Chandos complete

Lili Boulanger’s music is like no other. Though perhaps not “the first important woman composer” her sister Nadia declared her to be, she is certainly important for the extraordinary inspiration that arose from the unhappy situation she was in. It is true that she had no effect on the course of musical history - except perhaps in that she stimulated Nadia Boulanger to embark on what was to be a long and internationally influential career as a teacher of composition - and it is true that on her death at the age of twenty-four she had fulfilled little of her potential. On the other hand, no other composer has died so young and achieved so much.

It was, in fact, Lili’s suffering from almost permanent ill health and the awareness that she did not have long to live that made her the composer she was. After becoming at the age of nineteen the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome - the most coveted composition prize France had to offer - she devoted her few remaining years to coming to terms through her music with her expectation of an early death. A unique, modally inflected language - developed independently of the harmonic rules she had learned at the Conservatoire, though not without some influence from Fauré and Debussy - was inspired by a unique creative situation.

Psaume 24

Lili Boulanger’s audacious Psaume 24 - scored for four-part chorus, brass, timpani, harp and organ in a modal kind of E minor - would not have won her the Prix de Rome. The first of her three Psalm settings, written two years into the First World War in 1916, it is more like an act of defiance than a hymn of praise to “the King of glory.” There is no easy splendour in either the dissonant harmonies based on piled-up fifths or the primitive scoring for brass. Much of the vocal writing, which is confined at first to tenors and basses, is either aggressively severe or distantly modal. It is only with the entry of sopranos and altos on “Portes, élevez vos têtes,” that the composer applies more conventional colouring. The enriched harmonies are retained in the final section which, propelled by a rhythmic ostinato on brass and organ, accelerates to its emphatically affirmative conclusion.

D’un Matin de printemps

D’un Matin de printemps and its companion orchestral piece D’un Soir triste were completed in the last year of the composer’s life, probably in January 1918. There is no conclusive evidence as to which of the two was written first, but it is impossible to escape the feeling that D’un Soir triste (On a Sad Evening) is a dying composer’s unhappily realistic commentary on the all too transient radiance of D’un Matin de printemps (“On a Morning in Spring”). Although the two pieces are very different in emotional significance, their basic material is much the same.

The main theme of D’un Matin de printemps, introduced by flutes against a lightly articulated ostinato in the upper strings, is a positively cheerful little tune in carefree dotted rhythms. As it passes to the harp, a solo cello offers a graceful variant and the two melodies are developed in resourceful and colourfully scored counterpoint. In the middle section, inspired by expressive solo strings, the orchestra takes a more poetic and increasingly passionate view of springtime nature - but only to be cut short by muted horn and trumpet eager to restore the initial activity. Instead of reintroducing the main theme immediately in its original form and its original key, however, Lili teasingly reserves that event for the main climax of the piece, not long before its explosive ending.

Faust et Hélène

épisode lyrique d’après le second Faust de Goethe

The text prescribed for the Prix de Rome competition in the year Lili Boulanger won the Premier Grand Prix was a “lyric episode” by Eugène Adénis allegedly based on Part Two of Goethe’s Faust. In fact, it has scarcely anything to do with Goethe. It reduces the allegorical marriage of Goethe’s Faust and Helen to a superficially brief encounter spookily ended by the intervention of the jealous ghost of her Trojan lover Paris. The most extraordinary quality of Lili Boulanger’s setting of Faust et Hélène - completed, according to the rules of the competition, in four weeks of isolation at the Palais de Compiègne in the summer of 1913 - is that it restores a deeper meaning to the theme.

Lili could have approached the Adénis text entirely on its own terms. Indeed, in the central love scene between Faust and Helen, she missed no opportunity to demonstrate that she had the skill and the inspiration to challenge even Massenet in seductive melody and voluptuous harmony. There is, however, another level to the score expressed in another, overtly Wagnerian operatic language. From the beginning, where a chromatically sinister leitmotif casts a dark shadow over a tonally uncertain orchestral introduction, a premonition of disaster runs through the work. That unsettling leitmotif rises frequently to the surface while the uncertain tonality associated with it, coinciding with the negative harmonic quality represented by Mephistopheles, not only offsets the radiant major keys of the love scene but also confirms their unreality.

