Death and the Maiden

Lili Boulanger’s early death was only the last of her misfortunes. At the age of two she had contracted such severe bronchial pneumonia that, having narrowly survived it, she was left with a much reduced resistance to illness. During the twenty-two years remaining to her she suffered not only from the intestinal complaint that eventually killed her but also, in spite of every effort made by her family to protect her, from a variety of infectious diseases. Rarely in good health, often very weak, she experienced little of real life - even though the maturity of her music suggests that she knew as much about it as anyone twice her age.

When she should have been enjoying the rewards of her extraordinary achievement in becoming the first woman composer ever to win the Prix de Rome - with an inspired setting of a pseudo-Goethe text, Faust et Hélène, in 1913 - the outbreak of war interrupted her period of residence with the other prizewinners at the Villa Medici in Rome. The war also disrupted musical life in Paris and, when she might otherwise have been consolidating her reputation as a composer, she made it her duty to organise a morale-boosting supply of letters and parcels to Conservatoire students on military service. She did, however, find the energy to write most of her major works at this time, including her three fervent Psalm settings for chorus and orchestra.

With her illness came an indomitable will to work and a determination to develop her own creative personality. Her campaign to win the Prix de Rome - which her father Ernest Boulanger had won in 1835 and which her sister Nadia had just failed to win in 1908 - was the first stage in a calculated strategy. Having prepared herself at the Paris Conservatoire to excel in the academic techniques the competition jury required, and having duly secured the first prize, she promptly set about adapting them to her own voice and her own vision. While not abandoning triadic harmonies and major and minor tonalities, she significantly modified their sound and their expressive implications, not least - and not without some influence from Fauré and Debussy - by deflecting them in a variety of modal directions.

Lili enjoyed some good fortune too. She had the benefit of the inherited gifts of high intelligence and perfect pitch, of a childhood spent in a sophisticated musical family - where it was nothing out of the ordinary for her to sight-read Fauré’s latest songs for him - of a fiercely protective Russian princess as a mother and of a formidably professional teacher of composition as a sister. Without Nadia’s support, Lili would surely not, in the twenty or so high-quality scores she completed, have achieved so much in such a short time. The inspiration, on the other hand, the need to come to terms through her music with the prospect of an early death, was something unique to her. Lili Boulanger’s last work, an economical setting of the Pie Jesu dictated to her sister from her deathbed, was a requiem for herself.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner profiles the work and the personality of Lili Boulanger, a composer who died at the age of 24 in 1918 and whose music is featured in concerts by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester on Saturday and at the Proms in July

No composer who died as young as Lili Boulanger achieved even half as much. In fact, it was her suffering from a permanent state of ill health and the certain knowledge that she did not have long to live that made her the composer she was.

From the age of nineteen, when she became the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome - in spite of the notoriously institutionalised misogyny of the jury - until her death at the age of twenty-four she was driven by the need to come to terms through her music with the unhappy situation in which she found herself. She was no Schubert but it is difficult to find a more appropriate example of a composer similarly haunted and yet inspired by the prospect of an early death.

If she had been a healthy Lili Boulanger crushed in 1918 by one of the enemy shells landing in Paris at the time, rather than a sickly Lili Boulanger wasted by a long-term intestinal disorder, her music would have been quite different in quality and probably far less in quantity. She would surely still have won the Prix de Rome in 1913 however. This 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.

Lili had quite deliberately prepared herself as a student at the Conservatoire in the academic techniques and the not too progressive harmonic idiom that would impress the Prix de Rome jury. She must have benefited too from the advice of the already formidably professional Nadia. But it was in rigorously supervised isolation with the other candidates at the Palais de Compiègne, as required by the rules of the competition, that she produced a cantata of such obvious accomplishment that there was little alternative but to award her the first prize. Those few members of the jury who did not vote for her setting of the prescribed text, Faust et Hélène - a cheap travesty of an allegorical episode in the second part of Goethe’s Faust - were no doubt alarmed by the evidence of a more personal, more troubled vision than that suggested by the bright major harmonies of the central love scene.

Even before Faust et Hélène, Lili had been developing her own harmonic language independently of the rules she was learning at the Conservatoire. Influenced mainly by Fauré, whom she had known since her childhood, and Debussy, whom she admired from a safe distance, she was beginning to blend other modes with the major and minor scales and looking for means other than the conventional triadic ones of building up chords.

The defiant 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. Psalm 130 (“Out of the depths”), the third of her three audacious psalm settings - and the most impressive of the Boulanger scores to be presented in the BBC Philharmonic’s concerts in the Bridgewater Hall on Saturday and at the Albert Hall on 20 July - is a dramatic deployment of all the means at her disposal in search of light in oppressive darkness. An extraordinarily mature composition, it is by no means easily affirmative in its conclusion.

When Lili completed her Psalm 130 in 1917 she knew that she had only a year to live. She was working, with the poet’s blessing, on an operatic setting of Maeterlinck’s La Princess Maleine, in whose frail and tragically destined young heroine she quite clearly saw an image of herself. Given the time to complete the work, it might well have been her equivalent of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. We know from her song cycle to words by Francis Jammes, Clairières dans le ciel - her equivalent of Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson and a most touching evocation of the love affair she never had - that, given a reflection of her own situation, she had the poetic sensitivity and the emotional inspiration to make something distinctively and thoroughly musical of it.

Among the three works she was able to compete after Psalm 130 are the two orchestral pieces, D’un matin de printemps and D’un Soir triste, that Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC PO will be performing on Saturday. Based on the same material and constructed in much the same way, they are a matching pair, the one (“On a Sad Evening”) being a dying composer’s unhappily realistic commentary on the all too transient radiance of the other (“On a Morning in Spring”). After that, it was all she could do to dictate her final work, a necessarily economical setting of the Pie Jesu, to her sister on her deathbed.

Maybe Lili was not, as Nadia Boulanger proclaimed from the height of her authority as a teacher of composition, “the first important woman composer.” It depends on what you mean by “important.” She was, on the other hand, a uniquely inspired composer in a unique situation. It is true that, in spite of Nadia’s efforts up to her death twenty years ago, Lili’s music has not established itself in the concert hall. But just about everything she wrote (now that Chandos is recording Faust et Hélène) is available on CD. It is well worth investigating.