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.