No [such] reward could cause more rejoicing in the hearts of musicians, for no one is more purely musical than Fauré, no one is imbued with more poetry – so much so that his delightful Lieder have earned him the appellation of the French Schumann.

The economic and political stability of the 1920s came to a sudden halt in late October 1929, with the crash of the American stock market. For Americans thriving in Paris on favorable exchange rates and growing stock dividends, it meant the end of a decade-long party. Many talented, wealthy expatriates who had come to feast on the lively artistic scene—including the writers of the “Lost Generation” such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos—packed their bags and returned home.

It took a while for French people, other than those with significant American investments, to feel the economic blow of the Great Depression. In Winnaretta's case, her wealth appears to have remained untouched: her Singer dividends, emanating from a Canadian trust, and capably and conservatively managed by her Paris business manager, François Dupré, continued to fill her bank accounts. Most of her investments were in real estate, and her considerable charitable activities offset her equally considerable tax liabilities. Consequently, unlike most of the people she knew, she did not suffer financial reverses in the early 1930s; on the contrary, there is every indication that she thrived during these economically uncertain years. Only months after the crash, she bought the Jouy-en-Josas country house built by Vaudoyer that she had rented for several summers from decorator Henri Gonse; after assuming ownership, she had the villa redecorated by Paris's most sought-after designer, Jean-Michel Frank. Later that year she treated a dozen of her family members and friends—including Violet Trefusis and her mother—to a two-week cruise to the Greek Islands and Dalmatia, on a ship called, appropriately enough, the Sans Peur—Fearless.

The healthy state of her portfolio allowed her to help others in less fortunate economic circumstances. Winnaretta's help generally came, however, with the same proviso that she had imposed in the case of Oedipus Rex: she would provide financial aid only if additional mécènes were found to supplement her contribution. This was her modus operandi in her latest involvement with the Salvation Army, which, in 1929, began a fundraising campaign for a new Paris shelter, one that could house as many as five hundred men and women.

In the second half of the 1920s Winnaretta devoted her energies to publicly oriented works of mécénat. This change of direction in her patronage activities— away from musical projects, and towards houses, buildings, and institutions—began, oddly enough, with her brother Paris's newest financial scheme: the opening of a luxury country club in South Florida.

The publicity and royal accolades that Paris Singer had garnered from the conversion of the Wigwam into a war hospital failed to attract the wealthy investors to his European business ventures as he had hoped. His affair with Isadora Duncan had ended unhappily, despite his offer to purchase Madison Square Garden for her use as the New York branch of her dancing school. At the same time his wife Lillie, fed up with his amorous dalliances, obtained a French divorce. Plagued with financial woes and chronic heart problems, the indefatigable entrepreneur relocated to Florida and, in 1919, acquired a large property in the middle of a swamp, with a single dirt road running through it. He devised a plan to convert “Joe's Alligator Farm” into a convalescent and rehabilitation facility for wounded French and English officers returning from the war. To build the facility, Paris called upon the talents of another eccentrically brilliant amateur architect, Addison Mizner, who, with the Singer fortune at his disposal, built a manor house in “Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance- Bull-Market-Damn the Expense Style.” Paris solicited investors from the same group of wealthy Europeans who had endowed beds at the Wigwam. Unfortunately, the facility failed to attract convalescing soldiers. Facing the grim prospect of another financial failure, Paris had the idea of converting the building into a private social club. He had Mizner build a ring of private residential “cottages” to surround the manor house; he financed the transformation of the property's dusty dirt road into Worth Avenue—Palm Beach's future equivalent of Hollywood's Rodeo Drive. The Duchesse de Richelieu—the recently widowed Princesse Alice of Monaco— was enlisted to take charge of the décor. The success of the newly-born “Everglades Club” was instantaneous: from the first launch of advance publicity in 1925, the elite of two continents made plans to travel to Florida in order to discover this new palace of elitism.

After Edmond's interment in the Singer crypt in Torquay, Winnaretta returned to Paris. On 31 August, she invited the most gifted of memorycollectors, Marcel Proust, to come see her in the evening. Winnaretta reminisced at length, recalling her first meeting with Edmond's family members, whom he had nicknamed “the Big Reds” (les gros rouges). They had never understood him, and had told her that she was marrying an unbearable maniac. But to the contrary, she mused, she had never known someone so easy to live with, so fearful was he of being a bother to anyone. Proust was moved by the unusual emotional outpouring of this woman who had always hidden herself so carefully behind a wall of unapproachable reserve.

