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ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSIC ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSIC ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSIC ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSIC

TEACHERS OF OUR TIMETEACHERS OF OUR TIMETEACHERS OF OUR TIMETEACHERS OF OUR TIME Prepared by John Horsefield, Cowra U3A

An influential composer, conductor and music professor, Nadia

Boulanger taught many of the most important composers and

conductors of the 20th

century.

Nadia Juliette Boulanger was born in Paris on September 16, 1887, her fa-ther’s 72nd birthday; she was to become a musical phenomenon. She has been vari-ously described as a demanding peda-gogue, a musical phenomenon and a ten-der tyrant. Her grandmother was the singer Juliette Boulanger. Her grandfather, Frédérick Boulanger won first prize in violoncello in his fifth year (1797) at the then recently founded Paris Conservatoire.

Her father, Ernest-Henri Bou-langer, later studied at the same conserva-tory (his teachers included Charles-Valentin Alkan), and won the Prix de Rome in 1835. He later taught there, where he met Nadia's mother, Raissa Myshetskaya, a Russian princess, a gifted singer who made a career singing at the Théatre de l'Opéra Comique.

There are a lot of legends around her mother. All we do know is that she left Russia in the late 1870s, and studied sing-ing with Ernest Boulanger, who was to become her husband. There’s absolutely no documentary evidence whatsoever that she was descended from Russian princes, although this was a legend she like to tell people. Nadia Boulanger in her career as a teacher used as a selling point the fact that she was from this supposed aristocratic or even royal background.

Nadia Boulanger is better known as a teacher and conductor than as a com-poser. In the first capacity she was respon-sible for the musical training of a genera-tion of distinguished composers from

Europe and the USA. Her work as an in-terpreter influenced many, not least by the

part she played in the revival of interest in Monteverdi. She was central to the rebirth of public performances of pre-classical music during the first part of the 20th cen-tury, particularly music from the Renais-sance and Baroque.

Her career as a conductor, al-though successful, was also eclipsed by her teaching. Nadia, who liked to be known as 'Mademoiselle', was the first woman to conduct several major sym-phony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and in England the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

There was a time when it looked like Nadia would not continue the family

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tradition. There are some stories about her absolutely hating music when she was a child. When anybody played or sung in

Lili Boulanger.

Nadia in 1904.

their flat (which they did a lot, of course, because it was such a musical family) she would scream or hide under a table. So for about the first six years of her life she couldn’t stand music.

One day, when a fire engine passed her apartment in Paris, screaming under the piano with her hands covering her ears, she suddenly got up and touched the same note on the piano keyboard. From that day forward, she stayed at the piano and recognized sounds from life that she could put into music.

It was only when she was around about six or seven that she became more interested in music and began studying, initially with her mother. Raissa had very, very high standards in every area of life, not just in music but also in correct social behaviour. She never gave Nadia any praise when she was a child; whatever she did was not quite good enough for her. So it appears she was a very, very strict teacher.

Nadia felt in later life that six was actually too late an age to start serious musical training, that it had somehow be-come a bit of a handicap to her not having those first years of her life being very en-thusiastic about music.

After her sister Lili was born on August 21, 1893, Nadia was apparently called into a room by her father and told very solemnly that she would have to look after Lili throughout her life. Hence she always felt a great sense of responsibility towards her younger sister, not least be-cause from a very young age it became apparent that she was terminally ill.

At the age of nine, Nadia began the study of organ and composition, en-couraged by her father—a composer, or-chestral conductor and voice professor —who entrusted her to Louis Vierne. Enter-ing the Paris Conservatory at the same time, she studied composition with Gabriel Fauré and organ with Alexandre Guilmant and later with Charles-Marie Widor. She was a brilliant student and ob-tained in 1904, at the age of 16, first prizes in organ, accompaniment and com-position.

Because the Boulanger sisters were from such a musical family, musical careers seemed inevitable. So many musi-

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cians came to the family flat to perform. There’s a lovely story about Lili singing to Faure’s accompaniment when she was

Nadia in conversation with Marc Delmas

(1907).

only three years old. They were very much in a minority as female students in the Paris Conservatoire

Nadia became assistant organist to Gabriel Fauré at the church La Madeleine in 1903. She had an organ at home: a Mu-tin-Cavaillé-Coll, installed in 1904 as soon as she moved into her apartment on Ballu street. She also published a few short works and in 1908 won second place in the Prix de Rome competition with her cantata La Sirène.

