Renata Borgatti''

(March 2, 1894 – March 8, 1964) was an Italian classical musician who performed in Europe and the United States.

Early life

She was a daughter of the great Richard Wagner, Wagnerian tenor

Giuseppe Borgatti Giuseppe Borgatti (Cento, 17 March 1871 – Reno di Leggiuno, 18 October 1950) was an Italian dramatic tenor with an outstanding voice. (See Michael Scott, cited below, for a laudatory appraisal of his singing.) The creator of the title role i ...

(1871–1950), whose imposing career at

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

La Scala La Scala (, , ; abbreviation in Italian of the official name ) is a famous opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the ' (New Royal-Ducal Theatre alla Scala). The premiere performan ...

opera house was ended by blindness. Trained initially as a

ballerina A ballet dancer ( it, ballerina fem.; ''ballerino'' masc.) is a person who practices the art of classical ballet. Both females and males can practice ballet; however, dancers have a strict hierarchy and strict gender roles. They rely on yea ...

, she abandoned dance to become a

concert pianist A pianist ( , ) is an individual musician who plays the piano. Since most forms of Western music can make use of the piano, pianists have a wide repertoire and a wide variety of styles to choose from, among them traditional classical music, ja ...

, specialising in the works of

Claude Debussy (Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the ...

Relationships

lesbian A lesbian is a Homosexuality, homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate n ...

, she settled on the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...

island of

Capri Capri ( , ; ; ) is an island located in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrento Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples in the Campania region of Italy. The main town of Capri that is located on the island shares the name. It has been ...

in the early 1900s, where her lifestyle raised fewer eyebrows than elsewhere in Europe. In 1918, she entered into a lesbian affair with an Italian socialite (and

baroness Baron is a rank of nobility or title of honour, often Hereditary title, hereditary, in various European countries, either current or historical. The female equivalent is baroness. Typically, the title denotes an aristocrat who ranks higher th ...

) Mimì Franchetti. The duo remained together for just over a year, until Franchetti left Capri and was linked with the prominent American artist

Romaine Brooks Romaine Brooks (born Beatrice Romaine Goddard; May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970) was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portrait painting, portraiture and used a subdued tonal Palette (painting), palette ...

. Borgatti had an affair with

Faith Compton Mackenzie Faith Nona, Lady Mackenzie (née Stone; 26 February 1878 – 9 July 1960), known as Faith Compton Mackenzie, was an author known for memoirs of her travels around Europe. Early life and education Faith Nona Stone was born in February 1878, the d ...

, whose husband

Compton Mackenzie Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish independence, Scottish nation ...

wrote ''Extraordinary Women'' in 1928, a

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...

roman à clef ''Roman à clef'' (, anglicised as ), French for ''novel with a key'', is a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship ...

about a group of lesbians arriving on the island of Sirene, a fictional version of Capri. In 1920, Borgatti left Capri to pursue her career on the European mainland. She also began a romantic liaison with Brooks, who was by that time pursuing a relationship with the American writer

Natalie Barney Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris that brought together French and international writers. She influenced other authors through her salon and al ...

. Borgatti's affair with Brooks proceeded on and off for at least three years, but was curtailed when Brooks began avoiding her. During the early-1920s, she became intimately involved with

Winnaretta Singer Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac (8 January 186526 November 1943) was an American-born heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She used this to fund a wide range of causes, notably a musical salon where her protégés includ ...

, heiress to the

Singer sewing machine Singer Corporation is an American manufacturer of consumer sewing machines, first established as I. M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac M. Singer with New York lawyer Edward C. Clark. Best known for its sewing machines, it was renamed Singer Ma ...

fortune.

Career

She performed on stage with the

violin The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

ist

Olga Rudge Olga Rudge (April 13, 1895 – March 15, 1996) was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-time mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary. A gifted concert violinist of international repu ...

during this period. They worked frequently together, despite the presence of Rudge's lover, the famous poet

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

, who was then working as a

music critic ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' defines music criticism as "the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres". In this sense, it is a branch of mus ...

. Pound was not impressed by Borgatti's playing, describing it as "plonking". Like many musicians of the day, she disliked Pound, mostly due to the inconsistency in his assessments. Irrespective of Pound's disregard for Borgatti's musical talents, and her disregard for him, she and Rudge continued to play together for several years: it is likely that they simply shared the same musical tastes. Later on Borgatti taught music and then died of

leukemia Leukemia ( also spelled leukaemia and pronounced ) is a group of blood cancers that usually begin in the bone marrow and result in high numbers of abnormal blood cells. These blood cells are not fully developed and are called ''blasts'' or ' ...

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

in 1964.

References

External links

Renata Borgatti, images.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Borgatti, Renata 1894 births 1964 deaths Italian classical pianists Italian women pianists Italian lesbian musicians 20th-century classical pianists Deaths from leukemia Deaths from cancer in Lazio 20th-century Italian women musicians 20th-century women pianists