Louise Héritte-Viardotaus romantic

Louise Héritte-Viardot(* 14 December 1841 in Paris; † 17 January 1918 in Heidelberg) was a French-German composer, pianist, singer and vocal coach.

Life

Louise Héritte-Viardot came from a musical family: her mother was the famous singer and composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia, her aunt the legendary Maria Malibran. She was trained as a singer by her mother.

She was embedded in a musical atmosphere as a child and was introduced to solfège by a friend of her grandmother, Torre Morrel. She took some piano lessons with Louis Lacombe and composition lessons with Auguste Barbereau, but perfected her skills mainly as an autodidact.

On 17 March 1863, she married Ernest Héritte, a diplomat twenty years her senior, and accompanied him on his various vocations. They finally separated a few years after the birth of their son Louis Héritte de la Tour.

She was a singing teacher at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, at the London Academy of Music and, through the intermediary of Clara Schumann, at the Hoch’sche Conservatoire in Frankfurt, before founding an opera class in Berlin. After further travels, she finally settled in Heidelberg and spent her twilight years there.

Several of her compositions were performed during her lifetime and were critically successful. For example, after a concert given by the Société nationale de musique at the Salons Pleyel-Wolff on 16 March 1876, Auguste Morel wrote in Le Ménestrel:

“Souvenir d’une nuit de Crimée, by Mme Héritte-Viardot. It is an instrumental andante of mysterious character, whose motive and plan are a little vague, but remarkable from the point of view of harmonic science and especially of instrumentation, which offers imaginative and piquant, sometimes even somewhat strange effects.”

On the occasion of the premiere of her Piano Quartet in D minor on 10 May 1877, Le Ménestrel wrote that it was “a remarkable composition, both from the point of view of the force of the conception and that of the facture, harmony and interest of the developments, executed with a perfect ensemble by the author, in which the value of the virtuoso equals that of the composer.”

After a performance by the Société d’auditions musicales l’Art moderne, founded by the violinist Marie Tayau, dedicated to several of her compositions on 25 March 1878, Le Ménestrel also read: “Mme Héritte Viardot, entre parenthèses, pianiste de grand talent, a l’inspiration large et ses œuvres ont un cachet de réelle distinction.”

A few days later, another concert review notes that “all these different pieces proved that Mme Héritte’s talent lends itself to all genres with equal luck.”

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Héritte-Viardot