No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

this marriage to draw up a trust deed tying her wealth and property to her two brothers Mortimer and Washington Singer, for her benefit not her husband’s.

Neither her mother nor stepfather attended her wedding on Thursday 28 July 1887 at the Église St Pierre de Chaillot. Washington Singer walked her down the aisle. A newspaper account described her as tall, lithe, with sweet blue eyes and wavy brown hair, then switched to the underlying scandal:

The true reason for Miss Singer’s leaving her mother’s home was her utter inability to get along with her stepfather, the Duke, whom his best friends admit to be a man of extremely uncertain temper. The Duchess does not lead the happiest of lives.

On her wedding night, at Prince Louis’ family chateau in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, Winnaretta told her husband that if he touched her she would kill him. Weeks later, her stepfather died of a heart attack; his funeral was held in the Église St Pierre. One newspaper commented that she had married to protect herself from the importuning of her mother’s husband but now might regret her haste.

Winnaretta paid the Vatican enough to have the marriage annulled. Then in 1893, aged twenty-nine, she made a lavender cover-up marriage with Prince Edmond de Polignac, who was fifty-nine, homosexual, and a composer and musician. By the marriage, she acquired a title and social cover; he acquired money and opportunity to perform his music in public – which he did until his death in 1901.

the salon of the Princesse de Polignac

The Princesse de Polignac’s yacht was moored at Nice; in Venice she acquired a palazzo and in Paris she became a Right Bank institution. Her musical evenings were a showpiece for the Parisian musical avant-garde. Her salon, decorated in Louis XVI style, with wood panelling, a vaulted ceiling and a balcony around the upper storey, seated a hundred. In it were two grand pianos and a Cavaillé-Coll organ. To perform their own and others’ music, she commissioned the best organists in Paris. Debussy and Ravel came to hear new works in acoustically ideal surroundings. Proust, Cocteau and Colette all wrote of the musical soirées at the Polignac salon.

Inscribed on the scores of many works she commissioned from Ravel, Fauré, Poulenc and Stravinsky was the dedication ‘À Madame la Princesse de Polignac’. Prokofiev wrote his piano sonata No.3 for her; Ravel dedicated his Pavane for a Dead Princess to her. She subsidized the Opéra de Paris, the Ballets Russes, the Paris Symphony Orchestra. A performance in her salon was a stepping stone to a wide audience, particularly when she interceded on the composer or performer’s behalf. She was as influential to new music as were Sylvia Beach and Bryher to new writing and Gertrude Stein to new painting. Stravinsky received a commission from her in November 1912: her appreciation of him was immediate, she said. ‘From the start it seemed to me impossible not to recognize the importance of this new genius’:

You know my very great admiration for your talent. You will not be surprised then that I thought of you to write for me a work, which would belong to me and which I would have played in my music room which you are familiar with. It would obviously have to be a short work and for a small orchestra—maybe 30 to 36 musicians.

She told him the piece should last around fifteen minutes and have two pianos or four hands so she could perform with another pianist. She offered him 3,000 francs and suggested a deadline of 8 April so the piece could debut around the end of April or the beginning of May. Stravinsky proposed a concerto for piano and orchestra:

I would need 2 flutes (the first changing to the piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (the 2nd changing to the bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (and the contrabassoon if possible), 2 horns in F, 2 trumpets in C, 2 tympani, a grand piano, a harp, 2 first violins, 2 second violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and a double bass.

Lily de Gramont described a salon evening at Winnaretta’s mansion at avenue Henri Martin:

a large room is reserved for music. The platform is at the far end, the Princess rustles her train of silver-grey satin going up and down the middle of the nave, the faithful gather to the right and left… the groups go to their places: the first three rows for the American billionaires, white hair and diamonds and the British duchesses; three other rows for the important French women with tinted hair; the youth gather at the back…

There was a sense of a bygone age. It was not like Natalie’s hazardous Fridays. One visitor spoke of a stampede for the buffet between concertos. Moneyed, powerful, entitled, imperious, the Princesse de Polignac shored up tradition even while she embraced the new. She viewed change as evolution rather than departure. Down the years, as well as Proust, Colette and Cocteau, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter attended her salons, and so did Isadora Duncan, Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten.

She was patron to Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Ethel Smyth, Le Corbusier. In a piece for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner described her as eccentric. She was parsimonious over small payments and careless about her appearance; she had panic attacks about thunderstorms or street demonstrations.

Isadora Duncan, who married Winnaretta’s brother Paris Singer, said she looked like a Roman emperor (Ernest Hemingway thought the same of Gertrude Stein), and that ‘when she spoke her voice had a hard metallic twang’. She thought her harsh demeanour was a mask to hide ‘extreme and sensitive shyness’. Virginia Woolf, on first meeting her in 1936, wrote:

I saw La Princesse de Polignac… whatever she was born she’s grown into the image of a stately mellow old Tory; and to look at you’d never think she ravished half the virgins in Paris and used, so Ethel Smyth tells me, to spring upon them with such impetuosity that once a sofa