Lili Opera copy

Lili

Lili and Maleine

In the light of the first CD recording of Lili Boulanger’s dramatic cantata Faust et Hélène, Gerald Larner speculates on the opera composer she might have become if she had been given a few years longer to live

The event of the year in the musical life of Paris in 1913 was the scandalous first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May. Just over five weeks later the Académie des Beaux-Arts created scarcely less of a sensation by awarding the Prix de Rome for composition to a woman. Although the misogynist barrier to the Prix de Rome had already been breached by Lucienne Heuvelmans, who had won the first prize for sculpture in 1911, and although two women had been given second prizes for composition - Hélène Fleury in 1904 and Nadia Boulanger in 1908 - Lili Boulanger’s achievement in becoming the first woman composer ever to win the Premier Grand Prix was nothing short of heroic.

In a precarious state of health and, at not quite twenty, by far the youngest of the five (otherwise male) finalists, she had secured an overwhelming majority of votes from the jury. If some of them were predisposed in Lili’s favour - because they had been colleagues of her late father, who had himself won the Prix de Rome in 1835, or because they knew her brilliant but less talented sister Nadia - there were more who knew nothing of her or who were prejudiced against her. Even so, the sheer quality of her entry was such that the official citation commended her “remarkable cantata” for its “sensitivity and warmth,” its “poetic feeling” and its “intelligent and colourful orchestration.”

It is doubtful, however, if even such distinguished jury members as Fauré and Saint-Saëns realised how inspired her setting of the competition text really was. To understand that they would have had to be aware that Eugène Adenis’s Faust et Hélène, is a cheap and fairly nasty piece of work quite unworthy of the concentrated attention of the Prix de Rome competitors - who had to live with it for as long as four weeks in strictly supervised isolation, as the rules of the competition required, at the imposing Palais de Compiègne. Purporting to be a “lyric episode” based on Part Two of Goethe’s Faust, it has scarcely anything to do with Goethe. It actually reduces the allegorical marriage of Goethe’s Faust and Helen to a brief encounter motivated by nothing more sublime than Faust’s selfish desire to possess the most beautiful woman that ever existed. Adenis’s Helen is summoned by Mephistopheles on Faust’s insistence, warmed by the latter’s passion from emotional numbness to erotic ardour, and finally dragged away by the ghost of her Trojan lover, Paris.

The extraordinary quality of Lili Boulanger’s Faust et Hélène is that it redeems the text by restoring something of the deeper meaning proper to the theme before Adenis distorted it. Any ordinary composer would have opened his or her setting with music appropriate to the erotic dream stimulated in Faust by Mephistopheles and his attendant spirits at the beginning of the Adenis poem. As she demonstrates when she comes to it in her setting, Lili has the imagination and the means to create the authentic frisson in this episode, just as later, in the central love scene between Faust and Helen, she proves to have the resources to challenge even Massenet in seductive melody and voluptuous diatonic harmony.

Lili does not open her setting in the predictable way, however. She reserves the blissful B major material associated with Faust’s dream of Helen of Troy until after a dark, tonally uncertain orchestral introduction where she first presents the chromatically sinister leitmotif that is to run through the work as a premonition of ultimate disaster and give it an added dimension of meaning. This fatalistic element in Lili’s setting, expressed in an overtly Wagnerian language, was prompted not by the poem itself and probably not by any intimate knowledge of Goethe’s Faust but by an instinctive feeling that there must be more to this encounter than Adenis’s counterfeit text admits.

Few Prix de Rome compositions had such success in the real world as Faust et Hélène in the first few years after its composition. Far from being discarded as an academic exercise, it was not only given several public performances but was also snapped up for publication by Tito Ricordi. Persuaded no doubt by the evidence it offered of a born opera composer, he reserved the right to all Lili’s future compositions in return for an annual stipend. It would have been a sound investment but for one tragic fact: when they signed the contract in August 1913 Lili had less than five years to live. Alarmingly subject to infection from the age of two, when an attack of bronchial pneumonia had severely weakened her immune system, she was now suffering from an intestinal disorder (posthumously diagnosed as Crohn’s disease) that would kill her before she reached her twenty-fifth birthday.