Nadia entered the Prix de Rome three times. There was a big scandal in 1908, the second time she entered, when, for the preliminary round, candidates were supposed to write a vocal fugue and the best six of these would go forward to the final round, but Nadia decided that the subject of the fugue was more suited to instrumental treatment, so she submitted an instrumental fugue.

This was a huge scandal at the time. It seems extraordinary but it was ac-tually reported in the national press, and

Lili (left) and Nadia.

Camille Saint-Saens, who was something of a family enemy, in particular was very much against the idea of Nadia moving towards the final, however good her fugue was, because she had disobeyed the rules.

However, he was only one voice on the jury and she was allowed to pro-ceed to final round. But several people in the Paris musical establishment looked at her behaviour in this round and felt that she was something of a loose cannon.

Raoul Pugno (1852 -1914), the famous pianist, took Nadia under his wing. He played her Rhapsody Variations for piano and orchestra under her direction and also composed with her several works. Nadia composed a piano concerto Fantaisie Variee in 1912, especially for Pugno, and she conducted the first per-formance.

After his sudden death, she little-by-little abandoned composing, devoting

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her time instead to teaching and conduct-ing. Nadia's few compositions include the song-cycle Les heures claires, settings of poems by Verhaeren, started in 1909

Nadia in a sun dress, c1923.

Nadia seated at an organ.

(working with Pugno) and completed in 1912.

Some people think the death in 1914 of such an influential supporter per-haps had more influence on her abandon-ment of composition than her sister’s death. They had written an opera together which was supposed to be performed in 1914, but the outbreak of WWI put paid to that.

Nadia's emotional life was largely centred around her love for Lili, who was one of Nadia's first composition students. It was largely under her guidance that Lili, a brilliant visionary within the impression-ist style, became the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome, in 1913, with her cantata Faust et Helene. After this Lili’s achievements became headline news.

Reading a contemporary report of her triumph written by the music critic Émile Vuillermoz demonstrates just how difficult it was for these young women to compete in such a chauvinistic environ-ment:

Several months ago, in this col-umn, I warned musicians of the imminence of the ‘pink peril’: events have not hesitated to prove me right. Mlle Lili Bou-langer has just triumphed in the ‘Prix de Rome’. The misogyny of the jury was known. The entry of an Eve into the earthly para-dise of the Villa Medici was dreaded by certain patriarchs as the equal of total catastrophe. [Musica, August 1913].

Lili became seriously ill when she was two and never really got over that; she spent most of her life suffering from one ailment or another. She composed a surprising amount of music. Above all her sensitive handling of large choral and or-chestral forces continues to compel admi-ration.

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Nadia gave private lessons at her legendary Paris apartment. Her first teach-ing position was at Alfred Cortot's École Normale de Musique de Paris, in 1916. Towards the end of Lili’s life (she died on March 15, 1918), Nadia had become aware that Lili was really the more tal-ented composer of the two of them. Even though Nadia herself was a composer, she always felt very inadequate as a creative musician compared to her sister.

After Lili’s death, Nadia declared that she would never compose again and she spent the rest of her very long life de-termined to preserve Lili’s memory and promote her music. There are no surviving compositions by Nadia after about 1922 or 1923. She had begun her extraordinary journey as mentor to young composers and performers that lasted until 1979 when she died at age 93 in Fontainebleau.

In 1921, she was appointed Profes-sor of Harmony at the American Conser-vatory of Music in Fontainebleau, where she was discovered by a new generation of American composers. It was founded after World War I by the conductor Wal-ter Damrosch for US musicians. Nadia eventually became its director in 1950. She also taught at the Longy School of Music and the Paris Conservatory.

It was at the first session of the American Conservatory in 1921 that Nadia became an astonishing teacher who began to remember every chord progres-sion in Bach’s Preludes and Fugues and how they relate to modern music. In her long career, her musical examples were so vast, it was as if a whole concordance of western harmonics and tonality was at her fingertips.

Nadia’s teaching was firmly rooted in her allegiance to Stravinsky (whose Dumbarton Oaks Concerto she pre-miered). She impressed the need upon her students to forge a sound technique based on disciplined ear-training, without neces-sarily forcing upon them her own aesthetic leanings, which were very much towards classicism and away from the 12-tone mu-

sic of Arnold Schoenberg and his disci-ples.

