Chandos intro

Lili Boulanger’s music is like no other. She might not qualify as “the first important woman composer,” as her sister Nadia claimed, but she is certainly important for what she was and for the inspiration that arose from the 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, her suffering from an almost permanent state of ill health and the awareness that she did not have long to live that made her the composer she was.

Determined to win the Prix de Rome - as her father had done long before her and as her sister had recently failed to do - as a student at the Paris Conservatoire she deliberately prepared herself for the competition. When still only nineteen, she duly became the first woman ever to be awarded the most coveted composition prize France had to offer. Her competition cantata Faust et Hélène not only confirmed her accomplishment in the kind of music that was academically acceptable at the time but also revealed something of her own tormented vision. For the rest of her life she devoted herself to giving expression to both her unflinching knowledge of what was happening to her and the hope of finding some consolation in it. A unique musical language, developed largely by the substitution of ancient and modern modes for the major and minor scales, was inspired by a unique creative situation.