an early note on Winnaretta Singer

[queenlua]

i'm in the middle of Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac by Sylvia Kahan, which is fascinating so far. i'm really looking forward to doing a writeup on it once i'm done. tl;dr: it's a biography of this chick who was the Big Lesbian Money in the Parisian music scene during her lifetime; she personally commissioned a bunch of Composers You've Heard Of and had them debut at her salons and such.

and, yeah, as i said, a full writeup will come later, but rn i'm just noting something that struck me / gave me an unexpected Some Kinda Feeling, idk—

so in the intro of the biography, there's this bit from the author:

Another intriguing aspect of WSP's life and legacy is the wide chasm between her renown as a grande mécène—a great patron—and her reputation as a "famous lesbian." Partly because of her wealth, partly because of her problematic personality, WSP's personal and sexual history has generated as much story-telling as her patronage activities. Because she is so inscrutable, she is exactly the sort of biographical subject that lends itself easily to becoming a mirror of the writer's desires: that which is laudable is magnified; that which causes discomfort is either excised or gossiped about with cruelty and malice; that which appears larger than life is raised to the level of legend [. . .]

The stance of the present biography of WSP's lesbianism was a fact of her life. No theorizing is offered beyond that. While there may exist a "queer reading" to be gleaned from this material, it must be left to a future author.

which is the sort of thing that... one Notes while reading, right. not necessarily in a bad way, just—as a probabilistic question, that bristly "i'm not doing any GAY SHIT" tone often portends a stuffy lowkey reactionary historian who insists they're doing an Intellectual Integrity by offering a bunch of elaborate caveats whenever some suggestion of queerness emerges in the historical record, some of which may in fact be valid (e.g. yes, stuff that sounds Big Gay to a modern ear may not in fact read that way in context; yes, people have conceptualized sexuality very differently in different historical periods)... but, collectively, the caveats often start to smell of rather pointedly motivated reasoning, and that's no good either, right.

and, y'know, i'm not done with the biography yet, so the author still has a chance to disappoint me, but uh. so far i'm more getting the vibe that the author's bristly assertion is in fact borne out of genuine respect for Winnaretta Singer as an individual, in all her facets, because you run into shit like this:

When it came to private family matters . . . the newspapers, for the most part, kept their polite distance. It is therefore noteworthy that the Camposelice furor made the papers: if the altercation taking place in the family house was publicly reported, it suggests that the noise emanating from within its walls was simply too loud to be ignored . . .

The conflict at issue can only be guessed at. [Her stepfather] Victor had long been reputed to be a man of "Extremely uncertain temper." The story, repeated up until this day, began to circulate that Winnaretta had been raped by her stepfather. The tenacity of this rumor would have the unfortunate consequence of attempts by future biographers to "prove" or "justify," in a cause-and-effect way, Winnaretta's future choices of sexual partners and lifestyle.

...and then you just sit there a minute like, jesus fucking christ. what the fuck, other biographers (plural!!!).

some wikipedia'ing makes it seem like Winnaretta was an object of celebrity gossip, and one can imagine, er, a lot of mean-spirited/weird coverage of her emerging as a result, People magazine style, and so maybe that's where some of the author's bristliness comes from, and, y'know... fair. (there are other instances of this sort, but this is the one that was stark enough it made me put down the book to actually make a note haha)

a thing that does help me trust (? not sure if that's quite the right word) the author is the fact that the art/music world of this time & place has Lots Of Gay People In It, In General, and this is treated as being very obvious and unremarkable in the text; from an early age Winnaretta is circulating at salons and parties where there's A Variety Of Sexualities represented among its attendees, or taking art lessons from some Big Gay Art World Guy, and it's all treated with the same sort of everyday ordinariness as the Variety Of Sexualities that exist at any given random backyard grill party here in my beautiful city of Seattle in 2026. but also it makes me weirdly... angry...? in hindsight, reading this & thinking about the kind of histories & narratives i tended to absorb when i was growing up in very-much-not-Seattle, which tended to treat the existence of non-straight sexualities as something to not be mentioned, even in passing, and if it was mentioned, it was to call attention to it as Deviant And Weird, or to argue it's some Newfangled Thing and that Back In The Day such things Did Not Happen, and all of that is just... such an obvious fucking lie? always has been? there in the history for everyone to see? augh idk there's some kind of Feeling there

(i had a somewhat-similar sort of feeling when i was reading this excellent little blog post about the contemporaneous female composer Adela Maddison, where the author dryly notes that, despite there being at least some evidence to support both "Maddison slept with women" and "Maddison slept with men," none of the historians they read suggested that she might've been, y'know, bisexual. heh.)

((i heard of that blog via landofnowhere btw, and would very much recommend it; the archives for its series on women in music history are RICH & really interesting))

anyway. all human knowledge is your inheritance, go and claim it, or something

Comments

[snickfic]

That sounds like a fascinating read. Right there with you re: the ubiquity of non-straight people in history and their total absence in my education or general grasp of the world growing up.

On another note, I was startled and yet should not have been to go to wikipedia and find that she was the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.

[queenlua]

haha, yeah, Singer is absolutely where all the money comes from :) (and he's a CHARACTER himself—that'll come in the full writeup but tl;dr oh my GOODNESS being a gilded age magnate sure enables SOME kind of lifestyle lol)