Before World War II, she had al-ready become the teacher of choice for

Nadia with her class of 1923, including

Aaron Copland.

aspiring composers. for her American stu-dents Boulanger represented Europe’s best. She embodied the idea of the highly cultured French intellectual, which made her legendary Wednesday afternoon musi-cal analysis classes both terrifying and compelling.

Certainly for her American stu-dents this was a very big part of her ap-peal. In the early years of the 20th century, there was a feeling that the French felt that the Americans needed civilising, needing to be exposed to this kind of culture. Partly because of her mother’s supposed origins as a princess, Nadia Boulanger had this very cultured, almost aristocratic aura about her, as well as being a very, very knowledgeable and highly trained musi-cian.

So these Wednesday afternoon sessions were not only great opportunities to meet others, make music, hear her very penetrating and deep analyses of music but they were also social occasions, dur-ing which students may have been intro-duced to figures such as Stravinsky or the writer Paul Valery. All sorts of people popped in for tea.

During these Wednesday after-noons or her other classes her students might hear a 16th century motet plus

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something that Stravinsky had composed only the previous week. Nadia was able to

draw connections between these things

Nadia’s class on accompaniment at the Conservatoire National Superieur, Paris, is 1956.

Nadia with Darius Milhaud and Igor

Stravinsky in 1944.

and to really give a sense of the contin-uum of musical history.

Many of Nadia’s students from the 1920s, including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson, established a new school of composition based on her teaching. Walter Piston, in addition to his compositions, has produced three superb textbooks, on harmony, counterpoint and orchestration.

During World War II she taught in the USA, mainly as a teacher at the Wash-ington (DC) College of Music and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. It used to be said that every town in the USA had a Boulanger pupil.

Her influence was immense throughout most of the Western musical world. As her reputation as a teacher grew, then a lot of people wanted to go to Paris to study with her. It was seen as a very prestigious thing. Her other pupils included Jean Francaix, Lennox Berkeley, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass and Thea Mus-grave.

The education Nadia gave her stu-dents was very much a well-rounded edu-cation. Her influence as a teacher was al-ways personal rather than pedantic: she refused to write a textbook of theory. Her aim was to enlarge the student's aesthetic comprehensions while developing his/her individual gifts.

Nadia Boulanger once said that she taught music, she didn’t think that

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music should be subdivided into disci-plines such as aural training, harmony, history, performance, but that one should have a holistic view of the discipline.

Nadia's teaching methods included traditional harmony, score reading at the piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and mastery of sight singing (using fixed-Do solfège). Her students were also expected to memorize Bach's Well-Tempered Cla-

vier Books 1 and 2, and to learn to impro-vise fugues (as Bach often did).

She was also a very penetrating analyst, and she was somebody who could bring connections together between music from very, very different periods. Her range was phenomenal, her ear perfect, her memory seemingly photographic, and her disciplinary demands absolute. Nadia’s whole character was imbued with passionate dedication, generosity, and in-tense love of life.

Nadia was a slave master of sonic precision. She insisted the muscles of the ear and the focus of the mind be so acutely developed that intervals, rhythmic patterns and harmonic progressions be ingrained deeply, not only within the con-scious mind, but within deep memories of music heard throughout a lifetime.

In 1970, Nadia spoke of training the ears: ‘One can never train a child care-fully enough. If you take general educa-tion, one learns to recognize colour, to recognize words, but not to recognize sound. So the eyes are trained, but the ears very little. This is not because someone taught me that red is not blue that I pre-tended to become a painter. But most peo-ple hear nothing because their ears have never been trained and many musicians hear very badly and very little.’

Composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud sought her advice, as well as becoming lasting friends. In the late 1930s, Nadia recorded little-known works of Claudio Monteverdi, champi-oned rarely performed works by Heinrich Schütz and Gabriel Fauré, and promoted early French music.

She often visited the USA, as teacher, lecturer, organist, and guest con-ductor. Her first performance in the USA was as the organist in the premiere of the

Nadia’s class of 1963.

Symphony for Organ and Orchestra by her most famous pupil, Aaron Copland.

Nadia was the first woman to con-duct major symphony orchestras in the United States, including the Boston Sym-phony in 1938 and the New York Phil-harmonic in 1939, followed by the Phila-delphia orchestra. She had already become (1936) the first woman to conduct an en-tire program of the Royal Philharmonic in London.

