‘George’: Soprano Sonia Yoncheva’s first recital album celebrates the life of George Sand
Recreation of a Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, by Eugène Delacroix, based on a ca. 1838 painting which was subsequently cut into two separate portraits.

At the beginning of this year, the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva, renowned among the most acclaimed performers of her generation, released her first recital album, George, featuring art songs, duets, works for piano and violin, and spoken texts circling around the life of 19th-century author George Sand, longtime lover of Frédéric Chopin and arguably France’s most eminent 19th-century feminist. The album appears on the naïve classiques label.

Yoncheva has won legions of fans for her portrayal of some of the most iconic heroines by Bellini, Cherubini, Giordano, Mascagni, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi at the world’s most important stages: the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Paris Opera, Salzburg and numerous other venues.

The album is a collaboration with her company, SY11 Productions. Featured on it are pianist Olga Zado, mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti on two tracks, and violinist Adam Taubitz. Yoncheva can be heard not only singing, but also reciting letters from and to George Sand as well as a poem by the writer.

George Sand, born in 1804 as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, was one of France’s most famous authors, known under her pen name George Sand. Her works include tales, novels, plays, and political texts. She was also an advocate for women’s rights, fighting against of conservative social prejudices. Breaking gender stereotypes, Sand’s clothing style was masculine, just like her pseudonym. In 1831, she obtained a legal permit to wear men’s clothes. Also considered scandalous was her habit of smoking cigars, and she and her friends referred to her using both female and male pronouns.

George Sand, photographed by Nadar, 1864.

Leaving her husband Casimir Dudevant, to whom she was married for 13 years and with whom she had two children, she had several love affairs, most notably with poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset from 1833 to 1835, and with Polish-French composer Frédéric Chopin from 1837 to 1847 (he would die only two years later at 39). Sand died at 71 in 1876.

A highly controversial and political artist, George Sand delved into themes in her books that challenged the norms of her society, including women conquering forbidden spaces, free love, and gender identity, as in her novel Gabriel, where the protagonist is born as a woman but raised as a man. Her oeuvre amounted to 88 novels, starting with the 1832 Indiana, which introduced her nom de plume, stories, articles, and over 18,000 letters. At her funeral, writer Victor Hugo eulogized her, saying she was pivotal to “this century, which had completed the French Revolution in law, and had begun the human revolution.”

“George Sand has always fascinated me,” says Sonya Yoncheva, pictured on the cover of her album in a faintly androgynous outfit complete with black bow tie. “She was such a multi-layered woman, who dared to be herself throughout her life. Her unconditional love for the arts was one of the first sparks that inspired me to realize this project. I was intrigued by her artistic world: her salon, her friends, and how she lived surrounded by music and art. Her many affairs, to name a few: Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, and even rumors of a fling with Franz Liszt. She had all these men around her and was incredibly close to everything they created. For this project, I imagined Sand’s house, kitchen, and salon, with all these artists, lovers, and friends. And that is how this project was born. I wanted to bring this woman to life through my voice, through these works and melodies, also using her actual texts and thoughts, which show her vibrant nature.”

The 50-minute album was recorded in March 2024 at the Salle de Musique in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and includes music by Chopin, Léo Delibes, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Liszt, Jacques Offenbach, Francesco Paolo Tosti, and Pauline Viardot, to whom Sand dedicated her novel Consuelo.

The album opens with Frédéric Chopin’s piano transcription of “Casta diva” (Chaste Goddess), the best-known aria from Bellini’s Norma. It’s one of the Bel Canto era’s most elegant melodies, but here not subject to the virtuoso fanciful variations upon an operatic aria which many other composers indulged in. It’s followed by an excerpt from a letter to Sand from Alfred de Musset, read sensitively by Yoncheva with the sounds of Chopin in the background.

Portrait by Charles Landelle of poet Alfred de Musset (public domain).

Nuit de décembre” (December Night) is Ruggero Leoncavallo’s contribution to the album, set to a poem by de Musset. Perhaps others more intimately familiar with Leoncavallo’s work—he’s best known for his one-act opera I Pagliacci—might know this song by him, but the composer surprises with his idiomatic command of setting French lyrics.

Les filles de Cadix” (The Girls of Cádiz) by Léo Delibes is also set to a poem by de Musset. This is a popular, though not overly familiar, recital number celebrating the passions of the Spanish woman—a trope famously elevated in operatic repertoire by Bizet’s Carmen, and one which Yoncheva will return to later.

