Behind the Applause: Susan Madden and the Structural Necessity of Philanthropy in the Arts

“We always remember the artists,” Susan Madden once observed. “What do we remember in Bach’s time? We remember Bach.” Her remark is not an erasure of patronage, nor a dismissal of institutional leadership. It is an acknowledgment of cultural memory. We archive composers, virtuosi, conductors, and voices that endure. We canonize the visible. What we rarely memorialize is the infrastructure that made that visibility possible.