Boulanger, Nadia
NAME: Boulanger, Juliette Nadia.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Dominant figure in 20th century music.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: Mademoiselle
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept 16 1887, Paris
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: Oct 22 1979, Paris. Age 92
DISCIPLINE: Music
FIELD: Teacher of composition, also pianist, composer, conductor
LANGUAGE: French
PARENTS: Father: Ernest Henri Alexandre Boulanger, (1815-1900) Composer, professor at the Paris Conservatory, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1835.
Mother: Raïssa Myschetsky Shuvalov, (1856-1935) Russian “princess,” student of the former.
SIBLINGS: Lili Juliette Marie Olga Boulanger, (1893-1918)
EDUCATION: Entered Paris Conservatory at age 9.
MAJOR WORK: None
LIFE AND TIMES:
With an elderly father, dead by the time she was13, Nadia Boulanger’s life was dominated by the influence of her invalid sister and her demonic mother. She lived in one Paris apartment from 1904 to her death in 1979. Only at age 48, with the death of her mother, did she have a room, or a bed, to herself.
She ceased composing music after the death of her sister, and only conducted on rare occasions until the late 30s. Though a champion of contemporary music, her political sympathies lay with French fascists.
Her circle overlapped with the lesbian salon of the Princesse de Polignac* and her students included a roster of mostly homosexual and Jewish foreigners, while her own attitudes were dominated by a fundamentalist Catholicism and personal anti-Semitism.
As a young child, her father’s involvement with the Paris Conservatory made most of France’s musical elite familiar members of her extended family. Fauré*, Gounod*, Saint-Saëns* and Massenet*were part of her earliest memory. For several years, she responded to music by crying and running away, though she became an ardent student as soon as her studies began.
Entered at the Conservatory at 9, she took first-place awards in almost every subject by 1904. She took second-place in the 1908 prix de Rome, causing a minor scandal by having a required vocal piece performed by string quartet. Until 1914, she performed extensively as a pianist and organist, and composed a steady stream of works.
In both performing and writing, she was closely linked to another family friend, the pianist Raoul Pugno. Pugno’s death in January of 1914, followed by the outbreak of the First World War, curtailed Nadia’s performing career, and the premier of their major collaborative work, a four-act opera: La Ville Morte, on a libretto by D’Annunzio, based on his novel, was cancelled by the War.
Nadia Boulanger had begun teaching as early as 1904. Her most promising early pupil was her younger sister, Lili. Lili seemed to absorb and synthesize without effort, every subject and skill that Nadia had struggled to grasp.
In 1913, on her first try, Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, selected almost unanimously by the judges. Even though her medical condition (tuberculosis) kept her from performing in public, or even attending any formal school, Lili was recognized as a major composer in the making.
Nadia’s institutional teaching career would be distinguished enough for several careers.
Her posts included teaching: piano and accompaniment, Conservatoire Femina-Musica (1907-); harmony, counterpoint, music history, analysis, organ and composition, Ecole Normale de Musique (1920-39) returning to teach keyboard harmony from 1957 on; founding and teaching at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau from 1921, and becoming director in 1948; professor of accompaniment, Paris Conservatoire (1946-57); in addition to countless guest lectureships around the world.
Boulanger’s reputation rests, not upon her institutional work, but upon her influence on her private pupils, and her Wednesday salon, the famous ‘Boulangerie.’ It was this loose association that came to include most of the 20th century’s American and European composers.
At her salon, she rehearsed and conducted performances that reintroduced Monteverdi* and Heinrich Schütz, among others, to the public ear and helped to launch the revival of early music. It was on her own turf that she tirelessly promoted the later work of Stravinsky* at a time when his works were to ‘modern’ for the public and too ‘old-hat’ for musicians.
The Boulangerie became her unique, personal outlet for her talents. Although she attracted considerable attention when she emerged to conduct occasional performances (as in the debut of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks in 1938) she seemed more interesting to the public as the “first woman to conduct . . .” the London Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra etc. than as a performer with a contribution of her own to make.
She did not influence her students in any obvious stylistic manner; there is no “Boulanger Style” in music, although her disinterest in atonality and 12 tone composing left those composers outside of her influence. By all reports, her influence was largely one of critical integrity, and relentless artistic commitment. It was said that her capacity to simply read a score was without equal.
She could perceive, in a single reading, not merely the general sound and content of a new piece, but anticipate the potential problems of rehearsal and performance that most conductors spend years finding. For her private students, her instruction was not of any particular subject, but of the whole of music in the broadest sense.
Once, when a young violin virtuoso attended her class, she astounded those present by asking him to sing; not any violin or vocal piece, but the bass part of the Mendelssohn violin concerto.
As it turned out, the boy did not know the orchestral part well enough to do so, so she dragged out the score and they worked it through together. The boy’s playing was transformed as he learned to relate his own part to the essential components of the score.
ASSESSMENT: At a time when opportunities for women were severely restricted, her nun-like devotion made her far more influential in modern music than dozens of more public figures.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: She taught Copland*
She influenced Bernstein*, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Ned Rorem, attested to her influence. None
ONELINER: Nadia Boulanger, major music teacher
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Kendall, Alan, The tender tyrant, Nadia Boulanger,Wilton, Conn.: Lyceum Books, 1977.
Rosenstiel, Léonie, Nadia Boulanger: a life in music.New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.
Spycket, Jérôme, Nadia Boulanger, English translation by M.M. Shriver,Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992