What: The Passionate Muse: The Life and Music of Pauline Viardot-Garcia
When: Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m.
Where: Berwick Royal Oak Theatre
Tickets: $15 at the door
Mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Wagner’s first original stage production began with a question.
“I heard a lovely piece on a Cecilia Bartoli recording. And I thought, ‘Oh I must find the music for that. But who is that composer?’ ” Wagner said.
Like many people, Wagner had never heard of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the 19th-century Parisian composer and singer whose piece she heard Bartoli, a fellow mezzo-soprano from Italy, sing. But what she found after embarking on a research mission was inspiring enough to form the basis of a miniature opera-theatre hybrid.
Viardot-Garcia was born to a musical family and began performing publicly as a teenager. She married stage director Louis Viardot and was loved by novelist Ivan Turgenev. She composed or adapted more than 200 pieces in her life and counted among her friends and colleagues Chopin, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns.
According to Wagner, however, Viardot-Garcia’s influence has largely been forgotten by history.
“She’s a bit of a mystery, we don’t really know a lot about her today,” Wagner said.
The Passionate Muse: The Life and Music of Pauline Viardot-Garcia is set at the end of the musician’s life, at the turn of the 20th century. As Viardot-Garcia prepares for her last recital, she recalls the music and lovers of her life.
Wagner shares the lead role with actor Susie Mullen; Mullen peforms the monologues, while Wagner sings the songs.
“We’re like two halves of a person,” Wagner said.
Wagner selected pieces that Viardot-Garcia would have sung, including Che farò senza Euridice? from the opera Orpheus and Eurydice; songs that others dedicated to her, including a selection from Sampson and Delilah, an opera Saint-Saëns’ composed with Viardot-Garcia in mind; and songs that she wrote herself, including Haï luli, which is the piece that set Wagner on her mission in the first place.
Musical accompaniment and piano solos will be performed by Charlotte Hale.
Wagner, a retired public servant who began taking voice lessons later in life and has sung in Pacific Opera Victoria’s chorus, first staged The Passionate Muse in 2006. She said she decided to remount it in Victoria after plans developed for a staging in her hometown of Regina later this month. Since she first staged The Passionate Muse, Wagner has written two other musical plays: 2010’s The House on Middagh Street and 2012’s Earthly Delights: Day in the Life of Colette.
Asked if she shared anything in common with Viardot-Garcia, Wagner had a quick answer:
“Her great passion and music for creativity and being around all these stimulating, interesting people,” she said.
“And I think it’s interesting to me that she remains a bit of an enigma. We know certain things about her, but because she has been largely forgotten and [her story] is now just being reconstructed, there are questions about her life.”