Viardot: Le dernier sorcier (The Last Sorcerer) <br> BRIDGE 9515

2019 Opera News: *Critics Choice*2019 American Record Guide: *Critics Choice*Locke's List: Best Opera and Vocal Recordings of 2019   One hundred fifty years ago, the great mezzo-soprano, composer, and pedagogue Pauline García Viardot created the salon opera Le dernier sorcier (The Last Sorcerer) in collaboration with the acclaimed Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. The piece centered on themes of power and progress, gender and equality, and the restoration of natural order in an ever-changing world, Pauline García Viardot is perhaps the most famous Romantic heroine you’ve never heard of. She was born in Paris to Spanish parents, the tenor-cum-impresario Manuel García and the soprano Joaquina Sitchez.  Viardot's circle was a who’s who of nineteenth-century European artistic society: she studied piano with Liszt, co-authored mazurkas with Chopin, sang Tristan and Isolde excerpts with Wagner in her living room, had Charles Dickens and Henry James as house guests, and shared insights with he