Lili Boulanger: Psalm 130

According to Nadia Boulanger, Lili Boulanger was “the first important woman composer in history.” Of course, it’s true that Nadia and Lili were sisters and that it would be only natural if the one made an exaggerated claim on behalf of the other. But that statement was made in the late 1970s when Nadia - who had long been a uniquely distinguished and uniquely effective teacher of composition - was approaching ninety and Lili had been dead for nearly sixty years. Their life together, which had ended with Lili’s early death just before the end of the First World War, belonged to a different epoch. Nadia Boulanger in her old age, more famous than ever for her rigorously high standards and her professional integrity, would not have made a statement like that if she hadn’t meant it.

Nadia presumably did not mean that Lili was important in the sense that she affected the course of musical history in any significant way. As the first woman composer to win the Prix de Rome, she certainly made her mark, but in the five years between that historic event in 1913 and her death at the age of twenty-four she did not have the time to develop either a style distinctive enough or a body of work extensive enough to have much of an influence on others. But if Nadia meant that her sister wrote music of high quality and rare inspiration, as she surely did, Lili was an important composer. Listening to her songs and instrumental music, you can trace her style back to Debussy, Fauré, and even (in the case of the early piano Variations) César Franck. In her religious music - above all her fervent psalm settings and the ethereal Pie Jesu she dictated to Nadia when she no longer had the strength to write - she has her own very personal voice.

There could be no better work to represent Lili Boulanger at the Proms - for the first time in the sixty-eight years since her very early Nocturne was conducted here by Sir Henry Wood - than her monumental setting of Psalm 130, Du fond de l’abîme (“Out of the depths”) for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Started in 1914 as a tribute to her late father (himself a Prix de Rome) and completed in 1917, it is her longest single work and much the most impressive. Heartfelt though it clearly is, it preserves an extraordinary integrity through its more or less consistent use of church modes and its uncompromising harmonies.

What makes Psalm 130 a particularly appropriate choice for the Albert Hall is that it seems to have been written with a large space in mind. Certainly, no French composer between Berlioz and Messiaen had a better ear for acoustic effect than Lili Boulanger applies to Du fond de l’abîme. It starts literally in “the depths,” at the very bottom of the orchestra, where the main themes are introduced on tuba, double basses and trombones. Rising to higher registers but always falling back to the darker colours essential to the piece, it is a dramatic study in light and shade, with particularly effective use made of solo instruments on the one hand and a powerfully eloquent chorus on the other. While it has been said, with some justice, to be the missing link between Debussy’s Le Martyre Saint Sébastien and Honegger’s Le Roi David, there is nothing like it by any other composer.

A write and critic associated mainly with The Times, Gerald Larner is a specialist in French music. His Maurice Ravel is published by Phaidon Press.