Just at that time a newly published novel sought to unmask the private life that Winnaretta was purported to lead behind the circumspect public image. Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas was a sensationalist tale of a young man fascinated by and attracted to the world of Parisian sexual subcultures. The open disgust with which the author treated his homosexual characters was, in fact, a veil for his own closeted homosexuality. Montesquiou, for example, becomes the perfumed Comte de Muzarett, “the Narcissus of the inkpot,” who has just completed a new book, entitled Winged Rats. But Lorrain saves his particular venom for the character of the Princesse de Seiryman-Frileuse, a thinly disguised satirical portrait of Winnaretta de Polignac. The “ogress,” as depicted by Lorrain, is “interesting” and “very daring,” having contracted an honorary marriage with an elderly prince from an old and distinguished noble family.

Whether or not she actually read it, Winnaretta surely knew about this lurid new book. Its release so close to Edmond's death must have sharpened the sting of the portrait.

Some months after Winnaretta's death, Lennox Berkeley wrote to Nadia Boulanger,

In December 1944, Le Figaro published a commemorative article, expressing regret that, when she had died a year earlier, “the events and the subjugation that weighed on all free expression in France did not permit us to speak as we would have wished.” The article, praising her lifelong contribution to the arts, concluded that “it will be impossible to write the chronicle of the twentieth century without including the salon on Avenue Henri-Martin and the palazzo on the Grand Canal… . Music has forever inscribed her name at the top of some of the classic works of our time.”

A large memorial gathering in Winnaretta's honor was held in Paris sometime in 1944. Many family members, friends, and distinguished members of the European cultural community celebrated the life of this “eightthousand- volt being,” as Armande de Polignac aptly described her aunt. Shortly thereafter Winnaretta's will was read. In addition to the bequests of money and objects that she had made to various family members and friends, the document testified to her commitment to art, artists, and charitable institutions. Generous legacies were left to Colette, Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Giorgio Levi, Renata Borgatti, Jacques Février, and Léon- Paul Fargue (Fargue's bequest was the last codicil to be added to the will, in 1939). Institutions such as the Hospice for the Women of Calvary, the Society for the Preservation and Rehabilitation of Young Girls, and the Pasteur Institute (to which she endowed two scholarships) were also beneficiaries of her posthumous largesse. She donated the wainscotting from her library to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs; to the Louvre she left her beloved Manet canvas, La Lecture, as well as the Ingres drawing, the two large Paninis, and the three Monets—including the Champs de tulipes en Hollande that had brought her into competition with Edmond for its purchase.

After the death of Isaure de Miramon, Winnaretta did not “receive” for almost two years; indeed, she shunned company. Her tendency towards asceticism became more pronounced. The empty house was kept at uncomfortably low temperatures. She ate little, but because she was less active, she gained weight. She read constantly, studied Greek, and spent long hours playing Bach's organ fugues. Her infrequent luncheon or dinner guests—mostly Anna or Hélène, or her nieces or nephews—were treated to meager repasts, during which Winnaretta gazed into space, beyond reach. Attempts by friends to engage her in activity were rejected. When Augustine Bulteau asked if she would be willing to host an evening of monologues by the British comedian Ruth Draper in her atelier, Winnaretta responded, “I would be very glad to meet her, but as I am no longer receiving, I have, I’m afraid, very little influence in the ‘salons.’”

These solitary years coincided with the successive deaths of various figures from her personal and artistic life, both friends and foes: Robert de Montesquiou, querulous to the end; the sensible and much beloved Louise de Polignac; her stepfather Paul Sohège; and saddest of all, her cherished friend and “spiritual advisor” Augustine Bulteau, who died in September 1922 while Winnaretta was away in Venice. The last significant death of that period was that of Marcel Proust, who succumbed on 18 November 1922 to the ill health that had pursued him for most of his life. Proust had chronicled one of Winnaretta's rare appearances in society during her selfimposed two-year exile when, in June 1921, the two had crossed paths at a party given in honor of the marriage of the Duke of Marlborough to another American “dollar princess,” Gladys Deacon. On that occasion Winnaretta had seemed to Proust “icy as a cold draft, looking the image of Dante.” (What the writer perceived as coldness was more likely Winnaretta's shocked reaction to Proust's pallid, sickly complexion, as well as his to peculiar party attire: he had come dressed in a long seal-skin dressing gown that drooped around his ankles.) Nonetheless, she had responded with undisguised delight when he informed her, “Paul Morand likes you very much.”

On the first of February 1892 Winnaretta received the news that her marriage to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard had been officially annulled by the Curia in Rome. Now that the last impediments to her freedom were removed, she had only to wait for the completion of the newly constructed atelier and the composition by Fauré to make her official re-entry into the musical and aristocratic salon circles. But she was not able to celebrate her good news just yet. In addition to the financial problems with Carriès, and the consequent delay to the completion of the atelier, Winnaretta had another issue to confront: her social status. She had once again begun signing her letters Winnaretta Singer. Now merely an ex-princess, Winnaretta risked a descent from the upper crust back into the ranks of the socialclimbing bourgeoisie. Could she still draw the great ladies of the Faubourg St.-Germain all the way out to her home in Passy? Would her association with the musical circles of the avant-garde help or hinder her quest for social ascendance?