Nadia is supposed to have said, af-ter being congratulated as the first women to conduct the Boston Symphony, that

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she’d been a woman at that stage for a lit-tle over 50 years and she’d recovered from the initial astonishment.

With Aaron Copland in 1972.

One of Nadia’s last appearances

was with the New York Philharmonic in 1962, when she conducted works by her sister and the Fauré Requiem. With char-acteristic elegance and generosity, she dedicated the Sunday afternoon perform-ance to the memory of Bruno Walter, who had died the night before.

Nadia died on October 22, 1979, in Paris. She was an absolutely key figure in the 20th century. She was somebody who transmitted not only French culture but a very wide musical culture to thousands of students, most of whom completely revere her. They feel that she made them under-stand music deeply. And also so many people would perhaps never have become the composers that they became without Nadia Boulanger

She had quite a few blind-spots ac-tually. One of her former students men-tioned the name of Wagner and apparently Nadia said, ‘Do not pronounce that name in front of me!’ She hated Wagner. She also didn’t fully understand the second Viennese school.

This rejection of Wagner and that great late-Romantic style is almost a form of self-criticism of her own compositions because her own music was very much

late Romantic in feel—very chromatic, very much pushing the bounds of tonality without actually going beyond the bounds of tonality—so her later rejection of Wag-ner might have been a rejection of this musical style that she had herself aban-doned as a composer.

The frustrating thing for those who have studied Nadia’s music is that her lar-ger scale compositions, such as the opera she wrote with Raoul Pugno and her Fan-

taisie Variee for piano and orchestra are unplayable in their present states. There is no complete manuscript of either work.

There are some very, very interest-ing touches in her opera, not least an ex-traordinary piano cluster where the pianist actually has to play using the forearms rather than conventionally using the fin-gers. But it’s all part of a work which is probably only about half available to the researcher nowadays, and of course it’s never been recorded.

Among Nadia’s compositions is the Three Pieces for Cello & Piano (1915), 1. Modere, E flat minor. 2. Sans vitesse et a l'aise, A minor. 3. Vite et nerveusement rythme, C sharp minor. These three characterful pieces, with asso-ciations to Debussy and Messian, pack a lot into a short span. The first is a muted and gently rocking work with syncopa-tions remeniscent of The Snow is dancing. It is a transcription of the Improvisation from the collection Maitres contempo-

rains de l'Orgue. The second is one long canon at a quaver's distance, with a refer-ence to pre-Baroque music. And the last uses an oriental scale with a flattened sec-ond in a gypsy atmosphere. It's a bravura piece with a wry playfulness and wit.

There’s a rather fun cello piece in C# minor, which is probably the closest Nadia comes to her sister’s style of music. It is quite straightforward in its form, there’s quite a strong dialogue between the cello and the piano, which has a rather fun dance-like feel to it. There are also quite a lot of surprising twists and turns in it; sometimes it’s silent all of a sudden,

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and then she suddenly comes in with a melody that’s very loud. So it’s a rather surprising, fun piece to listen to.

Because Nadia was so critical of herself as a composer she might possibly even have destroyed some of her early works. It is possible that she really didn’t want people to perform these works that she felt were not good enough.

Nowadays there could not possibly be anybody like her, partly because she lived in a universe which has gone: this idea of people coming on Wednesday af-ternoons for private lessons and tea parties afterwards really harks back to the 19th century salon, and this kind of social world has now disappeared.

In 2004 the American Guild of Organists commissioned a prelude and fugue by David Conde dedicated to the memory of Nadia Boulanger. It had its world premiere on July 5, 2004 at the Bridges Hall of Music, Pomona College, Pomona, California.

The final say for Nadia lies in one of her quotations: ‘Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.’

Many will be familiar with Nadia Bou-

langer’s 1937 selection of Monteverdi

Madrigals, a seminal recorded set, and

one that has been in and out of the reissue

catalogues since the 1970s. This reissue

comes with other recordings made be-

tween the years 1930 and 1949.

Cover of a recent CD featuring

Nadia’s Lieder (wor ld premiere)

and Chamber Music . The works

on this recording are:

Five Lieder (1909)

Seven Lieder (1915/22)

Three pieces for Cello and Piano (1913),

Les Heures Claire (1909)

Vers la Vie nouvelle for Piano (1916).