Chopin’s Nocturne, op. 9, no. 2, shows the quintessentially lyrical, poetic, and harmonious composer in his most restful pose, unlike the sparkling feats of technique he employed in many of his other piano studies. It leads into a letter from George Sand to Chopin in which she offers herself completely to the composer as his lover and ever-faithful wife (épouse, although they did not marry), again with the accompaniment of his music in the background.

Jacques Offenbach was so prolific that it would take a lifetime’s work to know all that he produced, much of it for the comic theatre, comparable to what we would know in America as musicals. His “Ballade à la lune” (Ballad to the Moon) from the operetta Fantasio, based on the play by de Musset, is a charming romance I’d never heard before.

The eighth track is “Madrid” by Pauline Viardot, another entry in the story of French composers’ fascination with exotic Spain, its seductive women, its bullfights, and vanilla bonbons on a lovely Carnival night. Yoncheva certainly must have had fun discovering these musical bonbons!

A gently affecting “Romance” for piano and violin by Viardot follows, leading into a letter from George Sand to the actress Marie Dorval, a passionately overwritten love note pleading not to be abandoned. The implication that Sand was an equal opportunity lover cannot be denied.

Portrait of Pauline Garcia Viardot by Etienne Carjat, early 1860s (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication).

“Ninon,” by the well-known song writer Francesco Paolo Tosti is set to another poem by de Musset, a pretty number also by an Italian composer adept at French setting apparently derived from an 1832 play in verse called “À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles” (What Young Girls Dream Of), a bit mystical but surely a rare discovery lovers of song will be glad to welcome.

Two more curiosities follow as nos. 12 and 13 on the album. Chopin wrote a set of 12 mazurkas,  based on Polish dances, and Pauline Viardot took two of them (nos. 8 and 6) and rearranged them for voice, setting two love poems by Louis Pomey. The first is “Faible cœur” (Feeble Heart), the second “Séparation.”

The familiar “Liebestraum” (Love Dream) by Liszt (S. 541, No. 3) honors Sand’s affection for the Hungarian composer, and then underlies a text from an 1853 Sand novel in which the writer rhapsodizes about music: “I would give my whole being to music, for it’s in that language, the most perfect of all, that I would express my feelings and emotions” (my translation).

The concluding track is “Les Bohémiennes” (The Bohemian Women), to a text by Victor Wilder, set by Pauline Viardot to the themes of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances that sound more like Offenbach than the Offenbach we heard earlier in cut no. 7. In tune with the Romantic spirit summoned by the age, this text celebrates the carefree life of “La Bohème” that Giacomo Puccini (and Leoncavallo as well) would immortalize in their respective operas.

The liner notes include “A Word from Sonya Yoncheva,” in which she suggests that “This recital needs to be regarded as a private soirée, with friends who also know how to have a good feast…. I bathe in the arts. To surround oneself with the arts is simply a way to live healthily, something which today I try to inculcate into my own children.” (Yoncheva married Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan in 2014, and they live in Switzerland.)

Also in the album booklet is an essay by Petya Ivanova, “The Secret George Sand,” who cites Sand’s Consuelo: “Music expresses everything that the soul thinks more mysterious and more elevated…. It is the revelation of the infinite.” According to Ivanova, in her day, “Sand was more famous than Balzac and Hugo combined.” Both of these short essays appear in French and English, but sadly, for English speakers, the texts of the songs, letters, and poems are only in the original French.

What’s my takeaway, enfin? A beautiful voice has Yoncheva, suitable not only for grand opera roles on major international stages but also for the salon and recording studio (my compliments to the engineers!). I also salute her for bravely selecting a personally meaningful theme to investigate in song—this seems to be a trend now for singers who seek to project a little more social relevance to their work than simply to unleash yet another string of vocal pearls into the world. And all the more admirable for attempting this on her debut recital album. What a treasure of virtually unknown music is here, particularly the magnificent settings by Pauline Viardot. I expect this recording will do much to advance her long-neglected reputation.

And what a gift to lovers of music and literature who seek validation for a non- or at least somewhat less-gendered past!

Having said that, I find it a little precious, too, the breathless reading of untranslated amatory texts in French, the far-reaching mélange of musicians, composers, poets, dramatists, and lovers, many of them virtual strangers to a 21st-century public. The choice of material for what Yoncheva herself calls a “private soirée” is rarefied enough to have warranted deeper background information and context.

Grade? An A- for concept, a B for execution.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!


CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon
Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.