Let us leave Winnaretta temporarily, sitting in her mansion in the 16th arrondissement, mulling over her problems with unfinished projects, artistic crises, home decoration, and social position, and travel a short distance to the 8th arrondissement, in the quarter behind the Champs-Élysées. There, on that same first of February 1892, in a small apartment at 39 rue Washington, Prince Edmond de Polignac was contemplating some of the same issues besetting Winnaretta. Fifty-seven years old, all he had ever yearned for was to be a composer, recognized for his original music and his iconoclastic musical ideas. An inveterate dreamer, chronically inept with money, the victim of charlatans who had preyed on his credulity by luring him into “get-rich-quick” schemes, Edmond has recently lost the last of his small inheritance in the stock market. Earlier that week, his few remaining possessions had been seized by debt collectors, and he sat in the empty apartment, burrowed in the one remaining armchair, wrapped in a shawl, his head covered with a knitted cap.

This book is first and foremost a study of a remarkable life in music. The daughter of sewing machine industrialist Isaac Merritt Singer, Winnaretta Singer-Polignac (WSP) used her colossal fortune to champion the cause of musical modernism. She commissioned over twenty pieces of new music, providing important opportunities to composers such as Chabrier, Fauré, Stravinsky, Satie, Falla, and Poulenc at critical junctures in their careers. Many works commissioned by and dedicated to her received their first performances in her salon, which also showcased any number of worldclass instrumentalists and singers. No less important are the great number of good works done on behalf of art, literature, and the sciences, to say nothing of her underwriting of public housing and other social service projects.

WSP's prescience in her choice of musical and artistic projects was remarkable: she always seemed to be one step ahead of musical trends. She was an ardent Wagnerite before idolatry of the German and his music swept through the French artistic community, and she championed Debussy's music at a time when it was still considered to be “unhealthy.” Her commissions of works for chamber ensembles came from her insight, first articulated in 1912, “that, after Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, the days of big orchestras were over and that it would be delightful to return to a small orchestra of well chosen players and instruments.”

In the present work, WSP's long-lasting influence on twentieth-century music will be examined at length, but I would like to point out two seminal ways in which she changed the course of the art of her time. First, two of her artistic preferences—a love of the music of J. S. Bach, and her fascination with Hellenic language and culture—led directly to the rise of what is broadly called “neoclassicism” in music. Maurice Ravel's popular 1899 piano work, Pavane pour une infante défunte, a model of Apollonian coolness and calm, foreshadowed this trend. More important still was Erik Satie's Socrate, with texts by Plato, commissioned by WSP in 1918, a significant marker in modernist music; this influential piece would lead other composers directly along the path towards a compositional style that would inform musical composition for the next two decades.

The woman sat in front of the fireplace on that chilly October day, watching the hungry flames lick the stone walls. Her son was at her side, the piles and piles of letters stacked at their feet. She was about to carry out the dictates of her aunt's last will and testament.

The will had authorized “the autograph letters of celebrated persons” to be spared. These were separated out first. But then the woman started to read what she had promised to destroy. It was heartrending: so many testimonials to such a full, rich, complicated life, destined for the fire.

Her aunt had been one of the most famous women in Europe, lauded in her adopted country of France for the generosity with which she supported charitable causes, for her efforts on behalf of the arts, sciences, and letters, and most especially for her initiatives on behalf of music from all ages, on behalf of modern music in particular, initiatives that had earned her the title of la Grande Mécène, the Great Patron of modern music.

But her aunt had also been inscrutable, sphinx-like. No one really knew her. And not everyone in her family or her husband's family had liked her. Some had been jealous; some had found her private life scandalous; not a few had wished for her social downfall. One nephew had described the aunt that he called la silencieuse—the silent one—in the most uncomplimentary of terms.

Winnaretta Singer-Polignac, as befitted a future princess, was born in The Castle, a sumptous mansion situated on a hundred acres of parkland perched above a river. The Castle boasted room after room filled with the most elegant and costly furnishings that money could buy. A battalion of servants bustled through the house, attending to the needs of family members and guests. The large stable contained, in addition to horses and sleighs, a canary-yellow carriage that could transport thirty-one people.

What was unusual about the Singer Castle was its location: not in Sussex, or the Loire Valley, or in Bavaria, but in Yonkers, a northern suburb of New York City. Winnaretta's parents were not royalty, and in fact both came from humble backgrounds. And yet both father and mother came to be known in every corner of the globe—he for his family name, which was seen in millions of households, emblazoned on the machine that he had perfected and manufactured, the Singer sewing machine; she because of her beautiful face, which was rumored to have inspired sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi in creating the Statue of Liberty, the world's most visible woman. How could a child grow to equal—or surpass—such parents?

