Wen-Hui Tu was born in Taipeh, Taiwan, in 1964. She showed musical talent quite early which was directed to the piano by her mother. Aged 6 she attended a private music school, where she was given a classical European kind of musical training. At the early age of 7 she began to write her first piano compositions, at first for two and later also for four hands, and performed these pieces together with her sister.
Between 1979 and 1984 Wen-Hui Tu studied composition (with professors Yen Lui and Chan-Fa Yiu) and viola at the Taiwan National Academy of Arts, and completed her studies by writing an awardwinning violin concerto. In the same year she continued her composition studies with professor Francis Burt, one of Boris Blacher students, at the academy of music and performing arts in Vienna. In 1989 she passed the composer diploma with distinction, was honored for it with an award by the Austrian Federal Minister for Science and Research, and was granted the academic title of a Master of Arts in 1991.cause she was repeatedly exposed to hostility as the wife of Louis Viardot, who was a Republican and a declared opponent of Louis Napoleon. However, the premiere of Meyerbeer. The Prophet (16th April 1849) and her interpretation of the role of Fidès were an astounding triumph. Pauline Viardot sang Fidès over 200 times on all the great European stages. Apart from her portrayal of this character, it was above all as Gluck Orpheus that she lent dramatic reality to the role through her musical and dramatic artistry. The part had originally been written for a castrato, but Berlioz arranged it for her and, as a result, the forgotten opera made its return to the stage (18th November 1859). The leading female roles in Beethoven Fidelio, Gluck Alceste and Verdi Macbeth were further milestones in her career.
In 1863, at the age of 42, she retired from the stage and left France for political reasons. With her husband, her three younger children (Claudine, born 1852, Marianne, born 1854, Paul, born 1857) and Ivan Turgenev, she settled in Baden-Baden, taught female singers from all over the world, and built an art gallery and little opera house in her garden. Here she gave concerts with her pupils and children, and staged her own works in front of a cosmopolitan audience drawn from Baden-Baden society. Ivan Turgenev wrote the librettos. An orchestrated version of one of these pieces, Le dernier sorcier (1869), was also performed in public in Weimar (1869), in Riga and in Karlsruhe (1870). The first performance of Johannes Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody (3rd March 1870) also took place during the Baden period. The war between France and Germany, and the fall of Napoleon III, brought Pauline Viardot back to Paris via London (private performance of Le dernier sorcier 11.2.1871), where she continued to teach and compose until her death at the age of 89. Her compositions were mainly "salon operettas", among them Le conte de Fées (1879) and Cendrillon (1904). Until the deaths of her husband and Turgenev in 1883, she held a prominent music salon in the Rue de Douai, then in the Boulevard St. Germain.
She published her own singing method, based on the Garcia school of singing, entitled Une heure d’étude; a collection of selected songs and arias: école classique de chant, with comments on phrasing and articulation, and notes on interpretation, etc.; and a critical edition of 50 Schubert songs. Apart from her own compositions and arrangements, these publications are today an important source of information about 19th century performance practices.
"[…] she is the most brilliant woman I have ever met."2 It was not only Clara Schumann, the author of this quotation, who was of this opinion. Pauline Viardot’s singing and pianistic ability, her intelligence, and her extraordinary musical versatility, even by the standards of those days, were undisputed. She not only spoke fluent Spanish, French, Italian, English, German and Russian, but also composed in various national styles. Her more than one hundred songs and mélodies based on texts by Musset, Tergenev, Pushkin, Gautier, Mörike and Goethe were mostly published during her lifetime.
Werke:
Annäherung III - an sieben Komponistinnen. Kerstin Thieme, Ethel Smyth, Mia Schmidt, Wen-Hui Tu, Ver-dina Shlonsky, Elisabeth Kuyper, Jacqueline Fontyn
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