On Tuesday, March 21, 1933, the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris performed an unusual program. Like most Parisian orchestras in the 1930s, the OSP regularly offered audience-pleasing gems from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this concert exclusively featured music composed within the previous thirty-five years by French composers. The contemporaneity and overwhelming Frenchness of the program meant that the audience heard evidence of several major trends in early twentieth-century French music. They took in the modally inflected harmonies and Symbolist inspiration of Maurice Ravel's and Gabriel Fauré's works from the late 1890s. And they encountered the polytonality and neoclassicism of more recent compositions by Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, and Igor Markevitch. In its first Parisian performance, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos shifted from evocations of Balinese gamelan to Parisian fairground tunes to quotations from Mozart, representing tendencies in interwar French music toward exoticism, art of the everyday, and retrospectivism. A regular concertgoer would have been hard pressed to find another public concert so emphatically supportive of recent French music.

The concert's stated theme – “works dedicated to Mme. la Princesse Edmond de Polignac” – made it remarkable in another way. Rarely was a patron so publicly and positively acknowledged by concert organizers. As seen in the previous chapter, critics were more likely to evoke the figure of the patron when they hoped to score rhetorical points against a given piece. And outside of a salon, several works associated with the same patron were almost never performed alongside one another. But de Polignac was not only the dedicatee of the OSP's featured composers. She had also commissioned four of the pieces on the program (those by Tailleferre, Milhaud, Markevitch, and Poulenc), as well as seventeen others between 1916 and 1939. While de Polignac's impact was extraordinary, and while the OSP concert was exceptional in its acknowledgement of de Polignac's largesse, both the patron and the concert nevertheless represent a broader phenomenon: through their commissions, aristocratic patrons collectively exerted enormous influence on the development of interwar French music.

Twenty years before the OSP concert, French patrons did not commission multiple pieces. Even one-off commissions were rare.

The aristocratic commissions of the 1920s and 1930s intersected with another phenomenon that exerted a profound influence on French music: the rise of entrepreneurial patronage of modern dance, and with it, an explosion of new music. With the seemingly oxymoronic phrase “entrepreneurial patronage,” I intend to capture the dynamic blend of motives that fueled the creation and management of a number of Paris-based concert dance companies between 1920 and the mid-1930s. Like aristocratic patrons who commissioned for salon performances and costume balls, entrepreneurial patrons were collectors who used their financial resources and social capital to elicit new music from their favorite composers. And like aristocratic patrons, entrepreneurial patrons felt a deep desire not only to fund but to participate in artistic creation. Unlike aristocratic patrons, who subscribed to cultural mores that restricted their participation in for-profit endeavors, however, entrepreneurial patrons plunged themselves into the decidedly unrefined world of “the market.” They entered into productive albeit largely zero-sum competition with managers, impresarios, and other entrepreneurial patrons.

Sergei Diaghilev provided the model that French entrepreneurial patrons would follow in the years to come. Drawing on the resources of his investors, he advanced an art-for-art’s-sake agenda through a public-facing, profit-seeking ballet company starting in the years before the First World War. As Lynn Garafola argues, Diaghilev's “extraordinary genius” lay “in his teaming of art and enterprise and his intuitive understanding of how the marketplace might be exploited to serve the traditional ends of high art.” After the war, Diaghilev's success inspired rivals to enter the fray. They sought to emulate his methods, sometimes drawing on substantial personal fortunes to do so. Competition between dance companies meant competition over creative resources. Composers, painters, and choreographers became hotly contested commodities. Entrepreneurial patrons rushed to secure commitments from fashionable figures whose participation would bring prestige and modernist cachet to their troupe. The result was dozens of new works, most of which required new ballet scores that not only enriched the sounds of the dance world but quickly entered concert repertories, furthering many of the musical styles for which interwar French music is best known today.

Despite their substantial support for new music, including over thirty commissions for ballet scores, the individuals who pursued entrepreneurial patronage during the interwar years remain enigmatic.

In late 1927 the actress, dancer, and patron Ida Rubinstein wrote to Maurice Ravel to ask if he would orchestrate Isaac Albéniz's piano suite Iberia. The orchestration was to serve as a ballet score for the new company she was forming, hubristically titled the Ballets Ida Rubinstein. Although Ravel was sometimes hesitant to take on new projects, the price – 50,000 francs, or approximately $30,000 today – was right. In addition to the hefty fee, Rubinstein cleverly appealed to Ravel's love of orchestrating, his attraction to Spanish materials, and his bitterness at having had his last ballet rejected by the Ballets Russes. After Ravel encountered obstacles to securing the rights to Albéniz's piano pieces, he decided to compose his own Spanish exotica instead. First titled Fandango, Ravel later settled on the more accurate Boléro. Rubinstein set her ballet in a Spanish tavern, where the sensuous, flamenco-inspired movements of a female dancer (played by Rubinstein) drew a crowd's attention. Disgusted by Rubinstein's choreography, Ravel later pretended that he originally envisioned Boléro as expressing the rhythms of a factory. Much as Igor Stravinsky did with Le Sacre du printemps, Ravel tried to dissociate his score from its original, balletic context, archly describing it as an “experiment” consisting of “orchestral tissue without music.”