Winnaretta Singer was her father's twentieth child. In all, Isaac Merritt Singer would father twenty-four children from two legal and three common- law marriages. Although he would disavow all liaisons prior to his marriage with Winnaretta's mother, Singer acknowledged every single one of his children by name in his will and left each of them a handsome bequest. Like Paul Bunyan of American folklore, Isaac Singer lived a life of fantastic, even mythic proportions. His life bespoke big dreams, outsized curiosity, bold actions, enormous wealth, and huge appetites.

Winnaretta's godfather was Edward Harrison May, the English-born, French-trained American artist, best known at that time for his contribution to the 1851 “Grand Moving Panorama of the Pilgrim's Progress.” Moving panoramas were paintings hundreds of feet long, unrolled across a stage in “scenes.” Their stories, travelogues or epic tales, were accompanied by narration and music. These mid-nineteenth century “blockbusters” of visual art toured from city to city, attracting thousands of paying spectators, earning May over $100,000. He and Singer had been friends for years.

It was clear from the start that the marriage of Winnaretta Singer and Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard could not bring happiness to either party. Therefore, both sought out what could be gleaned from a marriage of convenience. The Prince, in wedding a wealthy “dollar princess,” was now the symbolic—if not legal— “master” of a large and elegant hôtel and his wife's even larger fortune. As for Winnaretta, she was now a titled woman. She knew that there were obligations as well as privileges that came with her new identity. That she intended to make patronage a focal point of her life is affirmed in an 1888 letter from Paris Singer. “I wish you every happiness that this world can offer. There are many noble and charitable works to be done in Paris and I am sure you will occupy your leisure moments in relieving the wants of those whom God has not blessed with name, beauty and riches as he has you.” Winnaretta would spend a lifetime fulfilling this charge.

For the moment, however, being able to add the title of “princess” to her calling cards was satisfaction enough. She was now welcomed into the aristocratic salons, including the celebrated gatherings at the homes of the Baronne de Poilly and Madame Lydie d’Aubernon, whose literary salons were unparalleled in their prestige. Winnaretta was stimulated by the intellectual atmosphere at these gatherings, which welcomed artists, musicians, and dramatists, but also amused by the foppish behavior of some members of the nobility. Comte Barbey d’Aurevilly, for example, had sartorial tastes dating back to the era of Louis XV: he would come dressed in waistcoats of silk and lace, buttons of amethyst and rhinestone. Once novelist Paul Bourget made an admiring comment about his choice of clothing: “How handsome you are tonight, Monsieur d’Aurevilly,” to which the gentleman replied, “I am simply being polite.”

Winnaretta hoped that, having “settled down” with a prince husband, there might be a détente in her relations with her mother, but events soon focused all of Isabella's attentions on her younger daughter. Belle-Blanche had recently captured the affections of a young nobleman, Duc Élie Decazes; by January 1888 they were engaged.

The 1932 Paris winter season was in full swing, and brilliant. One eagerly awaited musical event was an upcoming recital to be given by Stravinsky and Russian violinist Samuel Dushkin. The two musicians had decided to embark on a duo partnership, and Stravinsky had written some new pieces for their collaborative programs: a Suite italienne based on his Pergolesiinspired ballet Pulcinella, and a Duo Concertant. These works were scheduled to receive their Paris debut on 8 December 1932 at the Salle Pleyel. Winnaretta's seats for the recital were already reserved. She had invited Igor Markevitch, now a “regular” in the Polignac salon, to join her in her loge, with a promise to introduce him to Stravinsky afterwards. At the moment, Markevitch was in a bit of an awkward position vis-à-vis his patron: she had recently asked him to write a new work for small ensemble, a request that surely delighted the composer; on the other hand, she had not yet sent the final payment of four thousand francs for his Partita, due at the time of the manuscript's delivery. After the financial misunderstandings that had taken place the previous year, Markevitch did not feel capable of broaching the subject of money with Winnaretta. He wrote to his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, to ask for help. Boulanger was accustomed to acting as emissary on behalf of her talented but unworldly young students. On 15 November 1932 she called at rue Cortambert, expecting, no doubt, to carry out a relatively simple errand on Markevitch's behalf. Little did she imagine that her visit would set in motion a chain of events that would change her own life, and Winnaretta’s, forever.

Nadia Boulanger's strength of character had been forged from many personal and professional disappointments. Born in 1887, she was the daughter of composer and Prix de Rome winner Ernest Boulanger and his wife Raissa (his former voice student), who claimed descent from a family of Russian princes. The young Nadia had shown early promise as a musician. At the Conservatoire she studied harmony, piano accompaniment, and organ; in 1901 (the year of Edmond de Polignac's death) she entered the composition class of Gabriel Fauré. While still a student, she met the pianist and composer, Spanish-born Raoul Pugno, who became her mentor and, subsequently, her lover.