Nadia and Lili Boulanger

Caroline Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317090786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Pioneers in their fields and two of the best-known women in music in the twentieth century, Nadia and Lili Boulanger have previously been considered in isolation from one another. Yet, as Caroline Potter's new book demonstrates, their careers were closely linked during Lili Boulanger's short life (1893-1918) and there are several intriguing connections between their musical works. This biography also provides the first full analysis of the Boulanger sisters' musical styles, placing them within the context of French musical history. Their lives are also a case study in the issues of gender which surround music making even to the present day. Despite an unusually privileged upbringing, Nadia and Lili Boulanger exemplify the struggle women experienced when attempting to enter the professional music world. Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913, and Nadia gained second place in 1908. Yet in spite of this initial success, Nadia Boulanger was to give up composing in her thirties and devoted the remainder of her long life to teaching. Her pupils included several of the great composers of the century, including Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. This book, focusing on their musical careers, is essential reading for anyone interested in French music of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1
The Sisters and their Composing Careers

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the 9th arrondissement of Paris was by far the most popular residential area of the city with musicians. Berlioz moved to the area known as Nouvelle Athènes in 1834, and Liszt lived in the same area. Opera composers including Rossini, Massenet, Offenbach and Ambroise Thomas all lived in the area, and Verdi stayed there during his lengthy visits to the French capital. In the mid-nineteenth century, Pauline Viardot’s Thursday salon at her 9th arrondissement home, 50 rue de Douai, was one of the most celebrated artistic meeting places in the city; her regular guests included Fauré, and the house was the venue for a performance of Tristan and Isolde in May 1860 with Viardot as Isolde and the composer singing Tristan.1 Ravel was brought up in the 9th arrondissement, living there until he left the Paris Conservatoire in 1905, and later both Honegger and Milhaud lived in the area.2

The Boulanger sisters were born into a musical family (Juliette Nadia on 16 September 1887, Marie-Juliette Olga, always known as Lili, on 21 August 1893), the only two survivors of four daughters.3 Nadia was born when the family lived in a flat at 36 rue Maubeuge in the 9th arrondissement; they moved to 30 rue La Bruyère (near the church Notre-Dame de Lorette)4 before Lili’s birth, and finally to 36 rue Ballu in the same arrondissement in 1904. The intersection of rue Ballu and rue de Vintimille, near this house, was named place Lili-Boulanger in 1970.

Their father, Ernest Boulanger (1815–1900) was a composer and former student of Berlioz’s teacher François Lesueur at the Paris Conservatoire. He had some success as an opera composer after winning the Prix de Rome in 1836 and ended his long career as a singing teacher at the Paris Conservatoire and at the private Cours Gasset, where his colleagues included the pianist Raoul Pugno. His mother, Marie-Julie Hallinger, was a well-known singer who appeared regularly at the Opéra-Comique, and his father, Frédéric Boulanger, was a cellist in the Chapelle Royale. Frédéric Boulanger deserted the family when his son was still a child, but Ernest was devoted to his mother and lived with her until her death in 1850. His first three daughters were given the name Juliette in her honour.

One of Ernest Boulanger’s last pupils was the Russian-born Raïssa Myschetsky. They may have met in 1874, while Ernest was conducting a concert in her home town, St Petersburg; Raïssa later claimed that she fell madly in love with him and vowed to follow him to Paris. She was around forty years his junior and always used the title ‘Princesse’, although there is no evidence to suggest that she was entitled to do so. There is some uncertainty over her year of birth, her real name (she also used the name Rosa or Rose in Russia) and social background. Some reports suggest she was a governess, and she definitely obtained a teaching certificate. It is also possible that she married while still in Russia, as she also used the surname Shuvalov. This was perhaps a proxy marriage which would enable her to leave the country, as a young woman would have required her husband’s or father’s permission to leave.5 However, Raïssa married Ernest in 1878 and no more was heard of M. Shuvalov; indeed, Nadia Boulanger recalled that her mother was reluctant to talk about her early life in Russia.