Ravel was a famously finicky composer, a perfectionist. Scholars have compared the intricacies of his music to the inner workings of the automata that he collected. His music is described in terms of artifice and “masks,” as a creative expression for the inscrutability he enacted in his personal life. For many, Ravel's music exudes the total control of a master craftsman. But only a composer who writes for the desk drawer can ever hope to exert total control over their music. In the case of Boléro, Ravel and Rubinstein each exercised varying levels of control over the piece's conception and composition. Neither Ravel nor Rubinstein fully determined the outcome of their work. Both deserve credit as its creators.

Following the premiere of Boléroat the Paris Opéra on November 22, 1928, after Rubinstein's eponymous troupe toured the piece throughout Europe for half a decade, Ravel's score came to overshadow its original, choreographic setting.

The legacies of interwar music patronage in France are manifold and undeniable. For while some forms of interwar patronage all but disappeared after the Second World War, others transformed or expanded. Jacques Rouché's record-setting, thirty-year tenure at the Opéra may have ended in 1945, and it is true that none of his successors have wielded as much power as he did. But the French state can be said to have absorbed certain activities typical of individual patronage, both aristocratic and entrepreneurial. As I showed in the previous chapter, the commissions program inaugurated by the French Ministry of National Education became institutionalized through the Ministry of Culture and spread to French radio. Since then, the assumption that the state had an obligation to foment music composition through the advent of new institutions and programs has proven remarkably durable.

Those legacies extend beyond the realm of state funding and beyond France. In fact, the music patronage practiced in interwar France may have bequeathed its most significant legacy to music in the United States. For every French aristocratic patron who stopped commissioning music or hosting costume balls after the 1930s, another American patron stepped forward to create a foundation, endow a music composition appointment at a university, or fund a symphonic commissions program in the United States. American performing institutions (theaters, orchestras, choirs) and philanthropic foundations adapted the habits of aristocratic patronage to new geographies and new individual and institutional needs. Continuities between French and US American music patronage over the course of the twentieth century are no accident. Rather, much as the forms of creative labor that have defined music patronage over the past centuries have shifted but never disappeared, the patronage that made interwar French music so dynamic was merely translated into new contexts.

The transatlantic legacies of early twentieth-century French music patronage are neatly encapsulated within the career of Serge Koussevitzky, who served as a patron in many capacities but is more often remembered as a conductor. Koussevitzky was steeped in interwar French cultures of aristocratic and entrepreneurial patronage, and he drew on his familiarity with those cultural practices to make music patronage central to his own orchestras and foundation.

On July 29, 1931, Jacques Rouché faced a low point in his illustrious career. Two years earlier, the Paris Opéra administrator had spotted an opportunity in the demise of the Ballets Russes: he would hire Serge Lifar, the last choreographer of the Russes, and commission modernist ballets to rival those presented by Diaghilev. One of Rouché's first ballet commissions went to Serge Prokofiev for what became Sur le Borysthène, and as part of negotiations for that commission Rouché had agreed to give the Paris premiere of Prokofiev's opera L’Amour des trois oranges alongside the premiere of the composer's new ballet. But when Rouché made suggestions for improving minor aspects of the opera, Prokofiev exploded: “The Director of an old-fashioned Theater reproaches the lack of modernism in the libretto of an avant-garde composer! Someone must be in error in this situation and – to make a logical deduction – it must be the Director.” Prokofiev's “old-fashioned” barb, which reinforced a critical trope concerning the Opéra's conservatism, came at a time when Rouché was struggling to renovate the Opéra's repertory in the face of deepening budget deficits. The Great Depression had just struck France. Attendance and subscriptions were down. Fewer visiting troupes were renting out the Opéra and Rouché's bottom line dipped precipitously. It is hardly surprising, then, that less than a year after his spat with Prokofiev, Rouché resigned as director of the Opéra. Yet the story does not end there.

When the French Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts chose Jacques Rouché as director of the Paris Opéra in 1913, he seemed unusually well-positioned to succeed in the role. His résumé already boasted significant achievements in business and the arts. A graduate of the famous École Polytechnique, Rouché worked as chief of staff for several ministers early in his career before being named head of the general staff for the 1889 World's Fair – all before he was twenty-seven years old. His career took a major turn when in 1893 he married Berthe Piver, heiress of the L.T. Piver perfume company. Rouché became CEO of Piver, introducing synthetic perfumes and marketing innovations such as the perfumed card and fan.

