George Sand and Pauline Viardot: Consuelo

Pauline Viardot by Ary Scheffer, 1840 (detail). Image: Musée de la Vie Romantique

Pauline Garcia was the younger sister of the soprano Maria Malibran and the daughter of the singer, composer and vocal teacher Manuel Garcia. (As a measure of Manuel Garcia's skill and renown, the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini's Barber of Seville was written for him.) But both Maria and Manuel were deceased by the time Pauline made her professional singing debut in the fall of 1837 at age 16. She gave her first Parisian performance at a salon a year later; George Sand heard her sing shortly afterwards and immediately took an intense interest in her. [1]

Pauline became famous, if not quite overnight, very rapidly. In May 1839 she made her opera debut as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello at London's Covent Garden, and was invited to give a private performance for the 19-year-old Queen Victoria (Victoria wrote that "I was delighted with Garcia, who will I think surpass her poor sister." [2]) Five months later Pauline made her first Parisian opera appearance at the Théâtre Italien, again as Desdemona, followed by Angelina in Rossini's La Cenerentola and Rosina in his Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Pauline Viardot by P. I. Solokov. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Everywhere her singing caused a sensation. While we can't know what she sounded like, a contemporary reviewer praised her for "the agility of her voice, that approaches the incredible, the surety of her most audacious intonations, the ravishing charm. . ." [3] Another critic wrote that "she possesses one of the most magnificent instruments ever heard. . .the medium tones have an indescribable sweetness and penetration that moves the heart. Hearing it is stupendous." [4]

Perhaps we can hear a hint of these qualities in certain modern singers, such as Joyce DiDonato or Cecilia Bartoli. Here is Cecilia Bartoli singing Desdemona's "Willow Song" ("Assisa al piè d’un salice") and prayer ("Deh, calma") from Act III of Otello [5]:

https://youtu.be/ScngLHsWwhY?t=4

After her triumphs on the opera stage Pauline was besieged by admirers, including Sand's former lover Alfred de Musset, who wrote that "she sings as naturally as she breathes." [6] Sand was instrumental in steering Pauline away from de Musset and arranging her marriage to Louis Viardot, the director of the Théâtre Italien, who had been an advisor to Maria Malibran. The marriage took place in April 1840; Pauline was 18, and Viardot was, at 39, old enough to be her father.

It may seem odd that, given her experience of unhappiness in her own marriage to an older man she did not love, Sand so strongly advised Pauline to marry Viardot. But as Sand may have anticipated, Viardot served three invaluable functions for Pauline. First, opera singers, like actresses, were often seen as morally questionable; after her marriage Pauline was referred to on posters and in programs as "Madame Viardot," her marital status confirming her respectability. Second, many husbands refused to allow their wives to perform in public; this prohibition was incorporated into the plot of Sand's early story "La Prima Donna" (1831) in which an opera diva is forced by her new husband to retire from the stage (see George Sand: Indiana). As an opera impresario, Louis Viardot was unlikely to place restrictions on Pauline's professional activities. In fact, when Viardot married Pauline he was the one who quit his job as theater director to take on the role of her manager. Finally, Viardot was able to provide the material and emotional security that enabled Pauline to devote herself entirely to her artistic career.

Consuelo (1842-43)

Title page of Consuelo. Source: Bibliothèque national de France

Sand's interest in Pauline did not stop with helping to arrange her marriage; she was also inspired to write a novel, Consuelo, modeled on and dedicated to her. The heroine is an orphaned Spanish gypsy waif who is discovered singing in a Venetian church. The aging composer Nicola Porpora becomes her singing master; the novel takes place around 1750, when the historical Porpora, onetime rival of Handel and teacher of the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli, would have been in his mid-60s.

Nicola Porpora. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Eventually the predatory impresario Count Zustiniani arranges Consuelo's opera debut. But her ravishing voice and natural, unaffected onstage demeanor excite the jealousy of the reigning diva Corilla, who is Zustiniani's current mistress. Consuelo, though, refuses to engage in rivalry with Corilla; she shuns Zustiniani's sexual advances and, at Porpora's urging, flees to the Bohemian castle of Porpora's friends and patrons the Rudolstadts. Arriving during a fierce storm, Consuelo immediately senses that a mystery envelops the family. The young heir Count Albert is betrothed to his beautiful cousin Amelia, who is staying at the castle, but is subject to strange fits of melancholy and odd wanderings in the middle of the night.

