Chandos short

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.

The radical nature of Lili’s rethinking of standard harmony is strikingly clear in the first of her three completed psalm-settings, Psaume 24 (for four-part chorus, brass, timpani, harp and organ), written two years into the First World War in 1916. There is no ordinary “King of glory” splendour here, least of all in the starkly dissonant harmonies of piled-up fifths and the primitive brass writing of the first part. More conventional colouring is reserved for the delayed entry of the women’s voices and retained to add symbolic authority to the emphatically affirmative conclusion.

The modally influenced E minor of Psaume 24 was one of Lili’s favourite tonalities. She used it again in the linked pair of orchestral pieces, D’un Matin de printemps and D’un Soir triste - though with very different emotional implications in each case - that she wrote just few months before her death. D’un Matin de printemps is a rare example at this late stage in Lili ‘s life of a pain-free diversion from reality. Based on a cheerful triple-time dance tune introduced by flutes over a lightly articulated string ostinato, it is a radiant, at times almost impressionistic, certainly Debussyesque expression of joy in nature. Reality is unhappily reinstated in D’un Soir triste.

None of Lili audacious psalm-settings would have won her the Prix de Rome competition, which was judged according to strictly academic standards. It is a little surprising that she won it with her cantata Faust et Hélène in 1913 - not because of the notoriously misogynist attitude of the jury, still less because of any failure in technical accomplishment, but because it is not the conformist exercise it is regularly alleged to be. It is true that she uses her own harmonic idiom discreetly and sparingly. On the other hand, her artistic intuition did not allow her to treat Eugène Adénis’s text - which reduces the allegorical marriage of Goethe’s Faust and Helen to a superficially brief encounter with a spooky ending - on its own superficial terms. Her setting restores a deeper meaning to the theme.

So, while in the central love scene there is no lack of the seductive melody and voluptuous harmony standard to the post-Massenet opera of the day, there is 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 motif 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, in the end, confirms their unreality.

The real Lili Boulanger, without illusions but not without hope, reveals herself in D’un Soir triste. It is in the same triple-time metre and in a similar 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. The structural strategy is much the same too, but in this case to probe ever deeper depths of despair. Just before the end, however, 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.

That spiritual theme, of a longing for light in the prevailing darkness, is most dramatically expressed in Psaume 130, Lili’s masterful setting of “From the depths I call unto thee” completed in 1917. 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 while strings and woodwind strive ever higher to escape into the light.

There is no hint of escape until the the third section where, 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.” It is only at the beginning of the next section, however, when the alto is joined by a tenor soloist, that Lili’s vision at last glimpses the radiance of major harmonies. Even then she plunges the chorus back into the darkness of the depths and, in spite of a late ethereal expression of hope, she is too much the realist to offer unambiguous consolation in the end.

Gerald Larner©