Winnaretta Singer

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Winnaretta Singer, Princess Edmond de Polignac [1] (8 January 1865-26 November 1943), was an important musical patron, lesbian, and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She was the 18th of the more than 20 children of Isaac Singer. Her mother was his second wife, Isabelle Eugenie Boyer Summerville.

1 Marriages and Relationships
2 Patron of arts
3 The Singer relatives
4 Personal characteristics
5 Further reading

[edit] Marriages and Relationships

Although known within private social circles to be lesbian, Winnaretta married at the age of 22 to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard. The marriage was annulled in 1892 by the Catholic church, five years after a wedding night that reportedly included the bride's climbing atop an armoire and threatening to kill the groom if he came near her. The marriage was alleged to have never been consummated.

In 1893, at the age of 29, she stepped companionably into an equally chaste marriage with the 59 year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac (1843-1901), a gay amateur composer: he died in 1901. The marriage was mutually beneficial, and (like her first marriage) reportedly was never consummated.

She was involved in numerous affairs during both of her marriages and afterward with other women, some married, others not. She maintained lesbian affairs with numerous women, never making attempts to conceal them, and never going for any great length of time without a female lover. Composer and conductor Ethel Smyth fell deeply in love with her during their affair. Singer-Polignac frequently became involved with married women; often the husbands were complicit, but not always. The affronted husband of one of her married female lovers once stood outside the princess's Paris house declaring, "If you are half the man I think you are, you will come out here and fight me."

From 1923-1933 her partner was the British socialite and novelist Violet Trefusis [2], with whom she had a loving but often turbulent relationship. Despite their age difference, the two seemed to have had a strong bond. Trefusis, when she and Singer met, was just coming off a very stormy relationship with writer Vita Sackville-West, which had ended badly. Singer also had relationships with painter Romaine Brooks and Alvilda Chaplin, the future wife of writer James Lees-Milne.

[edit] Patron of arts

In 1894 the Prince and Princess de Polignac established a salon in Paris that came to be known as a haven for avant-garde music. After her husband's death, Winnaretta Singer-Polignac decided to honor his memory by commissioning several works of the young composers of her time, amongst others Igor Stravinsky's Renard, Erik Satie's Socrate (by her intercession Satie was kept out of jail when he was composing this work), Darius Milhaud's Les Malheurs d'Orphée, Francis Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos (The Organ Concerto being initially a commission to the young Jean Françaix, who didn't have the time and passed the commission to Poulenc), Kurt Weill's Second Symphony, and Germaine Tailleferre's First Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

Her salon in Paris was frequented, amongst others, by Marcel Proust, Antonio de La Gandara, Jean Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev, and Colette. Manuel de Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro was premiered there, with the harpsichord part performed by Wanda Landowska. (Kahan 2003)

She also acted as patron for many others, like Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, the Ballets Russes, l'Opéra de Paris, and l'Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. In addition to performing as pianist and organist in her own salon, she was an accomplished painter who exhibited in the Salon de Beaux-Arts.

[edit] The Singer relatives

She had some part in the raising of her equally famous niece Daisy Fellowes, a noted socialite, fashion plate, magazine editor, and novelist. Her brother Paris Singer was a lover of Isadora Duncan and a developer of Palm Beach, Florida.

[edit] Personal characteristics

Winnaretta de Polignac is described (amongst others by Violet Trefusis) to have few physical charms, though generally she was considered to have a formidable character and was both appealing and attractive. As a patron, she had complex relationships with her protégés, with whom she was alternatively supportive and generous, and demanding and controlling. In style this was very different from the more relaxed kind of patronage exerted by individuals such as Count Etienne de Beaumont and his wife, Edith.

Despite rumors and gossip about her personal life, her powerful social status and great wealth, as well as her inscrutability, allowed her to rise above social slings and arrows. It is said that this was one of the major reasons why Alice Keppel did not object her daughter carrying on a lesbian relationship with her, since to confront Singer could easily mean social suicide.

Shortly before her death, Polignac summarized: "I think with such great emotion of all that music has done for me, and of the immense consolation, the marvelous refuge that it was for me at all times.'"

[edit] Further reading

Sylvia Kahan (2003). Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, Eastman Studies in Music. University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-133-6.
Michael de Cossart, Food of Love: Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865-1943) and her Salon, Hamish Hamilton, 1978. ISBN 0-241-89785-8
James Ross, ‘Music in the French Salon’; in Caroline Potter and Richard Langham Smith (eds.), French Music Since Berlioz (Ashgate Press, 2006), pp.91–115. ISBN 0-7546-0282-6.