A storm, an isolated castle, a strange mystery: at this point Consuelo takes on the trappings of a Gothic novel. The narrator even jokes about it:

If the ingenious and prolific Ann Radcliffe were in the place of the frank and awkward narrator of this very truthful history, she would not neglect so good an occasion, kind reader, to lead you through trap-doors, corridors, winding staircases, darkness and underground passages during half-a-dozen fine and fascinating volumes, to reveal to you only in the seventh the key to her ingenious mysteries. But. . .we will tell as quickly as possible the answer to all our riddles. [7]

Notwithstanding this disclaimer, Consuelo is filled with ghostly sounds in the night, sudden appearances and disappearances, subterranean passageways, hidden lairs, carriages with secret compartments, dangerous encounters in dark forests and the like, all of which could have indeed come straight from an Ann Radcliffe novel.

Improbabilities and coincidences abound. It's the sort of novel where Consuelo, fleeing through a Bohemian forest, is surprised by a fellow wanderer who turns out to be the young Joseph Haydn. (Consuelo ultimately introduces him to her teacher Porpora, and Haydn—as he did in real life—becomes Porpora's servant in exchange for composition lessons.) And it is the sort of novel where, after Consuelo and Joseph rescue a man in the aforementioned dark forest from being press-ganged into Prussian military service, they later by chance encounter his wife and children begging in the streets of Vienna and are able to reunite the family.

All of this is calculated to make strong-minded, skeptical readers roll their eyes. And I confess that when I read this novel for the first time a few months ago I had to talk myself out of abandoning it more than once. But what I didn't appreciate was that Sand may have been employing overfamiliar fictional tropes in order to make more acceptable to readers what was radically new about her heroine.

Consuelo is a performer on the public stage who does not fulfill the stereotype of the ambitious, coquettish, backstabbing diva who uses her sexual appeal to gain material success. Nor does Consuelo have to die (as does the heroine of "La Prima Donna") in order to confirm her virtue, or (as does the heroine of Lélia (1833)) in order to be punished for exceeding the bounds of propriety set for women in a male-dominated world. [8]

Illustration by Tony Johannot for Lélia, Oeuvres Illustrées edition, 1854. Source: Bibliothèque national de France

Instead Consuelo is courageous and resolute; throughout the novel she braves physical dangers and wins through thanks to her fortitude. She does not play flirtatious games; she avoids the sexual snares laid for her by unscrupulous men, and when she loves she does so openly and wholeheartedly (if chastely—perhaps Sand's concession to popular mores). Throughout she remains devoted to the high principles of her artistic calling rather than to worldly success:

She had dreamed, and still dreamed in spite of herself, of livelier and deeper joys of the heart and of more extended and acute pleasures of the intellect; but as the world of art which she had imagined so pure, so sympathetic and so noble had shown itself on a nearer view under so ugly and forbidding an aspect, she had chosen in preference a life of obscurity and retirement, gentle affections, and a solitude sweetened by her chosen work.  [9]

It was Pauline Viardot, who was able to combine an artist's freedom with nobility of character, that inspired Sand to conceive of this new kind of heroine.

Other posts in this series:  

• George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Marianne (1876)
• George Sand and Frederic Chopin: Lucrezia Floriani (1846)
• George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession (1836)
• George Sand: Indiana (1832)

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1. Pauline was also a highly talented instrumentalist and composer. She gave serious thought to pursuing a career as a concert pianist, but followed her mother's wishes and devoted her energies to singing. See Rebecca Bennett Fairbank, Devastating Diva: Pauline Viardot and Rewriting the Image of Women in Nineteenth-Century French Opera Culture. Doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University, 2013, p. 56. There were few contemporary models for successful women concert pianists, Clara Wieck (later Schumann) perhaps being the best known.
2. Quoted in Fairbank, p. 65n.
3. Quoted in Fairbank, p. 128n. 
4. Théophile Gautier quoted in Fairbank, p. 108n. Translation somewhat altered.
5. For the words, see Lyle Neff's Public-Domain Opera Libretti (stanford.edu)
6. Quoted in Beatrix Borchard, "Viardot [née García], (Michelle Ferdinande) Pauline." Grove Music Online, 2001.  Retrieved 11 June 2019. 
7. George Sand, Consuelo, Vol. II, Ch. IV, 1842 (translated by Frank H. Potter, 1889). https://archive.org/details/afe0976.0002.001.umich.edu/page/25; the translator's spelling of Ann Radcliffe's name has been silently Anglicized.
8. Lélia is murdered by a monk who strangles her with his rosary (!); see Fairbank, p. 99.
9. Sand, Consuelo, Vol. IV, Ch. X. (Translation slightly altered.) https://archive.org/details/afe0976.0004.001.umich.edu/page/142