Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821 - 1910)

Famous in her lifetime as a singer and as a collaborator with Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Massenet, Pauline Viardot-Garcia was also an active composer who published nearly 200 songs between 1841 and 1905. These songs were known and admired by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saëns, and Viardot her herself, writing to a friend in 1864, noted, "I believe that I am more proud of the money that my little jottings have brought me than of that which I have earned as a singer." Viardot was fluent in five languages and widely traveled as a result of her singing career, thus her compositions reflect the musical idioms of the countries where she lived and worked.