Armande de Polignac (1876 - 1962)

Born in Paris on January 8, 1876, into a privileged environment where the arts were practiced, Armande de Polignac demonstrated a passion for piano improvisation from early childhood. She started studying music in London, where her family had settled shortly after her birth. German music, particularly Bach, constituted her first training; in her adolescence, Russian music was a revelation. At 17, she returned to Paris and continued her training with the composer and organist Eugène Gigout, then with Gabriel Fauré. She then spent two years at the Schola Cantorum, studying composition and conducting with Vincent d’Indy. A violinist since childhood, she played the viola in the orchestra of the Schola, thus being able to experience the symphonic sound from the inside, something few women were able to do at the time. She also took wind instrument lessons to perfect her knowledge of instrumentation. An excellent pianist, she perfected her skills with the virtuoso Wilhelmine Clauss-Szawardy.

Armande de Polignac married Count Alfred de Chabannes La Palice (1871–1933) in 1895. They had an only daughter, Hedwige. Her husband, a music lover and amateur singer, supported her vocation, and they agreed that she should pursue her career under her maiden name. By her own admission, she had devoted her life to music, insisting on her professionalism, she who had to fight, as the press noted, against two prejudices, one of gender, the other of class. She left almost two hundred works, in which she demonstrated a constantly searching spirit and a particular fascination for the Orient nourished by her numerous travels, which was notably embodied in her symphonic works La Source lointaine, Les Mille et une nuits, La Recherche de la vérité and Urashima and her song cycles L’amour fardé and La flûte de jade. She was one of the first women to conduct, notably her opera La petite Sirène at the Opéra de Nice in 1907 and Les Mille et une nuits at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1914. Her fragile health forced her to cease her activities from the 1940s onwards. She died on 29 April 1962 in Neauphle-le-Vieux.