Raïssa Boulanger was the dominant figure in the sisters’ lives, particularly after her husband’s death in 1900. She took charge of their education, forced Nadia to work very long hours even as a child, and was a constant presence alongside her daughters, even on occasions (such as Conservatoire classes) when this was not expected. She also instilled the importance of correct social, moral and religious behaviour into her children, though her religion, like so much else about her, remains a mystery. While Raïssa attended Mass and Nadia Boulanger always claimed that she and her mother were both born into the Catholic faith, there is no evidence that Nadia was baptized as a child.6

The sisters’ family background was, to say the least, propitious for future musicians. Friends of the family included Charles Gounod and Gabriel Fauré; indeed, according to Léonie Rosenstiel, ‘At the age of six, [Lili] had already read at sight Fauré’s Une Prière, with the composer at the piano.’7 When they moved to 36 rue Ballu in 1904, their neighbours in the building included Paul Vidal, the conductor and professor of composition at the Conservatoire; a frequent dinner guest who the girls knew as ‘Popaul’. Georges Caussade, a counterpoint teacher at the same institution who played a major role in Lili Boulanger’s musical development, also lived locally.

In addition, their mother was supposedly aristocratic though not wealthy. Their mother’s hypothetical aristocratic background meant that it would have been unseemly for her to work to support the family, so this responsibility fell to Nadia when their elderly father died. At Lili’s birth, their father had asked Nadia to vow that she would always take care of her sister, and throughout her life, Nadia kept her word, feeling her responsibility all the more because Lili never fully recovered from a bout of bronchial pneumonia contracted at the age of 2. In Léonie Rosenstiel’s words, ‘Raïssa Boulanger had carefully trained her elder daughter to take responsibility and duty very seriously indeed. To ignore either was a terrible transgression. Nadia remembered vividly the change in her life that this occasion [the birth of Lili] brought with it. “I walked into my mother’s room a carefree child,” she used to say, “and I left it an adult.”’8

Lili developed intestinal tuberculosis (which would nowadays have been diagnosed as Crohn’s disease) when she was only 3. At the time, this was incurable, though the family often took her to spas in the vain hope of some respite. Her life, and that of her mother and sister, was overshadowed by her illness.

Although Nadia hated music as a small child, an incident while her mother was pregnant with Lili changed everything; she claimed ‘One day I heard a fire bell. Instead of crying out and hiding, I rushed to the piano and tried to reproduce the sounds. My parents were amazed.’9 Aged only 5, she began to study music seriously, making up for what her parents considered was lost time. Initially, she studied with her father, singing to his piano accompaniment, and from 1895 she studied solfège and piano with Mlle Laure Donne, who was considered to be one of the leading teachers in Paris. She also took organ lessons and quickly revealed a talent for the instrument which her family encouraged. There was a harmonium in the flat in rue La Bruyère, where they lived at this time, but when they moved to rue Ballu they installed a full-size Cavaillé-Coll organ for Nadia. Monsieur and Madame Boulanger wanted Nadia to enrol at the Paris Conservatoire and eventually pursue a musical career.

The Paris Conservatoire was founded in 1792 as a school for military music, but by the early twentieth century its raison d’être was to be a school which trained students who would enter a branch of the music profession. The training it provided was, above all, systematic. All students began by studying solfège (aural training), moving on to harmony and practical instrumental or vocal studies. In the Boulanger sisters’ day, only those students who successfully passed their harmony exams could move on to a composition class. Counterpoint and fugue were the disciplines a would-be composer had to master before proceeding to freer styles of composition. Jane Fulcher notes, however, that ‘counterpoint … carried clerical associations that were considered threatening in a Republican institution and was thus systematically deemphasised’.10 The secular and vocational slant of Conservatoire teaching meant that composers were essentially trained to write for the lyric theatre; vocal studies also focused on the nineteenth-century repertoire which was the staple diet of these theatres.

