In the January 3rd, 2020 issue of the TLS is a review of Orlando Figes'
THREE LIVES AND THE MAKING OF A COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE. [The review was
written by Larry Wolff, professor of History at New York University]
The three subject lives are "Ivan Turgenev, the Spanish opera star Pauline
Garcia Viardot, and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, literary
translator and theatrical entrepreneur. Turgenev was in love with Pauline
Viardot for four decades and for much of that time was actually living with
her and Louis, mostly in Paris.
"Figes artfully makes these individual lives into illustrative examples of
the changing terms of nineteenth-century culture, and especially the ways in
which a Russian writer and a Spanish diva, from the eastern and western
margins of Europe, could emerge as fully European and cosmopolitan cultural
figures."
I read the article looking for anti-Brexit arguments, and perhaps they are
implied by the British historian, Figes,
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Figes ;) who has written several
books, mostly about Russian history. If he is opposed to Brexit, which he
may be, I wonder what he thinks of the even greater alienation (from Europe)
of Russia. However I didn't find my suspicions vindicated in the review in
which Wolff concentrates upon Pauline Viardot, an opera singer, who had some
of the most famous people of Europe panting after her. She could not only
sing better than anyone else, she was a concert-level pianist and regretted
giving that up to concentrate upon singing.
Wolff writes, "In 1860, Wagner came to visit her in Paris for a musical
evening, and, astonishingly, she participated in the very first performance
of the love duet from Tristan und Isolde, singing Isolde with Wagner himself
as Tristan. In fact Viardot was a composer herself, particularly writing
songs for solon performance, which are still heard in concert recitals
today."
And, "Viardot was closely associated with Don Giovanni, and sang the role of
the flirtatious Spanish peasant girl Zerlina, but also, more unexpectedly,
the role of the virtuous Spanish noblewoman Donna Anna (a role that was
written for soprano, and was almost never sung by a mezzo-soprano like
Viardot)."
But after reading the review I wonder if there ever has been another
mezzo-soprano like Viardot. "The astonishing range of her voice, its
unrivalled virtuosity, its magical, silvery tonality', gushed one Russian
critic in St. Petersburg, 'we have not heard anything like it before."
[Unfortunately we must take the words of others in regard to the quality of
Viardot's voice - unlike today when the beautiful and ugly-voiced alike may
preserve themselves on Youtube for future historians and review writers to
marvel at.]
Figes apparently makes much of the railroad's enhancing of cosmopolitanism:
"Turgenev, then twenty-five, met and fell in love with her during her
triumphant engagement in [St Petersburg]." "From the 1840s onwards, trains
carried Pauline Viardot to her singing engagements, while Turgenev, led a
peripatetic life on the railways of Europe, following the Viardots whenever
possible. Figes speculates about Turgenev and trains that 'he must have
journeyed more on them than any other writer of his day'. With the
completion of the Warsaw-Petersburg line in 1862, also the year of
Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Sons, it would have been possible for him
to travel all the way from France to Russia by Train. Figes suggest that it
was Turgenev's relation to the modern technology of train travel that also
made it possible for him to conceive of himself as a fully European writer,
and declare in 1864 that 'there is no necessity for a writer to live
continuously in his own country."
"Tolstoy, less enthusiastically modern, wrote to Turgenev in 1857 to urge
him to avoid the railroad as the travel equivalent of mechanical sex in a
brothel, cheapening the whole experience of the voyage. . ."
Lawrence
