Legacy
Princess Pauline was a notable patron of contemporary arts. She befriended music composers Richard Wagner (who dedicated a piano composition to her) and Franz Liszt, and helped them. She also organised the Parisian première of Wagner's opera Tannhäuser in 1861. The project failed (it closed after three performances) and became a celebrated fiasco and one of the greatest music-related scandals of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Pauline continued to spread the music of Wagner and other now-famous composers. One of her protégés was the leading Czech musician of that time, Bedřich Smetana, whom she introduced to the music circles of Vienna and Paris. Thanks to Pauline, Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride was produced in Vienna in 1892, to popular acclaim.
Pauline's regular travels between, and extended stays in, Paris and Vienna, permitted her to act as a cross-cultural transmitter of the many trends that interested her in music, political ideas, and sport.
She wrote two books of memoirs. The first, Gesehenes, geschehenes, erlebtes, in German, honored her grandfather, Chancellor Metternich, and father, Count Moritz Sándor, and the second, Éclairs du passé, in French, recalled her life and times in the court of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Both were published posthumously in the 1920s.
Read more about this topic: Pauline Von Metternich
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)