The first recall of the introductory leitmotif, now representing Faust’s ill-fated desire for Helen, occurs on violins after he awakens from a blissful B major dream about her and enters his vocal line on his fervent appeal, “Viens à travers les temps, viens à travers les âges.” The ecstatic melodic curve of his“Hélène au front de lys,” immediately echoed by a solo violin, introduces another, contrasting leitmotif into the drama. This new Helen motif is heard again on oboe and flute over rippling harps as Mephistopheles uses his magic powers to summon her from the past and then on violins as, most reluctantly, she appears before them.

Faust’s strategy in winning Helen is to coax her out of her tonal neutrality by means of a lyrical line and caressing major harmonies - which proves to be a gradual process crowned eventually by a passionate duet in E major. It is interrupted, however, by a shrill storm and a chillingly sombre march in E flat minor of the ghosts of all those warriors who died for Helen of Troy. A dramatic trio, for Mephistopheles and the threatened lovers, is cut short by the spectral intervention of Paris and the disaster foreshadowed from the beginning. The sinister leitmotif is heard for the last time on Mephistopheles’s pronouncement of “Sur nous malheur.”

D’un Soir triste

D’un Soir triste is in the same triple-time metre and in a similar, if more sombre, modally influenced E minor as D’un Matin de printemps. Its main theme, introduced in the opening bars by clarinets, is a close variant of that of the companion piece, although at something like half the tempo and against dark accumulations of fifths in the strings it gives a quite different impression. Here too there is a more passionate middle section, this one beginning dramatically with a motif of descending semitones on trombones and tuba and ending on the height of a long crescendo with a sudden silence.

Again the composer avoids an immediate return to the opening material, this time by interpolating what, even though it is still in triple time, can only be called a funeral march with dark off-beat colouring on harp and percussion. When the opening section is eventually recalled, in its unconsoling modal harmonies, it approaches a new height of despair. But just before the end there is a hint of reconciliation, or transfiguration even, as strings and harp catch a brief glimpse of radiant E major harmonies and sustain their faith into the attenuated closing bars.

Psaume 130

The last and most important of Lili Boulanger’s psalm settings, “Du fond de l’abîme,”completed in 1917. Dedicated “à la mémoire de mon cher Papa” - her father had died when she was only six but had left a lasting impression on her - it is a dramatic expression of a theme common to much of her work, which is a longing for light in the prevailing darkness. The symbolism is clear enough in the slow orchestral introduction where, over rumbling percussion and amid B flat minor harmonies made all the more oppressive by their modal inflections, a tuba and a solo cello utter a subterranean fragment of plain song. They are answered by lower strings and woodwind rising in aching arpeggios, violins striving ever higher and, as the urgency increases, a searing trumpet call.

On its first entry, a numbed chorus merely chants the words of the psalm and only gradually, by way of a lyrical expansion on the holy names of “Iahvé” and “Adonaï,” finds the melodic inspiration for sustained supplication. The quicker second section begins in the same way, proceeding from a soft chant to a broad climax on the “Adonaï” material, before the chorus yields to the alto soloist. She introduces a new melody which, though in an E flat minor still distorted by modal inflections, is set in a more relaxed tempo and a more intimate texture. The chorus takes fright again, however, asking with growing insistency “Qui donc pourra tenir?” - most emphatically of all on a fortissimo augmentation of the trumpet call from the introduction.

The answer is in the third section, which is the turning point of the work as far both its construction and its message are concerned. The tempo slows and, against gently rippling arpeggios on harp and organ, a devout new melody arises on woodwind for the alto soloist to take up with the consoling words “Mais la clémence est en toi.” The oppressive modal inflections are still there, however, and it is only at the beginning of the fourth section, where the alto is joined by a tenor soloist, that Lili’s vision at last glimpses the radiance of major harmonies.

At what might with any one else have been the high point of the work, she plunges the chorus back into the darkness of the depths, from where it must resume the struggle to achieve a last, liberated climax of “Iahvé, Adonaï” and to offer an ethereal expression of hope. Even then the work ends without the unambiguous consolation Lili was too honest to provide.

Gerald Larner©