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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.
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