From 1896 to 1905, the Conservatoire was directed by Théodore Dubois, a conservative musician and a family friend of the Boulangers who had promised Ernest that he would oversee Nadia’s musical education. Instrumental music was not the primary focus of student composers, and music history was not on their curriculum at all. The aims of the Schola Cantorum were quite different; at this institution, which was founded in 1897 at the beginning of Nadia Boulanger’s student days, the French musical tradition, church music, instrumental music and music history were all central to the student experience. Gabriel Fauré – another family friend, as we have noted – assumed the directorship of the Conservatoire in 1905 (following the scandal of his pupil Maurice Ravel’s failure to be admitted to the preliminary round of the Prix de Rome) introducing reforms which resulted in a wider repertoire being studied and the introduction of music history as a compulsory subject.

The Paris Conservatoire was also in most senses a meritocratic institution, where success was based on winning prizes in end-of-year competitions. However, women were barred from some classes, including fugue and composition, until the end of the nineteenth century, even though women had enrolled on other Conservatoire courses since the earliest days of the institution. Indeed, a Mlle Félicité Lebrun won a second prize in violin in 1797 (the inaugural year of the Conservatoire), and a first prize the year after.11 But in the Boulanger sisters’ day, male and female students were taught solfège and harmony separately, and there were separate syllabuses for the violin and piano classes for the two sexes, the women playing less demanding repertory.

Nadia Boulanger entered the Conservatoire at the age of 9, though she audited classes unofficially when she was only 7 years old, two years below the minimum age for enrolment. The school address until 1911 was 2 rue Bergère in the 9th arrondissement, conveniently close to the family home.12 Even at this age, Nadia was impatient to complete her studies and launch herself into a career. She took the end-of-year competition in elementary musicianship at the end of the year, but according to Rosenstiel, ‘The accumulated burden of preparation and tension exhausted her, and after having been locked in her private cubicle to complete the evening portion of the examination, the young girl fell asleep, a lapse of which she was ashamed for the rest of her life.’13

Students who had reached the required standard were awarded one of four distinctions, which were, in ascending order of merit: accessit; premier accessit; deuxième prix; premier prix. These prizes were announced in the weekly music journal Le ménestrel, and the Prix de Rome was the subject of intense media interest, however surprising this may seem nowadays. A large number of first prizes (premier prix) was the recognized guarantee of quality for musicians, and Nadia Boulanger’s aim was to win as many as possible in the shortest possible time. In 1897, she was placed third out of 55 female candidates for the solfège examination (when she was by far the youngest student in the class), and in 1898 she won a first prize. She was admitted to Paul Dukas’s piano accompaniment class in 1900; a misleading title as students did not simply accompany others at the piano, but studied disciplines including figured bass and score reading.

In 1903, she won a first prize in harmony, as a student of Dupuis, following this in 1904 (before her seventeenth birthday) with first prizes in organ, fugue and piano accompaniment. These Conservatoire prizes were of crucial importance to her future career, being guarantees of her ability and status as a teacher. She also enrolled in Fauré’s composition class in 1904. Fauré was at this time very much a Conservatoire outsider, having trained at the Ecole Niedermeyer, a small Parisian school which focused on training church musicians. He was therefore ineligible to compete in the Prix de Rome, and was not interested in the operatic career that was the traditional destiny of Conservatoire composition students. Despite his reputation as a composer of songs, piano works and chamber music of great originality and quality, he was not employed by the Conservatoire until 1896, and even then he was only narrowly preferred to Charles Lefebvre, a composer of far less importance. Jean-Michel Nectoux writes that ‘Fauré’s class attracted the Conservatoire’s most original talents, and reports from many of these people lead us to believe that the class was more what we would now call a seminar, rather than the traditional Conservatoire composition class, which was essentially conceived...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Sisters and their Composing Careers
• 2 Towards the Prix de Rome
• 3 The Music of Nadia Boulanger
• 4 The Music of Lili Boulanger after 1913
• 5 Nadia Boulanger as Teacher
• 6 Reputations
• A Catalogue of Nadia Boulanger’s Works
• B Catalogue of Lili Boulanger’s Works
• Select Bibliography
• Index