Lili

Lili Boulanger’s early death was only the last of her misfortunes. At the age of two she had such severe bronchial pneumonia that she nearly died from it and was left with a much reduced resistance to illness. For the rest of her life 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 extraordinary maturity of her music suggests that she knew a lot more than a little about it.

When the time came for her to enjoy the rewards of her achievement in becoming the first woman composer ever to win the Prix de Rome, the outbreak of war promptly interrupted her period of residence with the other prizewinners at the French Academy in Rome. She went back to the Villa Medici two years later but it was again for a short period and - taking only intermittent advantage of the favourable working conditions she found there - she spent no more than seven months in Rome altogether. The war also disrupted musical life in Paris and, in consequence, reduced the opportunities she would otherwise have had to establish her reputation as a composer. She did, on the other hand, find the energy to write most of her major works at this time, including her three fervent Psalm settings for chorus and orchestra.

But she did have some good fortune too, not the least of which was her will to work whatever the problems. Her determination 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 - is a case in point. She prepared herself over a period of years to excel in precisely those qualities the jury traditionally looked for and in 1913, on her second attempt, she won it with her pseudo-Goethe setting Faust et Hélène. Snapped up by Ricordi, that cantata was the one work published in her lifetime.

Lili’s other major advantages came from her family - the example set by her distinguished musician father, who was seventy-eight when she was born, the fierce protection of her Russian princess mother, who was forty-three years younger than her husband, and the guidance of her elder sister Nadia, who was an effective and highly respected teacher of composition even during Lili’s lifetime. Given that she had less than twenty-five years to live, in ill health and at a time of war, Lili Boulanger’s creative potential could not have been more satisfactorily fulfilled than by the two dozen scores she left behind.

Psalm 24

Lili Boulanger’s audacious setting of Psalm 24 would not have won her the Prix de Rome. Having so painstakingly developed the academic technique required to win the prize, the stipend that went with it and the right of residence at the Villa Medici, she promptly dropped it. On her first visit to Rome in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War compelled her to return to Paris, while developing her own way of writing for voices she took refuge in instrumental music. She turned first to the piano for D’un vieux jardin and D’un jardin clair - poetic impressions inspired perhaps by the view from the window of the room she was rarely well enough to leave - and then to violin and piano for an attractive little salon piece called Cortège. On her return to the Villa Medici in 1916, with the War in its second year and the composer in no mood for either poetry or frivolity, she wrote the first two of her three completed psalm settings, the short but stark Psaume 24, “La terre appartient à l’Eternel,” and the fiercely protesting Psaume 129, “Ils m’ont assez opprimé.”

Psaume 24 is no ordinary hymn of praise to “the King of glory.” Scored for four-part chorus, brass, timpani, harp and organ and set in a modal kind of E minor, it is more like an act of defiance. There is no easy splendour in either the dissonant harmonies based on piled-up fifths - a device to be adopted for the soundtracks of the Hollywood biblical epics decades later - or the primitive scoring for brass. Much of the choral writing, which is confined at first to male voices (including a solo tenor), 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

In Rome in 1916, anxious to know whether she would have time to finish her Maeterlinck opera La Princesse Maleine, Lili Boulanger was told by the doctor attached to the Villa Medici that she had no more than two years to live. In fact, while she did not get very far with La Princesse Maleine, she was able to complete Psaume 130 and Vieille Prière bouddhique in a hotel in Arcachon in 1917 and, back home in Paris, a pair of orchestral pieces, D’un Matin de printemps and D’un Soir triste, before the end of January 1918.

There is no conclusive evidence as to which of the two orchestral pieces was written first. It is impossible to escape the feeling, however, 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”). The uncertain state of the manuscript of D’un Soir triste seems to confirm the conjecture, in that it was clearly all she could do to finish it. Certainly, within a matter of weeks she was in no fit state to write at all and had to dictate her last work, a necessarily economical setting of the Pie Jesu, to her sister.

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 playful tune in dotted rhythms with a cheerful upward flourish connecting its first two phrases. As the theme passes to the harp, a solo cello offers a graceful variant in longer note values and the two melodies are developed in resourceful and colourfully scored counterpoint. The Debussyish atmosphere is intensified in the more thoughtful middle section, beginning with a downward series of whole tones on clarinet and bass clarinet. Inspired by expressive solo strings, the orchestra takes a more poetic and increasingly passionate view of springtime nature here - 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, Boulanger teasingly reserves that event for the main climax of the piece, not long before its explosive ending.

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 clarinet and bass clarinet, 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. On an upward flourish on first violins, the melody is extended and then developed in increasing despair. Here too a middle section calls Debussy to mind, 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. An intimate treatment of an augmented version of the main theme on solo strings and woodwind against a background of harp and celesta colours meets a sinister reminder of the same theme in its original form on all the brass. So the opening section is now recalled in its unconsoling modal harmonies and approaches a new height of despair. Just before the end of the work, 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.

Psalm 130

One of the vocal pieces Lili was working on during her first visit to the Villa Medici in Rome in 1914 was a setting of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths,” that was destined to become the most convincing of all indications of her genius. Having more or less completed it at Archachon in the spring of 1917, after illness had compelled her to retreat from Rome for a second time, she finished the orchestration while recovering from an (ineffective) operation at the Boulangers’ country home at Gargenville in the summer.

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 - “Du fond de l’abîme” 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 striving upwards in aching arpeggios. First and second violins take off by themselves and climb ever higher before being pressed down again.Together with a new theme, a searing trumpet call, this material develops in intensity until the tempo and the dynamic level are reduced for the first entry of the voices.

Coming slowly to life, the chorus begins by merely chanting the words of the first section of the text 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 second section, which is signalled by an acceleration to Allegro très rythmé and by urgent reminders of the upward striving arpeggios and the trumpet call (now transferred to trombones), 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. Supported by a solo cello, 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. As the Allegro très rythmé tempo and the trumpet calls return, the chorus takes fright again, asking with growing insistency “Qui donc pourra tenir?” (“Who shall stand?”) - most emphatically of all on a fortissimo augmentation of the trumpet call

The answer is in the third section which, while it is not the climax of the work, is its turning point as far as both the construction and the 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” (“But there is forgiveness with thee”). 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.

Although she sustains the mood with the help of an ecstatic semi-chorus, she is too much of a realist to leave it there. At what might with any one else have been the high point of the work, she plunges the chorus back into the darkness, from the depths of which it must resume the struggle to achieve a last, liberated climax of “Iahvé, Adonaï” and offer a final, ethereal expression of hope. Even then, the oppressive modal inflections return and the work ends with nothing more definitively consolatory than the ambiguous harmonies of the closing bars.

Gerald Larner©