Predestined for a European music center
The estate where Turgenev and the Viardot couple spent their summers is to become a memorial to Romantic music with potential for the future.
Bougival is a small town west of Paris on the Seine. Many artists have succumbed to the charm of this hilly landscape: Impressionists have immortalized it. The 9th arrondissement of Paris - also known as "Nouvelle-Athène" - chose it as its summer resort in the second half of the 19th century.
On September 15 of this year, on French Heritage Day, President Emmanuel Macron visited the site together with his wife and personalities from politics and culture: he presented the first prize of the newly launched "Patrimoine-Loto" for the restoration of French monuments, organized by the French state lottery company "Française des Jeux". The Villa Viardot was selected from 18 of the 2000 properties at risk and was awarded 600,000 euros in funding. The surprise and joy are great. The restoration costs of the Villa Viardot are estimated at 3 million euros; local authorities, foundations and the European Union will contribute. A European music center (CEM) is planned.
Ivan Turgenev's property
Villa Viardot stands in a 5.5-hectare park with mature trees. With white walls and harmonious proportions, it has two floors in a neo-Palladian style. Its floor plan is 180 m²; a terrace can be seen on the eastern side. The dacha of the Russian poet Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), which was built later and is now the Tourguéniev, Viardot, Malibran Museum, is slightly elevated and only a few steps away. Ivan Turgenev bought the entire estate in 1874 together with the married couple Louis and Pauline Viardot and named it "Les Frêles", the oaks. From then on, they spent their summers there. Louis Viardot passed away on May 5, 1883; a few months later, on September 3 of the same year, Turgenev succumbed to cancer in Bougival. Pauline Viardot gave up their shared home and moved to 243 Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris in 1884.
Pauline Viardot's work
Few people today know the name of this extraordinary singer and musician (1821-1910). Georges Sand, Chopin, Clara Schumann, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Delacroix were among her friends; her piano teacher Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann were her admirers; she inspired Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Gounod and Massenet to compose works in which she herself sang the leading roles on the stages of the major European opera houses. Her love and friendship with Ivan Turgenev accompanied her from her premiere as Rosina in Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia at the grand opera in St. Petersburg (1843). The "trio" of Louis and Pauline Viardot and Ivan Turgenev has caused a lot of ink to flow since then - as evidenced by articles on the occasion of the awarding of the Cultural Heritage Prize to Villa Viardot. Famous in the 19th century, almost forgotten in the 20th, Pauline Viardot and her artistic environment are returning to the European consciousness in the 21st century. Franz Liszt wrote about Pauline Viardot: "With her Spanish nature, her French upbringing and her German sympathies, she unites the characteristics of various nationalities in such a way that one would not want to grant any particular soil an exclusive claim to her, but rather call art the fatherland of her free choice and love."
