Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (review)

Abstract

Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac Bonnie Jo Dopp Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. By Sylvia Kahan . Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. ( Eastman Studies in Music.) [ xxii, 547 p. ISBN 1-58046-133-6. $49.95.] Appendices, index, bibliography. Attending concerts in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress as a college student made me at least unconsciously aware of women as music patrons, so decades later perhaps Coolidge's example inspired my commissioning a piece—actually, I could afford only an arrangement—from a composer I knew, played on a regularly-scheduled chamber music concert. My small experience as a patron of composers (there was one other arrangement, from another composer friend, this time performed in my living room) taught me something about the challenges of this activity and gave me some of the pleasures one imagines other composers' patrons feel: the joy of supporting creative efforts with beautiful results and the peace of "owning" things that take up no space, need not be insured, and are best held in memory among friends, with just printed programs and inscribed scores as souvenirs. A "bragging rights" snob factor was not completely absent, either. Ralph P. Locke in the final essay in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) presents a case for a positive spin on the "misapprehensions" of historical female patrons doing cultural work as an excuse to throw lavish parties, adopt favorite composers as pets, and promote themselves when they might rather have contributed to overcoming the ills of society. Among other things, even if their work in music directly supported the creation of few lasting masterpieces of the repertoire, the cumulative effect of their efforts gave many in the world of art music real opportunities to grow as performing musicians, composers, and audiences, and their example gave rise to more artistic patronage from others. Though she was born in Yonkers, Winnaretta Singer cultivated music in Paris and Venice and is not considered in Locke and Barr's book. A brief précis of her patronage as Princesse de Polignac appears in Mona Mender's appreciative survey, Extraordinary Women in Support of Music (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997). An inaccurate, footnote-free biography of this expatriate American princess appeared in 1978, during the late twentieth-century "women's movement" when writings by and about lesbians were relatively new to the popular nonfiction market and those that made much of a subject's sexual adventures were welcomed: The Food of Love by Michael de Cossart (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978). Sylvia Kahan's 1993 dissertation, "The Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865-1943): A Documentary Chronicle of Her Life and Artistic Circle" (D.M.A., City University of New York) was an extensive [End Page 780] scholarly study of Singer-Polignac's life, and the book under review, an expansion of that thesis, is now the most authoritative published source of information about her. The essential problem in Singer-Polignac research is that her will dictated that her personal papers be destroyed, and they were. Thus, any scholar attempting to bring her to life must rely on copious testimony from other primary sources: letters she wrote that are in various archives (some privately held), whatever exists in the public record of her day, including published reviews and articles in the press, and interviews with people who knew Singer-Polignac, who died in 1943. Numerous anecdotes concerning her appear in secondary sources as well, for she knew many prominent people and their memoirs often reveal just how memorable a person she was. Kahan's investigation of Singer-Polignac's life included interviews with family members. It required travel to libraries and private archives in France, the United States, and Britain and perusal of over 400 books, articles, and dissertations listed in her bibliography in addition to news clippings in family scrapbooks cited in notes. Fully one-third of Kahan's book consists of apparatus (appendices, notes, bibliography, index, etc.) so simply as a source for information on Winnaretta's modernist milieu, it is a valuable...