Prince Edmond de Polignac
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Prince Edmond Melchior Jean Marie de Polignac (19 April 1834 - 8 August 1901) was a French composer.
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[edit] Heritage, prison sentence
Edmond was a descendant of one of the more illustrious families of France. His father Auguste Jules Armand Marie, Prince de Polignac (1780-1847) was the Minister of State in the Restoration government of King Charles X, and was the author of the Thirty Ordinances in 1830, which revoked the Constitution, suspended freedom of the press, and gave the king extraordinary powers, including absolute power in the name of "insuring the safety of the state".
The document resulted in the development of an insurgency and resulted in the "July Revolution" that ended the reign of the Bourbons. The king fled the country, and his cabinet members tried to. Jules de Polignac was captured, tried, convicted and condemned in December 1830 to le mort civile: life imprisonment and a complete loss of civil rights. He was incarcerated in the fortress at Ham.
[edit] Marriages, Arts-Writing-Acting, and Homosexuality
Jules de Polignac, who by his first wife Barbara Campbell had had one daughter and one son, by his second wife Mary Charlotte Parkyns (1792-1864), had, in 1830, two sons, and a daughter was born as he began his sentence. Despite the harsh sentence, visitation was allowed, and two more sons were born to Jules while he was imprisoned. Edmond was his last child, born on 19 April 1834.
As his father was legally non-existent, Edmond was listed on his acte de naissance (birth certificate) as the son of 'the Prince called Marquis de Chalançon, presently on a trip'. In 1836 King Louis-Philippe granted a petition for the release of the imprisoned cabinet members on the grounds of their declining physical condition. Jules was released from jail with the proviso that he leave Paris permanently. The family moved to Bavaria, near Landau, where Jules was granted a second Princely title by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and built a chateau named "Wildthurn". Edmond received a classical education there, including instruction in Greek, Latin, modern languages, dancing and horseback riding. English, French and German were all spoken regularly in the household. Early on Edmond demonstrated an inclination toward performance and the creative arts, writing plays and comedies for the children's theatre built by his father. His elder brothers mocked him for his frailness and his lack of athleticism; as a sort of recompense, his parents permitted him to take lessons in piano and music theory.
In November 1845 the family returned to France, moving to St.-Germain-en-Laye. Two years later, on 30 March 1847, Jules de Polignac died. The remaining family moved to Paris in the rue de Berri, and Edmond continued his education with a preceptor in the Faubourg St.-Germain. Edmond by now had determined that he would be a composer, though this dismayed his mother, who felt music was an acceptable hobby for an aristocrat, but not an acceptable profession.
Alphonse Thys was engaged to teach Edmond counterpoint, composition, and solfège. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris and studied harmony under Henri Reber. His pre-existing frailty, the rigors of the conservatory curriculum, his chronic gastrointestinal problems, and the internal pressures of his concealed and, perhaps, mistrusted homosexuality led to periods of great musical productivity alternating with stretches of illness and inactivity. In 1860 Alfred Beaumont, director of the Opéra-Comique asked Edmond to supply the music for a libretto by Roger de Beauvoir. He composed an opéra bouffe, Un Baiser de Duchesse, but Beaumont left the Opéra-Comique before it could be produced. Depression, and family pressure to marry, ensued.
In 1861 Edmond and his brother Alphonse were founding members of the Cercle de l'Union Artistique, formed to promote performances of great music in venues other than theatres. Besides the aristocrats, the club included Gounod, Berlioz, Auber, and Catulle Mendès. The Cercle supported Wagner after Tannhäuser's resounding failure in its 1861 Paris Opera debut.
Edmond began writing for the amateur male choruses (orphéons) which had begun to proliferate in France, revealing a gift for choral composition, and winning first prizes in competitions for orpheonic works in 1865 and 1867. He also began to write for chamber ensembles. Opera, though, was the path to fame, and when the Ministry of Fine Arts mounted a contest in conjunction with the World's Fair in August 1867 for a new opera on the libretto La Coupe du Roi de Thulé, Edmond, and forty-one other composers, entered. The winner, Eugène-Émile Diaz de la Péna, was a student of the chairman of the judging jury. The losers included Jules Massenet in second place and Georges Bizet in seventh place. Edmond's score, ranked fifth, had been rated lowly because its orchestration - calling for two bass clarinets - was considered horribly complicated.
Edmond joined other clubs for their social status: the Jockey Club, the most exclusive, and the Cercle de la rue Royale, a venue for idling, smoking cigars, discussing politics and the stock market. The indolence of the Cercle de la rue Royal, and of Edmond, was caught in James Tissot's 1868 painting Le Balcon du Cercle de la rue Royale. He buried himself in mystic obsessions and enthusiasms.
In 1875 a new friend entered his life, Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a beautiful and intelligent man twenty-one years his junior. They shared many interests, and it is possible they began a sexual relationship at that time. In his later years, Montesquiou used his wit to shield himself from sincere emotional interaction. He is remembered as a model for Des Esseintes in Huysman's A Rebours, and the Baron de Charlus in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Through Montesquiou's circle, Polignac made the acquaintance of the Elisabeth, comtesse Greffulhe and of Gabriel Fauré, and became a member of the Société Nationale de Musique, where his compositions were performed alongside those of Chausson, Debussy, and Fauré.
