It is no exaggeration to say that Pauline Viardot’s role in the composition of Charles Gounod’s 1851 Sapho was fundamental to the work’s very existence. Not only did she urge the young composer to write an opera, she also advocated for his contract, which, given the composer’s untested reputation, was issued only because she agreed to perform the title role. Pauline and her husband opened their country home, Courtavenel, to the composer, who lived and worked there throughout the summer and autumn of 1850 while Viardot was on tour. During that time, the two corresponded frequently – Gounod wrote to her nearly every day, often multiple times per day. Viardot’s absence from Courtavenel during the summer months, however, as well as the loss of her letters, has led to a somewhat hazy picture of the nature of her influence on the music of Sapho.

Gounod’s letters to Viardot were emotionally intense, detailed and confessional, and he repeatedly engaged in what I would call a discursive merging with Viardot, as if the two were fused into a single creative force. Throughout the correspondence, the word ‘our’ occurs with some frequency, as when he refers pointedly to Sapho as ‘our oeuvre’.Footnote ¹ One thorny problem facing Gounod was Sapho’s final scene. On 28 June, Gounod wrote of his work on the number, describing Sapho’s final moments as a big theatrical climax: ‘From the last four lines … to the end, the music becomes turbulent; the roaring of the sea combines with these last expressions of sorrow until the final big orchestral entry, which occurs at the moment when Sapho throws herself into the sea.’Footnote ² Three days later, Gounod wrote to Pauline that he had completed the scene and performed it for ‘Maman et Berthe’. The event, he boasted, was a ‘Huuuuuuuge success. They found the last number grippingly dramatic and were greatly moved by it. As was I. I can hardly wait to give you all of this: you for whom and a bit by whom [i.e., ‘with whose assistance’] I have made it.’Footnote ³

But Louis Viardot, Pauline’s husband, wasn’t so sure. In a meticulously detailed missive written just a few days later, he sent Pauline a précis of the opera, described what was left to be composed, and shared his impressions of the work so far.Footnote ⁴ This unpublished letter reads something like a foreman’s report to the boss, with Gounod cast as the labourer. Despite the composer’s enthusiasm, Louis found Sapho’s final song ‘had a major defect’. ‘The song of despair for Sapho must be magnificent and awesome – at least I believe that you will make it have that effect’, he wrote to Pauline. But Gounod, by setting the words ‘tourments affreux, avec moi finissez’ (‘horrid torments, have an end with me’) to music that expressed ‘mad and enraged’ despair had evoked not the death of a noble figure but instead ‘a gambler who is about to commit suicide’. The solution Louis proposed was to make the final scene sound more like Gluck. ‘Gounod did not hesitate to accept my suggestion’, he reported, ‘and he is pleased with himself [for having done so]’.Footnote ⁵

But neither Louis’s suggestion nor Gounod’s original idea were ultimately deemed suitable for the ancient poet’s final song. The solution arrived at was an unusual one, and was likely sparked by Pauline Viardot’s return to Courtavenel in September. After studying the score she proposed even bigger changes, as she wrote to Ivan Turgenev: ‘the whole last scene will be reworked’.Footnote ⁶ Viardot seems to have proposed that Gounod scrap the existing music and instead use a previously composed song, ‘La chanson du pêcheur’ (original text by Gautier), for the final number.Footnote ⁷ The choice had much to do with wanting to end the opera with a strong, pathetic effect, as she explained to Turgenev:

In this final sentence, Viardot wittily slips between the ‘elle’ who is Sapho and the ‘elle’ who is Viardot; such confusion is consistent with the letter’s refusal to take overt credit for the change.

Reusing an earlier chanson for Sapho’s big finale, while lending her musical utterance a classical plainness and simplicity, also inevitably recalls a vocal idiom foreign to the stage. Instead of a fiery, creative poet or even a flamboyantly tragic figure, she seems to have emerged from a more intimate domestic space. For although Augier wrote a new text, Gounod’s melody changed very little. A rolling, arpeggiated accompaniment figure in triple metre clearly marks this piece as oceanic in nature, making it well suited to do double duty for both a lamenting fisherman and a soon-to-drown Sapho. The piece’s two stanzas in B flat minor feature an almost austere lyricism, perhaps demonstrating how rustic, folk-like simplicity and the noble classicism are two sides of the same coin. Repeated notes and a strict absence of melisma characterise the melody, whose expressive touches consist of downward leaps and long, sustained notes. The words Sapho sings display a certain self-consciousness about the number’s status as a song, since she is describing a failed performance: Sapho addresses her lyre (embodied by the orchestra’s harp), whose murmuring cannot console her in her extremity. Remaking the earlier song, placing the melody of the mourning fisherman in the mouth of the suicidal poetess, could be thought of as a form of ventriloquy, or perhaps an uncanny doubling, as if Sapho were both the (already) dead beloved and her own mourner. Sapho’s lyre is no longer the vehicle of her genius but instead the instrument of her destruction, as the harp voices the moody, roiling arpeggios originally given to the piano. Her death song is at once folksy and cerebral – and as such seems to anticipate its future life as a successful recital piece, where, coming full circle, the iconic lyre would be replaced with the domestic piano.

Why would Viardot herself advocate for the seeming domestication of her operatic Sappho? Perhaps she didn’t; the evidence for her intervention, while strong (in that it was in part through his songs that she came to know and admire Gounod’s talent, and the decision to reuse the earlier song was not made until she had returned to Courtavenel), is not watertight.Footnote ⁹ But I would like to resist the notion that, in collaborative relationships between singer and composer, the only influence that matters is that which is exerted upon the musical text. Viardot’s collaborations were in fact characterised by the sheer variety and volume of the affective and practical labour she performed – labour that often leaves no obvious traces on the work.Footnote ¹⁰

This sort of labour is, of course, feminised, and while it often remains invisible to scholars today, it was a source of conflict for creative women at the time. The matter of Sapho’s ‘remade song’ raises more questions than who exactly deserves the credit for compositional decisions. Instead, it opens out onto the larger issue of what ideals of artistic effort were embraced by the mid-nineteenth-century operatic world. In this respect, it is significant that Viardot, throughout her life, both practised and advocated for a model of creative endeavour that was decidedly retrogressive – domestically focused, communal and involving a multitude of actors. We see this at play not just in the case in her relationships with composers such as Gounod and Berlioz, but also in her later focus on composing salon operas, to libretti by Turgenev and with roles written for her students. Such an image may not chime with the normal tales we tell about operatic divas.Footnote ¹¹ But perhaps we can look at Sapho’s last song not simply as a capitulation to restrictive ideals concerning feminine creativity, but instead as a means for Viardot to both enact and advocate for an openly collaborative ethos of artistic production, one that persisted even in an era so dominated by the mythos of the solitary genius.