she closely linked the two.
She set Goethe and Heine to music, but also Pushkin and Fet
From the beginning of her career she had not only presented herself on stage as an outstanding singer actress, but also as a pianist and composer in concerts and salons.
She collected and arranged folk music from different countries and regions;
was soon also considered a specialist in music from bygone eras.
For an internationally active singer, it was neither extraordinary that she spoke different languages, nor that she possessed this musical versatility.
It was her - also in the stylistic sense - multilingual compositions and arrangements that made her an extraordinary figure.
To this day, her work poses many challenges in relation to current discussions about forms of cultural transfer: How to classify it, how to deal with it? Pauline Viardot composed Spanish boleros, Italian canzoni, French romances, mélodies and chansons, set poems by Mörike, Goethe and Heine as German songs and poems by Pushkin, Kolzow and Fet as Russian romances. Her catalog raisonné by Christin Heitmann (https://www.pauline-viardot.de/Werkverzeichnis.htm), which is accessible on the internet, proves her musical multilingualism up to the area of popular music, including a promotional song for an exotic soap.