Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover
UK £20.00,Canada $40.00,
UK Publication November 2003
ISBN 9781840468434
Hardback
Buy: | Waterstones| Book Depository
She was among 'the most brilliant dramatic stars of our time', according to Franz Liszt, and billed as 'the most talked of opera singer in Europe'. Dickens - reduced to tears by her singing - regarded her as 'one of the greatest actresses of any time'. Liszt also declared that, with Pauline Viardot, the world had finally found a female composer of genius.
Enchantress of Nations is a lavish biography of this amazing woman, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century, and it also weaves a rich tapestry of music and literature in France, England and Russia. Michael Steen sympathetically and sensitively explores the passionate 40-year love-affair between Viardot and Ivan Turgenev, the great Russian novelist, as well as her stormy friendship with Charles Gounod, the famous French composer. We also meet George Sand, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; Rossini, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Fauré and the other Paris-based composers, artists and singers of the period.
Steen recounts the back-stage bitchiness, robbery, duels and violence of Viardot's life and times. Among much else, we read of the unhappiness experienced by the progeny of successful parents - the life of Viardot's eldest child was blighted by a catalogue of miseries. The scene is historical; many of the issues are surprisingly contemporary.
Enchantress of Nations is a portrait of one of the history of music's most magnetic, colourful and brilliant female stars - but also a picturesque biography of tumultuous, artistic, ever-changing nineteenth century Europe.
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Steen's book is more than a biography. It's both a zealously researched portrait of an age, and an intimate portrait of the great figure always close to the action.' The Independent
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Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin, studied at the Royal College of Music and was organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford. He has been chairman of the Friends of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and of the Royal College of Music Society, and is Treasurer of The Open University.
His previous books include The Lives and Times of the Great Composers – described as ‘hugely informative and deliciously gossipy’ by the Spectator – and Enchantress of Nations. His Great Operas – bringing together guides to twenty-five of the world’s finest musical experiences, is published by Icon Books in November 2012.
See more books by: Michael Steen
