Music’s Modern Muse: Author Talk and Piano Recital

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History buffs, art and music lovers, and Francophiles will all enjoy this fascinating author talk highlighted by music!

Winnaretta Singer de Polignac was one of the most prolific philanthropists of the 20th century. Using her colossal Singer sewing-machine fortune, she subsidized musicians and organizations, commissioned new musical masterworks, and held performances in her Parisian salon where cultural luminaries like Proust, Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev, and Colette gathered. The resulting list of works includes well-known titles like Stravinsky's Renard, Satie's Socrate, Falla's El Retablo de Maese Pedro, and Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos.

Author Sylvia Kahan (Music’s Modern Muse) will share her research on this extravagant lover of the arts, punctuating her talk with piano pieces performed in Winnaretta’s salon.

Performances will include Edmond de Polignac: Rêverie; Gabriel Fauré: Impromptu in F minor, Op. 31, no. 2; Maurice Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte (dedicated to Winnaretta); and Claude Debussy: L’Isle joyeuse.

This event is in English and will be followed by a reception with complimentary refreshments. Books in French and English will be available for purchase.

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About the Author

Sylvia Kahan is Professor of Music at the Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, CUNY, where she is a member of both the Piano and Musicology faculties. As a pianist, she has performed as concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician in all of New York’s major halls and in concerts venues throughout North America and Europe. As a musicologist, Sylvia Kahan specializes in late 19th-century and 20th-century French music and culture. She has written on women’s roles as music patrons, Proust and music, Nadia Boulanger, and 19th-century music criticism.

About the Book

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. [...] 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.

The book served as the inspiration for a lecture and concert produced by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Praise

This biography by Sylvia Kahan 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

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

Sylvia Kahan draws an unflinching portrait both of a lost world . . . Winnaretta Singer-Polignac appears as an avant-garde figure in patronage, a major reference for how to work in a useful and lasting manner to support the creation and advancement of the arts, allowing humanity to progress.

– RESMUSICA

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