Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Eastman Studies in Music) (Volume 22) - Hardcover

Kahan, Sylvia

4.27

22 ratings by Goodreads

9781580461337: Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Eastman Studies in Music) (Volume 22)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580461336 ISBN 13: 9781580461337

Publisher: University of Rochester Press, 2006

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The American-born Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943) was a millionaire at the age of eighteen, due to her inheriting a substantial part of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Her 1893 marriage to Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer, brought her into contact with the most elite strata of French society. After Edmond's death in 1901, she used her fortune to benefit the arts, science, and letters. Her most significant contribution was in the musical domain: in addition to subsidizing individual artists (Boulanger, Haskil, Rubinstein, Horowitz) and organizations (the Ballets Russes, l'Op�ra de Paris, l'Orchestre Symphonique de Paris), she made a lifelong project of commissioning new musical works from composers, many of them unknown and struggling, to be performed in her Paris salon. The list of works created as a result is long and extraordinary: Stravinsky's Renard, Satie's Socrate, Falla's El Retablo de Maese Pedro, and Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos are among the best-known titles. In addition, her salon was a gathering place for luminaries of French culture such as Proust, Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev, and Colette. Many of Proust's memorable evocations of salon culture were born during his attendance at concerts in the Polignac music room. Sylvia Kahan brings to life this eccentric and extravagant lover of the arts, whose influence on the 20th Century world of music and literature remains incalculable.

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About the Author:

Sylvia Kahan, a pianist and scholar, is Professor of Music at the Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Review:

A splendid biography of the munificent princess. --Alex Ross (online at http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/04/merci-beaucoup-domo-arigato.html) Superb new biography. . . The list of her achievements -- music dedicated to her, works commissioned by her, artists supported by her -- are all scrupulously recorded here. . . a dazzling and inspiring array. . . In Sylvia Kahan Winnaretta (Singer-Polignac) has a biographer able to explain her special mixture of arrogance, intelligence and bravery. THE TIMES (Margaret Reynolds) Her book is magnificently readable. The reader's complaint might be that it stopped after 550 pages and has not yet been made into a movie. THE VILLAGER A pleasure to read and a good reference book to keep. . . (Winnaretta's) beautiful kingdom created a musical reality that we enjoy to this day. JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR WOMEN IN MUSIC (Julie Cross) The list of those who owed much to (the Princesse de Polignac) is simply breathtaking. . . This biography by Sylvia Kahan (now available . . . in paperback) is easy to read as an adventure story just as much as it is a sideways glance at over half a century's cultural history. GRAMOPHONE (Geraint Lewis) This is a book to be referred to again and again. . . an 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. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (Robert Orledge)BR> Kahan appears to have gotten as close to Singer-Polignac as any scholar could in the many years she worked on this good book. NOTES, March 2005 Kahan does justice to this inspiring woman's legacy by crafting a biography that is heartfelt and stimulating. FRENCH REVIEW, 2006 (Eileen M. Angelini) Wonderfully researched. . . Sensitively sets Singer Polignac's vibrant lesbianism in the context of the times. CLASSICAL MUSIC (Andrew Green)

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