Although Lili did not know for certain until 1916 that she would die young - that was when the doctor at the Villa Medici in Rome gave her two years to live - she had long been aware of what was happening to her. She did not allow this knowledge did not distress her so much as to paralyse her creativity, however. As well as stimulating her to work while she had the time, and whenever she had the physical strength, it was a positive source of inspiration. It is clear from the works she completed and the projects she cherished from her late teens onwards that she was driven to come to terms with her situation and compensate for it through her music.

One such project, sadly never realised, was an opera based on Maeterlinck’s play La Princesse Maleine. Although she was probably unaware of the fact, Debussy had sought Maeterlinck’s agreement to an operatic version of La Princesse Maleine in 1891 and had been turned down on the grounds that it had already been promised to Vincent d’Indy - which is one reason why Debussy turned to the same poet’s Pelléas et Mélisande. By 1916, when Lili visited Maeterlinck in Nice to make the same request, d’Indy must have withdrawn his interest. Certainly, the poet gave Lili every encouragement, immediately suggesting the cuts she should make and later sending her a signed photograph of himself inscribed with the words, “To my dear little collaborator Lili Boulanger who is to give Princess Maleine, by the will of the gods of music and destiny, the soul she is waiting for.”

The soul Lili would have given to Maleine would have been her own. Identifying closely with Maeterlinck’s ailing heroine, who dies a cruel death at the age of fifteen, she had been working on the opera since she was herself only eighteen and she continued to do so, intermittently, until her death in 1918. Unfortunately, since the sketches have not been made available, we do not know how much she wrote or what the music is like. We do know, however, that the score was so far from completion that not even Nadia could finish it, as the dying Lili requested. And we can be pretty certain that, apart from a characteristically resourceful use of leitmotifs, it is not written in the same manner as Faust et Hélène. The clear triadic harmonies and the Wagnerian chromaticism of Faust et Hélène were elements in a technique learned specifically to achieve success in the Prix de Rome and much modified by her own harmonic language thereafter.

The most likely clue to what La Princesse Maleine might have sounded like is Lili’s extraordinary song cycle to words by Francis Jammes, Clairières dans le ciel*. While it was inspired to some extent by her intense friendship with Miki Piré - it was she who drew Lili’s attention to the poems and who was with her when she was working on them in Nice in 1914 - it is also a case of the composer once again identifying with a teenage heroine who, for whatever reason, disappears. The idiom is basically that of the French song composers of the time, Debussy and Fauré above all, but it has its own modal inflections and harmonic complexities and an abundant expressive potential. It is a musical language that would have been equal not only to the poetry of La Princesse Maleine, which is more direct and less sophisticated in its symbolism than that of Pelléas et Mélisande, but also to its Shakespearean atmosphere and dramatic eventfulness.

A less promising but no less interesting project, which was abandoned when the poet refused even to contemplate the idea, was an opera to be based on Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce faite à Marie. It is easy to see why Lili was drawn to it - the heroine in this case is a young woman who, though afflicted with leprosy, is capable of performing a miracle - and it is possible to imagine how she might have set it. The religious fervour of the play, its medieval starkness, its biblical and plainsong allusions would surely have inspired music akin to that of Du fond de l’abîme, the most impressive of Lili’s three ardent psalm settings (and the other main work alongside Faust et Hélène on the new Chandos CD). How she would have coped with the prolixity of the text and its rambling construction is another matter.

It would have been a miracle comparable to that of Violaine in the Claudel play if Lili Boulanger, in her short and afflicted life, had been able to complete an opera on any subject, let alone one as challenging as L’Annonce faite à Marie. Even so, with her genius and her courage, she deserved that ultimate fulfilment of her ambitions.

Gerald Larner©

*Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel is recorded by Martyn Hill and Andrew Ball on Hyperion CDA66726, which includes several of her other songs and vocal works