Viardot: Le Dernier Sorcier

150 years after its composition, a lost opera is recovered and a vanished voice restored. A recently rediscovered treasure by one of the most compelling artists of the nineteenth century, Le dernier sorcier (The Last Sorcerer) resonates with themes of power and progress, gender and equality, and the restoration of natural order in an ever-changing world – a feminist eco-fable in operatic form. The work is a chamber opera in two acts written by Pauline Viardot to a French libretto by Ivan Turgenev. It premiered privately in 1867 at the Villa Turgenev in Baden-Baden and received its first public performance at the Court Theatre in Weimar in April 1869. The story focuses on Krakamiche, an old and once-powerful sorcerer whose presence in the woods has upset the elves living there, and a romance between the sorcerer’s daughter Stella and Prince Lelio, whose marriage comes about through the intervention of a Queen of the Elves.