In the mid-nineteenth century, three ambassadors of the arts and ideas took part in the construction of a cultural Europe whose foundations we still share today. The singer and composer Pauline Garcia Viardot performed on stages all over the world and secured international success for Bizet’s Carmen following its disappointing premiere at the Paris opera house. Her husband, Louis Viardot, an art historian, Hispanophile and collector, wrote the first European museum guides and translated Don Quixote into French. Ivan Turgenev, a Russian novelist and playwright and a friend of the couple for several decades, published his works in France and helped familiarise Russians with the novels of Flaubert, Zola and Hugo. These three people’s lives and creations were intertwined at a time of major technological breakthroughs that revolutionised travel and mass communications, contributing to the shaping of a common cultural identity on a continental scale.

This documentary traces the cosmopolitan career of this exceptional trio, whose formidable symbiosis fascinated many other renowned musicians, writers and painters who kept company with them in Paris, Bougival and Baden-Baden and, like them, disseminated the European spirit across national borders. Viewed from a modern perspective aware of the political and social upheavals of the time, these figures take on a special historical dimension as forerunners of a European cultural community that came into its own in the twentieth century, although its values are currently being called into question.

Nadège de Peganow, who trained as a lawyer and musicologist, specialises in cultural management. Besides publishing and translating several books, she has made documentaries for television, including L’Exil de Lénine en Suisse. De Genève à Petrograd (2017).

Watch documentary
Premiere screening at the Maison de l’Europe, Paris