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

Rating:
Summary: Buy it, read it, love it.
Review: A wonderful, well-researched history of a great patron of the arts in France during the latter part of the 19th and the early 20th century. The author takes us on an exquisite trip through the period in history when literature, art and music were French and France was the center of the artistic universe. You can only be jealous of the heroine of this history - the daughter of sewing machine inventor Isaac Singer - who could have been the ultimate name dropper. Degas, Picasso, Proust, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Turgenyev, Rubinstein, Balanchine, and on and on and on. She even managed to hire Poincare, later the Prime Minister, as her lawyer, and attended the wedding of the parents of Price Ranier of Monaco, whose father was a relative of her husband. Through painstaking research involving what must have been thousands of letters, newspaper articles, diary pages and other sources, the author has turned her years of work into a readable story of the development of modern classical music. It would have been easy to get lost in the Princesse's lesbian sexual preference to the detriment of the story. Luckily, the author, although she makes reference to the issue when it is important, does not get confused by the pop psychologist's attempt to turn everything into sexual warfare. For that effort, and for the painstaking research, Ms. Kahan deserve great praise and our undying gratitude.

Rating:
Summary: No Hunny For This Winnie
Review: As an aficionado and practitioner of early music, I was delighted by the publication of "Music's Modern Muse," the new biography of Winnaretta ("Winnie") Singer-Polignac (1865-1943) by Sylvia Kahan. A detailed account of the important career of this American-born Paris-based music patroness was long overdue. But sadly, my anticipation for what could have been a milestone of the genre was soon soured on several levels. It is not surprising to learn that "Music's Modern Muse" is both Ms. Kahan's first book and an expansion of her doctoral dissertation as it bears the telltale signs of both. These include an unnecessarily overlong text at 369 pages, accompanied by several superfluous appendices, especially a 12-page guide to the notable guests who attended WSP's salon. Sadly, the latter comes across as a pretentious tactic by the author to further legitimize her subject. More troubling is Kahan's overall dismissal of Michael de Cossart's book "The Food of Love," the first full-length biographical study of WSP published originally in 1978. The core of Kahan's condemnation of this vastly entertaining study is in what she claims to be de Cossart's reliance upon rumors and outlandish stories as fact. So one must then question her citation of this same author's research on WSP in describing the subject's poignant death scene. At one point in "Music's Modern Muse," Ms. Kahan recognizes the fact that WSP was a constant target of negative criticism. The author maintains that the press and members of the Parisian elite of the day accused her unfairly of exploiting artists for self-serving gratification. But by now, the reader has already been treated to Kahan's unfortunate account of how WSP did not invite the musicians of a new work by Manuel de Falla to a private dinner in her home prior to their performance of it. And this included such renowned artists as Wanda Landowska and Francis Poulenc. Kahan quickly dismisses such grossly hypocritical behavior as being "no doubt less the result of parsimony than absent-mindedness: [WSP] had simply forgotten that the musicians would have no chance to eat between the final rehearsal and the performance." So much for this "modernist musical hostess." It should be noted that an otherwise finely written text is marred by the occasional misspelling of proper names and the appearance of factual errors. And this is truly a shame since the lasting worth of "Music's Modern Muse" would be most obviously as a reference book for specialists in the birth of Modern music at the turn of the twentieth century. On a lighter note, the biography is illustrated throughout, offering a selection of photographs and artwork reproductions of WSP. These document a long life and offer corroborative evidence as to the many contemporary reports of her unpleasing exterior, an unchanging condition clearly possessed from childhood. Ms. Kahan's achievement in publishing such a weighty tome on a relatively unknown but admirable patroness is laudable. But in the end, she presents us with a figure most perfectly epitomized by character actress Margaret Dumont, who specialized in being a foil to the Marx Brothers as a self-important, but inadvertently silly society grande dame.

Rating:
Summary: No Hunny For This Winnie
Review: Collaboratively edited by Nicholas Boyle (Professor of German Literary and Intellectual History, and Head of the Department of German, Cambridge University) and John Guthrie (Fellow in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages, New Hall, Cambridge), Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays for the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary is an impressive compilation of informed and informative college-level essays and thoughts about Goethe's work, ranging from close readings of the well-known "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister", to scrutiny of recent translations of his poetry, to a look at how Goethe's texts have affected Ireland literary culture in particular. Goethe And The English-Speaking World is strongly recommended reading for its deep, varied, and eclectic compilation of erudite contributions on the classic works of an immortal master writer.