After attending the 1924 Paris premiere of Le Train bleu, a Ballets Russes production with music by Darius Milhaud, the critic Charles Tenroc took aim at a problem he had detected in several of the most recent Ballets Russes offerings. “I’m afraid,” he sniffed, “that our talented youngsters are wasting the most fecund years of their lives.” Comparing Milhaud and his peers to hens, he continued, “They lay [pondent] with disconcerting fertility, but only tiny eggs, without substance.” Not content to conclude with the clever wordplay that substituted eggs (oeufs) for works (oeuvres), Tenroc closed with what he must have thought a stinging rebuke: “Their music sounds like commissioned music. They produce on command.” Putting aside the fallacy that commissioned music has a certain “sound,” Tenroc's jab divulges a sincerely held fear about the risks he thought commissions posed to young composers’ development. In Tenroc's defense, the young composers he lectured had benefited from a remarkably fertile spree of commissions: Le Train bleu and its sister works – Georges Auric's Les Matelots, Francis Poulenc's Les Biches – were all indeed produced “on command” for the Ballets Russes's 1924 season. Right or wrong, Tenroc's insinuations that these works were inferior, that their commissioned status should be counted against them, would echo through the decades.

Sergei Prokofiev reacted even more negatively to the tight links between young French composers and their sources of funding. During a conversation with Nicolas Nabokov, Prokofiev lashed out at the wealth and prestige concentrated within the audience of the chamber music series Le Triton. One night, as Prokofiev and Nabokov strolled near the Hôtel des Invalides (a military memorial) after a concert, Prokofiev remarked,

One year before the opening of the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, Albert Roussel wrote to the fair's commissioner to ask for money. As chair of the committee tasked with organizing musical events at the fair, Roussel indignantly observed that the Paris municipal council had granted 23 million francs to fund the creation of new visual art for the fair while allocating nothing for new music. In stiffly bureaucratic language, he asked the commissioner, Edmond Labbé, to intercede with the council on behalf of French composers. “Would it not be fair,” Roussel argued, “that Music shares in this munificence [so that] the Plastic Arts are not the exclusive beneficiaries of this generous initiative?” Even as he posed this delicate question, Roussel must have known that the visual arts had long been the near exclusive beneficiaries of state commissions. Since the advent of the Third Republic, the state's music patronage had included subventions for ensembles, funding for conservatories, and support for musicians touring as cultural diplomats, but always at levels disproportionately lower than that accorded the plastic arts. Only rarely had the state supported music composition. Yet Roussel's call for a more equitable approach to state support for music was hardly revolutionary. Both within and outside of the French government, others shared Roussel's vision for increased state sponsorship of music composition. Within three years, the state would begin to reverse its inequitable approach, embarking on two ambitious sets of occasional commissions and inaugurating a groundbreaking annual commissions program. Roussel and dozens of other composers were about to experience the push and pull of working with a powerful new patron.

When he made his pitch to Labbé, Roussel knew well that previous efforts by government officials to foment music composition had come in three flavors. There were the rare commissions to mark occasions of grave importance (like state funerals) or ostentatious celebration (like coronations). Instances like these depended on the ad hoc actions of high-ranking officials rather than coordinated efforts by ministries or legislative processes. In the late 1830s, for instance, Minister of the Interior Adrien de Gasparin commissioned one piece per year, starting with Berlioz's Requiem, and Berlioz received a commission from another minister, the Comte de Rémusat, for the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale.

At first glance, Darius Milhaud appears to have been the darling of inter-war French patrons. He received aristocratic commissions from the Princesse de Polignac, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and Ida Rubinstein; and ballet commissions from Sergei Diaghilev, Rolf de Maré, Étienne de Beaumont, Ida Rubinstein, and Edward James. But commissions alone do not make a career. For all his apparent success, Milhaud struggled to win the consecration of one patron in particular: Jacques Rouché, the powerful administrator of the Paris Opéra.

In his autobiography, Milhaud reflected on the humiliation of a 1929 performance at the Opéra of a brief polka written for the collective ballet L’éventail de Jeanne. The composer complained that he would have preferred to see one of “so many lyrical works that had never been performed at the Opéra” on the stage instead of an inconsequential piece “written one morning in May, in Vienna.” Milhaud alluded to a frustrating streak: between 1913 and 1929 he composed eleven operas but saw only two premiered in France, both at the Opéra-Comique; four were staged outside of France, and five more awaited their premieres. Every work submitted to Rouché had been rejected.

Milhaud's failure to secure performances of his music at the Opéra – the most prestigious musical venue in France – reflected a broader critical failure that dogged him through the 1920s. Even as he accrued notoriety and professional opportunities, won commissions from patrons and impresarios, traveled and performed his music on four continents, he struggled to earn the respect he felt he deserved. His music was still dismissed by influential critics and composers, many of whom served on prize-giving or advisory committees. And because he had failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome, the official accolade par excellence for aspiring composers, he was at a distinct disadvantage when it came to realizing his ambition of seeing one of his lyrical works performed at the Paris Opéra. In short, Milhaud felt spurned by the “official” milieu of French music.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that a circuitous career path enabled Milhaud to overcome institutional, cultural, and aesthetic prejudices and achieve official recognition in France. His path took him through Vienna, where he forged a powerful partnership with the publishing firm Universal Edition.