Boulanger profile

Would Lili Boulanger have become a great composer if she had lived much beyond her twenty-fifth year?

It’s an impossible question to answer because the illness that killed Lili was also her inspiration. She had long known she was going to die young and it is clear from the works she completed and the projects she cherished from her late teens onwards - her audacious Psalm settings, her poignant song cycle Clairières dans le ciel, her unfinished opera on Maeterlinck’s La Princesse Maleine - that she was driven to come to terms with her personal situation, to find the poetry in it or at least to compensate for it through her music. She was no Schubert but it is difficult to find a more appropriate example of another composer haunted and yet inspired by the prospect of an early death.

So what would have happened if, instead of finally succumbing to Crohn’s disease in 1918, a normally healthy Lili Boulanger had died a sudden death in an accident?

Her music would surely have been quite different in quality - not so serious and not so precociously mature - and probably far less in quantity. She would still have become the first woman composer to win the Prix de Rome, however. That was the end of a quite different ambition stimulated by the success of her father, Ernest Boulanger, in the same competition as long as seventy-eight years earlier and her sister Nadia’s narrow failure in 1908.

Is Faust et Hélène, the cantata that won her that so hotly contested prize in 1913, characteristic of her work in general?

No. She had quite deliberately prepared herself in private lessons and as a student at the Conservatoire in precisely those academic techniques and the not too progressive harmonic procedures that would impress the Prix de Rome jury. She knew just how far she could go, judiciously and very expertly mixing Massenet with Wagner while suppressing any too overt sign of the personal idiom she had been developing before that time.

What idiom was that?

Her own language, which was to be represented at its most impressive in her setting of Psalm 130 “Out of the depths” in 1917, was made of much sterner stuff, from modalities outside the diatonic system and chords built out of other than the conventional triadic harmonies. The opening of her Psalm 24 “The earth is the Lord’s,” written two years into the First World War, would have had the Prix de Rome jury gasping for breath under the assault of its primitive piled-up fifths.

Lili’s sister Nadia Boulanger described her as “the first important woman composer in history.” Is that an appropriate epitaph?

Although as a uniquely influential and effective teacher of composition Nadia certainly knew what she was talking about, I’m not quite sure what she meant by that claim. Winning the Prix de Rome didn’t make Lili important, even though she was the first to break through the institutionalised misogyny in the jury at that time. Nor was she important in the sense that she influenced others: she was still herself under the influence of Fauré and Debussy. On the other hand, no other composer has died so young and achieved even half as much as she did in the twenty or so high-quality scores she managed, often in the most difficult circumatances, to complete.

Gerald Larner©