Sonya Yoncheva on George

The Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva makes her recital-debut on on Naïve Records (in collaboration with her own company SY11 Productions) tomorrow with a programme dedicated to one of the great French writers of the nineteenth century: novelist, journalist and activist George Sand (born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil in 1804), whose works include Gabriel (1839), Consuelo (1843), La Mare au Diable (1846), and the autobiographical travelogue A Winter in Majorca (1841).

The album interweaves excerpts from Sand's correspondence with music by some of the composers who were drawn into her orbit, including her lover Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and the celebrated French mezzo Pauline Viardot (who was the inspiration for Consuelo). I spoke to Sonya last month about why she was drawn to Sand's story from an early age, how she went about compiling the programme, and her plans to develop the project on film...

How did your fascination with George Sand begin?

I was ‘introduced’ to her by my mother. As a child I was a pianist, and my favourite composer was Chopin; I played his music quite often, and one day my mother told me the story about this woman who was present in the last ten years of his life and supported him until his death... 

And as I explored further, I began to realise that George was not exactly an ordinary woman – she was an incredible journalist, author, activist, feminist and free thinker. Here was someone who couldn’t fit into any of the boxes which society had created for her: she had to find a way to exist and be happy in her own skin, and that had a big impact on me as a child. 

Her story continued to speak to me later on when I became an artist myself and started to navigate my own path through this industry, and eventually I decided it was time for me to shine a light on her social circle and her advocacy for the arts. I was so struck by the fact that she was surrounded by all of these friends doing excellent work in their different fields, so that’s how this album was born.

It's wonderful to hear music by Pauline Viardot, another woman who didn't fit into boxes!

I was already a huge fan of Pauline Viardot and also her sister Maria Malibran, but somehow Pauline really speaks to my soul because she was so eclectic. She was a mezzo, a soprano, a composer, an absolutely brilliant pianist…maybe I could do a project around her one day! And she was really one of George Sand’s best friends - George loved to bring all these people together in her home in Nohant and to cook for them, to exchange ideas and try to change the world for the better.

I wanted to underline the fact that George was bisexual, because I found it extraordinary that she was so open about it herself. She didn’t hide her sexuality from anybody, and it didn’t stop her from being an incredible mother, wife, politician and author – nowadays we take it for granted that all of these things can coexist, but 250 years ago it must have seemed very radical. When I decided to tell this part of her story, I started with one of the letters she wrote to Marie Dorval, the actress she was in love with; it was interesting that she would always sign with her nickname ‘George’ and not with her given name [Amantine].

Then I had to find musical content which would express this, and I found it in the works of Viardot. In her song 'Faible Coeur' (after one of Chopin’s mazurkas) she sets a text which talks about forbidden love: ‘De mon mal dois-je parler? / Ou dois-je en faire un mystère? / Je crains de le révéler / Mais je meurs, je meurs de me taire!’. That seemed to capture the situation of this woman who was ‘out’ amongst her own social circle, but still aware that her sexuality went against the grain of what was accepted in wider society at the time.

You have a special guest on the album, in the shape of mezzo Marina Viotti who joins you for two of the Viardot pieces - had you worked together before?

I invited Marina first and foremost because I just love her voice. She’s so sensual and open-minded, and like George she’s an eclectic bird: you can hear her singing metal music one night, and Carmen the next! For me she’s exactly what an artist should be: a multi-coloured personality who paints outside the lines. I’d never sung with her before or even met her in person, but it turned out that our voices just work together. It almost took longer to set up the microphones than it did to record the track: we were done in thirty minutes!

You include several spoken excerpts from Sand's letters - how did you select these?

George didn’t compose any music herself, but I wanted to find a way for her to exist in this project - not only as a muse but through her own words. She left a huge legacy of novels and political writings, and because this project exists as an audio recording I had to limit myself to a few short excerpts. I tried to choose texts which illustrated why she was so adored as a muse, lover and friend.

Her correspondence shows that she had a tremendous capacity to offer and inspire great passion and sensuality - as we see in the letters she wrote to Chopin and the actress Marie Dorval, and received from the French poet and dramatist Alfred Musset. I also discovered that many of the composers I wanted to include were drawn to poems by Musset, who was Sand’s lover for many years: Leoncavallo’s ‘Nuit de décembre’, Delibes’s ‘Les filles de cadix’, Viardot’s ‘Madrid’ and Tosti’s ‘Ninon’ are all settings of his texts.

Do you have any plans to bring this programme to life on stage?

You read my mind! When I first started thinking about this project, I imagined it as a staged piano recital that tells a story: the pieces were all chosen to depict different moments in her life, and because she’s such an exuberant multi-faceted character I knew that she would spring to life so vividly in that context. In the end we went with a studio recording but when I listened back to the album, I started wondering about using it as the soundtrack to a short film…I’m thinking about something really intimate, maybe around fifty minutes long, and I hope we can make that happen in the coming months! 

I would absolutely love to do some filming in and around George’s villa in Nohant, which is now a museum; it’s incredibly picturesque and beautiful, and I love the idea of all these great composers, artists and authors gathering there to exchange ideas and discuss how to change society for the better. I haven’t visited yet, but I do have a connection via the author Alain Duault who wrote my book Fifteen Mirrors (about my fifteen favourite characters to perform on stage). Like George, Alain is a poet, author and journalist; he’s organised conferences and other events at the villa, so there are possibilities!

George has been depicted on screen numerous times over the decades, perhaps most notably by Juliette Binoche in Children of the Century (1999) - were any of the existing films a source of inspiration for you?

Not really, which is strange because I love movies and find something new to watch every weekend! I somehow resisted seeing George brought to life on screen, maybe because I didn’t want to influence my own fantasy of her. So I buried myself in her writing instead: you can build her character in no time just by soaking up her words, and I felt like that was enough for me.

What's coming up for you in terms of opera work?

It’s a busy season. I’m very active in my core repertoire so there’s a lot of Toscas coming up, Andrea Chénier and a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta in Vienna, then a nice debut at the Metropolitan Opera in May – Lisa in The Queen of Spades, which is such a great role. In terms of my opera career I just go with the flow and try to keep in good shape, but these little projects like George add a bit of salt and pepper to my life!