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

The composer, conductor, pianist and teacher Nadia Boulanger called Winnaretta ‘one of the last great patrons in history’.

Her collection of paintings was fabulous… She’d arrive in London and an hour later you’d be playing music or reading poems. How many soirées we all went to where we played lots of Monteverdi, Schütz’s Resurrection, Carissimi’s Jephte, and then all the works she commissioned… There was the famous evening when her butler entered appalled, ‘Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived’. Stravinsky’s Les Noces was to be played for the first time.

Winnaretta’s lovers

Winnaretta had lovers galore. She said that after confessing to a priest, he refused her a second hearing. She neither advertised her relationships nor concealed them. She practised and expected discretion and left instruction for her personal papers and letters to be burned after her death.

Colette, to whom Winnaretta gave extravagant gifts, wrote of ‘a deep blue-eyed gaze, a conqueror’s chin, an air of indestructibility’. Among the gifts Winnaretta sent her were a vase of flowers with a diamond necklace hidden among them, a red Renault car, an antique writing table. Maurice Goudeket, who in 1935 became Colette’s third husband, thought Winnaretta always seemed like a guest in her own house.

Ethel Smyth

Winnaretta went to the first night of Ethel Smyth’s second opera, Der Wald (The Forest), at Covent Garden in 1903. Ethel, smitten by her, gave her an inscribed copy of the opera and said she had met ‘the most adorable human being in the world […] grave, natural, don’t-care-ish, the soul of independence – in short all the things I like.’ She stayed at the Singer mansion in Paignton and at the Palazzo Polignac in Venice, and from England sent declarations of love:

It is difficult to stand up against my feeling for you… your personality has the inevitableness, the rare finality of nature itself… Other people seem to me so fussy, so personal – so bereft of possibilities… You are the only human being I ever saw who combines limitless serenity and limitless passion… I am as certain of one thing as of death – I love you more in five minutes than anyone else ever did in five years.

Her love was not reciprocated. Winnaretta’s involvement in 1903 was with Olga de Meyer, tall, red-headed, an artists’ model to Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert, and said to be the daughter of Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Villa Olga in Dieppe, the house she grew up in, was bought by him for her mother. Her marriage in 1899 to the Vogue photographer Adolph de Meyer was, as with Winnaretta’s, a cover to conceal same-sex relationships.

Spurned, Ethel Smyth then thought Winnaretta ‘the worst’ as a human being. And she ‘detested and distrusted’ the Meyers.

Romaine Brooks met Winnaretta at a salon evening of Olga de Meyer’s in 1904. She had hesitated between a singing or painting career and she and the Princesse shared a passion for culture and an imperious manner. And for Romaine it was a relationship that furthered her career in Paris as a portrait painter.

Though Ethel Smyth’s love was rebuffed, Winnaretta supported both her music and her fight for suffrage. Ethel wrote the suffragettes’ rallying cry ‘The March of the Women’, worked with Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union and was imprisoned in Holloway in 1912 for throwing a rock through the window of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt. Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel, went to France to avoid arrest and stayed with Winnaretta, who helped her financially. Emmeline’s deputy, Annie Kenney, a Lancashire mill worker, visited her there:

I was shown into the largest room I had ever seen in a private house. There were beautiful books everywhere. I picked one up and found it to be a translation of Sappho’s poetry. The colour of the leather binding was the shade of a ripe pink cherry.

Ethel thanked Winnaretta on the Pankhursts’ behalf: ‘You are a brick and I think Mrs P’s greatest comfort is to know she has friends like you.’

philanthropy

Winnaretta was a brick for many good causes. In the First World War she paid for X-ray units needed by Marie Curie, bought an old hotel in Paris and had it converted into a hospital for the blind, and gave money for welfare and to supply ambulances for Belgian soldiers. She continued her music patronage during the war. In spring 1916 she gave Erik Satie a commission to set to music The Death of Socrates from Plato’s Phaedo. Satie, who was short of money, described himself as ‘swimming in happiness and free as water’.

After the war, Winnaretta withdrew from society for some years. The death in 1920 of a lover, Isaure de Miramon, aged forty-one, from a drug overdose sent her into deep depression. Madame de Miramon, unhappily married, beautiful and musical, had been introduced to opium by Jean Cocteau. ‘We go on because we have to, but with a heart full of shadows and distress that time will not alter,’ Winnaretta wrote to a friend.

In January 1923 Winnaretta offered Paul Valéry 12,000 francs to arrange monthly lectures in her home for a year. He could choose the topics. That year too, Violet Trefusis became her lover.

Violet Trefusis

Violet had been exiled to Paris from England after the intensely public scandal of her love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Her mother, Alice Keppel, socially acceptable as Edward VII’s mistress, forced Violet into a sham marriage with Denys Trefusis and packed them both off to Paris. Violet, broken-hearted, wrote to Vita:

What a dreadful thing is marriage. I think it is the wickedest thing in the universe. Think of the straight, clean lives it has ruined by forcing them to skulk and hide and intrigue and scheme, making of love a thing to be hidden and lied about. It is a wicked institution. It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s – he would give his soul never to have married. It has ruined – not your life