NADIA BOULANGER: TEACING MIDWIFE OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS

A remarkable woman of strength, perseverance, self-discipline, a musical genius when it came to creative composition, Nadia Boulanger was the doyen of music teachers, a first among women orchestral conductors, an organist and a composer.

Her celebrated musical family spanned generations:  grandfather, Frédéric Boulanger, won a prize, aged five, at the Paris Conservatoire; grandmother Marie-Julie was a famous singer at the Opéra Comique; father, Ernest Boulanger, who studied piano, violin and composition at the Paris Conservatoire from the age of sixteen, won the Prix de Rome, the top prize at the institution at the age of twenty.  A singing teacher at the Conservatoire at a later stage, he performed in various places and, while travelling in Russia, he met a young aristocratic Russian schoolteacher, Raissa Myschetsky, who subsequently came to Paris to study singing with him.

After Raissa divorced her Russian husband, she and Ernest married:  he was sixty-two and she was twenty.

Ernest was seventy-two when Nadia was born in Paris in 1887.  Aged six, she studied music with her mother and then, after her sister, Lili was born, she entered the Conservatoire, aged ten, to study harmony and composition and had private lessons in organ playing.

By that time her father was already eighty-two and died when Nadia was thirteen years old.  Unbelievably, she then had to support the family.  At that tender age, she shouldered the onerous responsibility, taking up performances as a pianist and teaching private pupils at home, for at this stage, the family had moved to an apartment in rue Ballu, where Nadia lived and taught in the same place until she died seventy-five years later.

She also taught her younger sister, Lili, another Boulanger musical prodigy, who unfortunately after an early bout of bronchial pneumonia, was left with a weakened constitution.  When she was a mere two years old, the composer and director of the Conservatoire, Gabriel Faure, discovered that she had perfect pitch.  As a result, aged five, she accompanied the ten-year-old Nadia to classes at the Conservatoire in organ-playing and composition and, aside from singing, learned to play the violin, piano, cello and harp.  Like her father before her, Lili won the Prix de Rome at the age of nineteen for a cantata based on Goethe’s Faust called Faust et Hélène.  She died at the young age of twenty-four in 1918, after which Nadia stopped composing.

She herself failed in two attempts at the Conservatoire to win the important Prix, both in 1908 and 1909.  Having revered her sister, she believed Lili had the superior talent and genius, as her unsuccessful attempts at the Prix indicated.  These failures left her with the unwarranted view, according to Gabriel Faure, that her own music was “worthless”.  (Refer Nadia Boulanger:  Bach Cantatas website)

Nevertheless, her compositions were published between 1901 and 1922:  they consisted of two orchestral works, twenty-nine songs for solo singers; nine more ambitious vocal works some of which were orchestrated; five pieces for instrumental solo, namely organ, piano and cello; the opera, La ville morte; a song cycle Les heures claires, of which the opera and the song cycle were composed together with Raoul Pugno.  A French composer, teacher, organist and pianist of Italian origin, he became Director of the Opéra in Paris.  Nadia also composed Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra, which he was to   stage as an opera in 1914 but as unrest was leading to the World War and Pugno himself died suddenly in the same year, the opera was never performed.

A harsh critic of her own work, she concentrated instead on teaching, conducting and directing orchestral and other pieces, some of which she arranged to have recorded in 1937 by His Masters Voice.  Among the recordings was her performance of Johannes Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes for two pianists with a vocal ensemble, her conducting of Piano Concerto in D by Jean Françaix, and directing the first performance of Monteverdi’s compositions, in this case, a selection of his madrigals.

In 1912 as the first woman conductor, she worked in the United States with, among others, The New York Symphony Orchestra, The Boston Orchestra and The Philadelphia Orchestra.  In 1937 she became the first woman to conduct an entire concert for the Royal Philharmonic Society in London.   The following year she directed the debut performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, she had already started teaching at the Conservatoire in 1907 and in 1920 joined the first staff members of the new Ecole Normal de Musique de Paris started by Alfred Cortot where she taught a range of musical subjects.  The following year, she was given a teaching post at the new Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleu, a summer school sponsored by Americans.  Here she taught composition, harmony and counterpoint.  In the United States itself, she taught at the Longy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1915.

As a result of her ties with America, she influenced what were to become some of the country’s famous composers, like Aaron Copland, Michel Legrand, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter and many, many more.  Hundreds of composers and musicians went through the hands of Mademoiselle, her preferred title, one of whom remarked that there was a dime store as well as a Boulanger student at every town in the United States.  In the 1920’s a group of these students opened a school of composition based on Nadia Boulanger’s teaching.

During her first tour of the United States in 1912, she conducted the premier of Aron Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra:  he became a pupil of hers in the 1920’s when she taught at the Conservatoire Américain.

As for her extensive range of Continental students, there were, among others, John-Eliot Gardiner, Lennox Berkeley and Igor Markevitch.  Indefatigable, she served on various juries of international competitions, one of which was the International Tchaikovsky Competition held in Moscow in1966.  She made her teaching mark in England at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, of which the lectures on a variety of musical subjects were broadcast by the BBC.

It seems as though over time, the negative in her psychology, namely the destructive self-criticism of her musical compositions was over-ruled by an increasingly well-developed understanding of the musical language and creative process of her students, past and present.  Although disciplined and traditional in approach, she had an unusual intuitive grasp of the work by individual composers who studied with her.  She was able to guide them towards a peak of creative self-fulfillment, which, ironically, she could not do for herself.  She inspired musical creators to realize their own individual fingerprint, that she regarded as the mark of genius.

This exceptional pedagogue continued to work, perform and teach for almost the full span of her seventy-nine years of active music life, starting from the age of thirteen and ending at the mature age of ninety-two.