In Monte Carlo last week death came to the most famous woman composer who ever lived. Frail, white-haired, 86-year-old Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade had been bedridden with a bone disease for more than a decade. Deprived of her royalties by the German occupation (her Jewish publishers in Paris had been liquidated), she died in comparative obscurity. The era that her fragile, saccharine little piano pieces (most famed: The Scarf Dance) represented had long since closed. Hers had been the age of rubber plants, stereoscopic views, and parlor trances over Ethelbert Kevin's The...
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