The piano-accompanied Lied is undoubtedly the main genre of Pauline Viardot-García’s oeuvre. With this volume, we present settings of German texts by such poets as Ludwig Uhland, Eduard Mörike, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Emanuel Geibel, Ludwig Rellstab and Richard Pohl. Except for the Uhland settings, these “German Lieder” were written between 1862 and 1871 during Viardot’s Baden-Baden period, when she shifted the focus of her activities from singing to composing and teaching. Here she worked, among other things, on the poetry of Eduard Mörike, which she called “the greatest and most genuine in all German poetry after Goethe.”
One of her first published songs was the setting of the Uhland poem Des Knaben Berglied. Accompanying herself on the piano, she performed it in 1838 on her first concert tour of Germany. A performance of the song at the Leipzig Gewandhaus prompted Robert Schumann to remark: “She showed three talents here [composition, singing and piano playing], each of which would grace its artist.”
Through her music, Viardot brings the creatures in the poems to life, tracing their different characters and inner states, thus giving the texts a new level of interpretation.