My Dearest Hedgehog

for soprano, two narrators and pianist

‘My wife is perfect for me – she’s really quite gentle, shy and tender, but she’s rough on the outside, like a hedgehog, all spiny and prickly.’

A look at the tempestuous marriage of the composer Richard Strauss and the singer Pauline de Ahna, the performance begins and ends with Morgen, one of Strauss’s most well-known and best-loved songs. All his songs were written with the sound of Pauline’s singing voice in mind and this entertainment tells the story of their relationship and the way in which it sustained Strauss’s creative life and inspired his compositions.

Songs are interwoven with narration, the actors describing how these two people, whose marriage many of their friends found baffling, loved one another deeply. Strauss was seen by many as cold, even arrogant, while Pauline had a wildly volatile temper and was prone to fits of irrational jealousy.

This jealousy was to give rise to one particular upheaval, when Pauline became convinced that Strauss was having an affair, emptied their joint bank account and wrote to him where he was staying on the Isle of Wight threatening him with divorce. There was no affair and Pauline eventually realised this and withdrew her threats but Strauss later used the incident in one of his operas, Intermezzo, provoking of course, another outburst.

Each song performed illustrates an aspect of their relationship, from the ecstatic Cäcilie, composed as a gift on the eve of their wedding, to Meinem Kinde, heralding the birth of their only child, and Gefunden, an allegory of contented domesticity. 

Despite outward appearances, Pauline loved and supported her husband unstintingly, while his reserve concealed a passionate nature, a deep-rooted sensuality that found expression in his music – music that was inspired by his exasperating, prickly hedgehog of a wife. 

Gounod and Georgina

for soprano and tenor, narrator and pianist

‘Was there ever a stranger tale than that of Gounod and the Englishwoman? Passion has taken possession of his brain. At her feet he forgets all – decency, family and country!’

Charles Gounod was a mass of contradictions, both in his music and in his personal life. He was a charmer who adored the company of women but who yearned for a more solitary, contemplative existence and spent some years studying for the priesthood. His religious zeal was matched by his enthusiasm for the theatre and public acclaim. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 he fell prey to despair about the fate of France and the impossibility of pursuing his musical career ‘beneath an enemy flag’. Gathering his family together – wife, two children and mother-in-law – he crossed the Channel to find refuge in London.

Gounod was rapidly adopted as a prize asset at society gatherings, accompanying himself on the piano as he sang songs and arias from his operas. One February evening in 1871 he spotted a new and pretty female face amid the throng of admirers; this was Georgina Weldon, a singer and champion of her own methods of vocal teaching. At 35 she was nearly 20 years Gounod’s junior but they struck up an immediate and intense friendship – despite profoundly misunderstanding each other from the start. 

It was the start of a bizarre episode during which Gounod moved in to live with Georgina and her husband Harry in a house in London’s Tavistock Square which had previously belonged to Charles Dickens. The events that followed were dramatic and occasionally highly comic. 

Narration and songs illustrate the ups and downs of this unlikely relationship.

Watch the Wigmore performance here, narrated by Petroc Trelawny, with singers John Mark Ainsley and Harriet Burns, and Malcolm Martineau at the piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ie7gMDFsUg

Chez Pauline

‘I cannot help it. I must thank you for that wonderful performance of last night. There were tears rolling down my face. Nothing could be more magnificent, more true, more tender, more beautiful, more profound!’

Charles Dickens to Pauline Viardot

An evocation in words and music of the Paris salon of Pauline Viardot. Celebrated across Europe during the mid-19th-century, Viardot was an internationally acclaimed opera singer, an influential voice teacher and a fine composer. She studied the piano with Liszt, played duets with Chopin, created operatic roles for Saint-Saëns and Gounod, and caused the poet and novelist Ivan Turgenev to fall headlong in love with her, resulting in a relationship that continued until the end of his life.