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(More customer reviews)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 Munch 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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Eastman Studies in Music)
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. --Margaret Reynolds, The Times 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 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'Opéra 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 eccentic and extravagant lover of the arts, whose influence on the 20th Century world of music and literature remains incalculable.
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