MUSIC'S MODERN MUSE. A life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. By Sylvia Kahan. 576pp. University of Rochester Press. $49.95; distributed in the UK by Boydell and Brewer. £30. 1 58046 133 6
Undoubtedly the best thing to come out of Yonkers, New York, "Tante Winnie", as she became known, pursued an extraordinary career combining "dollar princess", society hostess, discreet but active lesbian, ascetic devotee of Bach, and far-sighted patroness of composers from Stravinsky to Kurt Weill. Yet she led a lonely life after the death of her beloved (and gay) second husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac, a talented choral composer who independently discovered the octatonic scale in 1879 and whose modernistic works (admired by both Debussy and Proust) she promoted with dedication from 1901 onwards. She stoically kept herself busy to avoid depression, sponsoring Salvation Army hostels designed by Le Corbusier and Greek archaeological digs, founding and supervising the Fondation Singer Polignac, and practising Bach on her Cavaille-Coll organ in the Avenue Henri-Martin, a palace for the arts that often remained unheated, and in which her frequently assembled orchestras and choirs complained about being underpaid, or ignored when it came to the banquets she offered to her mostly aristocratic salon guests.
Quite how she produced her endless benefactions is only occasionally touched on in this detailed chronology of her life and achievements, for she appears to have inherited only $900,000 as the twentieth child of the philandering and flamboyant Isaac Singer in 1877. But doubtless her shares in his sewing-machine empire escalated in value as her wealth was estimated at $1.5 million by 1888, and continued to grow until the Second World War, thanks to some very shrewd investment in real estate. Even so, the figures involved in her endless and often colossal donations do not seem to add up. Might they perhaps explain her legendary penny- pinching and later policy of providing only donations that could be matched by others?
Although she continued to help struggling composers from Faure in the 1890s to Igor Markevitch in the 1930s, Winnie's main interest lay in the music she commissioned, and she could be tough in insisting on the fulfilment of her carefully worded contracts. While her activities as la grande mecene undoubtedly enhanced her reputation and standing in high society, she was happiest sitting silently in front of her gossiping audiences, absorbed in the masterpieces she had helped to create. Organization she mostly left to others, such as Charles Bordes, Gabriel Astruc and, in the 1930s, the equally resourceful Nadia Boulanger, who became her closest friend for a while and for whom she created the opportunities to become a celebrated conductor in her own right.
Her lovers included the society hostess Olga de Meyer, the artist Romaine Brooks, the temperamental Violet Trefusis (1923-33) and the devoted Alvilde Chaplin, yet she also remained very close to Colette and Ethel Smyth (who was infatuated with her when they first met in 1903). She remained seemingly indestructible amid her whirlwind activities, and emerged unscathed from terrible ordeals such as her wedding to the Prince de Scey-Montbeliard (when she allegedly fought off his unwanted attentions from the top of a wardrobe with an umbrella), or her ducking in the Seine as she tried to escape in a rowing boat from the advances of a certain "Monsieur de D." during a ball given by the Comtesse Greffulhe on the island in the Bois de Boulogne in 1891. But she still had "great fun" on that memorable night, hearing Faure's Pavane with a text by Robert de Montesquiou and original choreography. Far more devastating to her was Stravinsky's ungrateful and tardy refusal to conduct Renard at a special concert of works she had commissioned by the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris on March 21, 1933, especially as she had footed the bill for the choir he needed to perform his Symphony of Psalms two days earlier. She suffered equally from the insensitive gaucheness of the young Igor Markevitch, but still remained generous to both composers in the aftermath.
In her exhaustive study of the Princesse de Polignac, Sylvia Kahan has consulted many private collections, assessed a wide variety of international (and up-to-date) sources, and even gone to the Totnes Times of 1888 to check out a story about Chabrier and the effects of asparagus on the bladder. Unlike Michael de Cossart's 1978 study, everything is immaculately referenced, though Kahan follows his format as a social historian using imaginatively titled chapters, which might also have been helpfully dated. If she does not share his lighter stylistic touch and wit, she has scored a coup in at last gaining untrammelled access to the Polignac archives, and the picture she paints of the enigmatic Princesse working behind the scenes is both broader and more comprehensive than Cossart's. The diplomatic Professor Kahan has also studied the diaries of Madame de Saint-Marceaux, which play an important role in Myriam Chimenes's encyclopedic Mecenes et musiciens: Du salon au concert a Paris sous la IIIe Republique (Fayard, 2004), which should ideally be read alongside the present study. In essence, Kahan has done for the Princesse what Lynn Garafola did for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1989, to the extent that we now know from the Archives Nationales the names of Winnie's guests in her dress circle box at the epoch-making opening performance of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov with Chaliapin on May 19, 1908. This is a book to be referred to again and again, not least for its comprehensive appendices tabling all the known performances in the Polignac salon from 1888 to 1939, all her known guests, and all the works commissioned by and dedicated to this extraordinary Maecenas.
Occasionally, and perhaps inevitably, there are repetitions of material and contradictions: Kahan has used the Princesse's unreliable Memoirs (published in
1945) as a starting point, so it would be surprising if there were not. But it can be confusing to discover in Chapter Fifteen that "it was the first time that a woman (Nadia Boulanger) had ever conducted the London Symphony (Orchestra)" as late as November 1936, and then to read a few pages later that a concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1937 "would break new ground -the first time that a woman had ever conducted a major orchestra in England".
Perhaps the LSO did not then count as a "major orchestra"? Overall, Kahan's book does not overstress feminist and gender issues, and is often refreshingly speculative, even if the tone is at times rather deferential.
There are errors, too: Erik Satie, for all his gay associates, disapproved strongly of the antics of Cocteau and his circle, so he did not belong in the "gay, bisexual, or 'queer'" category to which Kahan consigns him. Satie missed the September 1924 Venice "run-through" of Socrate (if he was ever told about it) because he was busy finishing Relache, and did not die "five years later"; his group "Les Nouveaux Jeunes" was a loose and short-lived assembly of modern artists (including performers) and never a "group of six composers". But these are small quibbles in an otherwise authoritative study that will give any interested reader an overview of a fascinating artistic epoch with a complex and intriguing survivor at its helm. Underneath the forbidding exterior, "Aunt Winnie" was a sensitive and selfless philanthropist, both acutely perceptive of genuine talent in others and wide-ranging in her patronage. These aspects shine clearly through the mine of detailed information in Sylvia Kahan's important new study.