Rating:
Summary: Dry as a Bone.
Review: I picked up this book at a book signing by the author at Lincoln Center in New York City this past winter. It seemed an interesting read about an interesting woman. This was not the case. The book reads more like a student's college paper than a biography. Mistakes and typos abound! The book also needed the talents of a good editor as the author can be frequently redundant. True, the book has some great pics, but they are often marred by poor reproductions. True, Ms. Singer did lead a fascinating life in Paris during the belle epoque, but she seems to be one of those people who were famous simply because of the artists they knew and not because they ever truly contributed anything. She held salons, but often paid no attention to the famous guests she was entertaining. The author dances very nimbly around the fact that her subject was not a very well-like woman, even by some of her closest confidants. And her husband, despite numerous protests by Ms. Kahan to the contrary, was a composer of dubious talents. It all reads like one of those stories where the wife has a ton of money and spends it to promote the mediocre talents of a loved one, then basks in whatever adulation is received, like a battleaxe of a stage mom that no one can say no to. The book is also rife with tons of filler - party guest lists, a cataloging of music played here, there and everywhere, an overlong bibliography. I am very certain that Ms. Kahan did an immense amount of research while writing this book, but not for one moment does its subject come to life. Ms. Singer appears like one of those folks who happen to be in the right place at the right time and became famous for all the wrong reasons. Doubtless the woman did something for the cause of music, but the book, and Ms. Kahan's writing style, is dry as a bone. The book is also exorbitantly overpriced.

Rating:
Summary: Sheer Brilliance
Review: I was absolutely blown away by this book, a true insight into the life of Winnaretta Singer, and an incredibly fun read. This is a definite must have.

Rating:
Summary: Useful reference source, but a little uncritical
Review: It's tough writing about someone you admire. It makes you let down your critical guard, makes you a bit too forgiving of things you ordinarily would not be. This is the big flaw of Kahan's book for me. Kahan goes out of her way to portray Winnaretta Singer as largely apolitical in a politically fraught climate. Given Singer's close acquaintances with people like Poincaré, Anna de Noailles and the rest, this is hard to believe. I'm not saying Singer was clearly of the Right or the Left; like several members of Parisian high culture at the time, Singer's politics couldn't be placed conveniently in one type or another. But this isn't the same as apolitical. It's one thing to shun politics; it's quite another to hold ambiguous political beliefs.

For example, Kahan writes: "By this point Ezra Pound had already begun to write his pro-Fascist manifestos; [Olga] Rudge showed them to Winnaretta, who found them 'very well done *indeed*.' The most generous interpretation here is that Winnaretta, adamantly apolitical, only wanted to compliment Rudge's lover."

Yes, that's a very generous interpretation. A less generous one would be that there were things in Pound's tracts that Singer found appealing. It's only understandable that Kahan would shy away from such readings, though; no one likes Fascism. But we don't have to label Winnaretta Singer a Fascist just because she liked Pound's Fascist texts. We can say that, like many intellectuals, Singer was attracted to *some* of the tenets of Fascism. Disturbing, yes, but probably closer to the truth than Kahan's black-and-white portrayal.

Another example: "The recital at Winnaretta's was, in fact, a run-through for the grand concert that Rudge and Münch would give at the Fascist Institute of Culture in Genoa in November of 1934. [P] Winnaretta seemed completely oblivious to the implications of being involved in crypto-Fascist musical activities. It was surely due more to a form of willful blindness than to any political stance on her part."

Again, being willfully blind is not the same as being apolitical. To be apolitical is to refuse to participate; to be willfully blind is to refuse to criticize. If Singer was as smart as Kahan says (and I think she was), then it's doubtful that Singer would have been "completely oblivious" to anything.

Avoiding clear-cut, black-and-white understandings of history is the hardest thing to do. Many times it feels like evasiveness; it makes the scholar feel like he or she is skirting the issue. I'm sure there were many things about Winnaretta Singer that were politically and morally admirable; but I find it hard to believe that a Princesse operating in such a Right-wing institution as the postwar Parisian haute culture would be this thoroughly innocent of the faults that were so prevalent among her fellow aristocrats.