In 1879 Polignac independently "discovered" the octatonic scale (it had been used in Russian folk music for centuries). He used it for his three-part Passion oratorio, Échos de l'Orient judaïque, and in his incidental music for Salammbô. These works, though played, proved puzzling to audiences and critics.
[edit] Meeting and marriage with Winnaretta Singer
By 1892, Polignac, inept with money and impoverished through investments in a series of get-rich-quick schemes, was destitute; his nephews helped him with loans, but noted that desperate action was needed. The solution they suggested was marriage to a woman of appropriate means. Polignac discussed the matter with Montesquiou, and Montesquiou with his cousin Élisabeth Greffulhe, and out of these conversations the name of Winnaretta Eugenie Singer, daughter of Isaac Singer, the sewing machine tycoon, with her marriage to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard lately annulled, arose. Singer's social status could be improved by marrying a prince, even a poor one. And the arrangement would have other benefits: Winnaretta was lesbian and not sexually interested in men at all. She was intimately interested in music, however, something the two did have in common. Polignac asked the Comtesse Greffulhe to sound out Madame Singer on the subject of a mariage blanc (unconsummated marriage), in which each partner would have their own bed but would share artistic interests. Montesquiou, who collaborated with Winnaretta on some artistic projects, asked her to speak with Madame Greffulhe, and there the arguments were reviewed; her social position, compromised by divorce, would be improved by an alliance with one of the oldest and most distinguished aristocratic families in France; with the thirty-one year age difference, and the predilections of the bride and groom, Winnaretta would be free to lead her personal life as she wished, with no sexual demands from Edmond.
The advantages clear, a friendship and affection grew. In November 1893, Edmond proposed marriage to Winnaretta, and she accepted, a year after the idea had first been broached. On 15 December 1893 the couple were married by the Abbé de Broglie in the Chapelle des Carmes. The union received the blessings of Pope Leo XIII. Montesquiou, who felt Edmond owed him a debt of gratitude for effecting this marriage of convenience, felt slighted when Edmond was not sufficiently effulgent, and the friendship was irrevocably broken.
The marriage freed Edmond to create, and Winnaretta was happy to promote his creations. The happier they became, the more scurrilous the stories Montesquieu would spread about them. Winnaretta became close with Edmond's niece, Armande de Polignac, who was also a composer and musician. Winnaretta became a patron in public musical circles. With her husband, she hosted a music salon in her renovated atelier. With a vaulted two story ceiling, 12 x 10 meters, and housing a Cavaillé-Coll organ and two grand pianos, the room became a haven for Paris's musical and artistic avant-garde.
On Tuesdays, her organ evenings were especially sought after, and featured the great performers of the day, including Widor, Gigout, Fauré, Vierne, and Guilmant. In 1894, Marcel Proust was introduced to the Polignacs through Montesquiou; as of 1895, he was a regular in the Polignac salon, often attending in the company of his current love interest and mutual friend of the Polignacs, composer Reynaldo Hahn. Much of Proust's musical "education" took place in the Polignac salon, and his letters to Edmond de Polignac reveal a profound admiration of the Prince's music.
In 1894, Winnaretta produced a performance of Edmond's octatonic compositions at a charity event for the benefit of an orphanage. In 1901, she mounted another "all-Polignac" concert at the Conservatoire.
Through his friendship with Vincent d'Indy, Edmond became involved with the founding of the Schola Cantorum Armande de Polignac was among the school's first students. Shortly before his death, Polignac also collaborated with dancer Isadora Duncan.
During the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, Edmond and his brother Camille were staunch Dreyfusards, while most of the rest of the Polignacs, and a remarkable number of musicians, were Anti-Dreyfus.
The time remaining to the couples' marriage was spent in touring Europe, acquiring a palazzo in Venice, and promoting Edmond's compositions. Edmond died of a febrile illness, on 8 August 1901. He was interred in the Singer crypt in Torquay. His tomb is inscribed "Edmond-Melchior-Jean-Marie, Prince de Polignac, Born 1834, Died 1901, Composer of Music"
After Polignac's death, the Princesse de Polignac became an important musical patron in her own right. She established a prize in music in her husband's name, and commissioned Igor Stravinsky's Renard, Manuel de Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro,Erik Satie's Socrate, Francis Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos and Germaine Tailleferre's Piano Concerto. She also subsidized individuals and organizations, such as Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Rubinstein, Horowitz, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, the Ballets Russes, l'Opéra de Paris, and l'Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. Until 1939, the Polignac salon was the foremost gathering-place for the artistic elite in Paris and Venice, including Jean Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev, and Colette.
[edit] References
- Kahan, Sylvia (2003). Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 1-58046-133-6.
- Kahan, Sylvia. “Quatre Lettres inédites de Proust au Prince de Polignac,” with Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer. Bulletin Marcel Proust 53 (December 2003), 9-21.
- Kahan, Sylvia. “‘Rien de la tonalité usuelle’: Edmond de Polignac and the Octatonic Scale in Nineteenth-Century France,” 19th-Century Music 29.2 (Fall 2005), 97-120.
