Nadia Boulanger

French composer and educator

• Born: September 16, 1887
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 22, 1979
• Place of death: Paris, France

Boulanger forged a musical career spanning more than eighty years, teaching generations of students the arts of performance, composition, and thinking. At a time when very few women were in prominent musical positions, Boulanger steadfastly pursued her goals. She is one of the most revered music teachers female or male of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Nadia Boulanger (bew-lahn-jehr) was born in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. Her father, Ernest, was a conductor, composer, and professor at the Paris Conservatory, where he met her mother, Raïssa Myschetsky Shuvalov. Russian-born Shuvalov studied voice with Ernest and, although forty-three years younger, married him in 1919. Nadia was the second of four children born to the Boulangers. Two of the girls died in infancy, but Nadia and younger sister Marie Julliet, affectionately called Lili, survived.

Although initially indifferent to music, Boulanger began studying sight-reading, singing, and solfeggio at the conservatory as well as organ and composition. In 1897 she was awarded a first prize in solfeggio. Her father’s death in 1900 strengthened her resolve to study music. By age sixteen, she had already accumulated significant honors: a second prize in harmony at the conservatory, an appointment as Gabriel Fauré’s substitute organist, a first prize in harmony, and a first prize in organ, accompaniment, fugue, and composition.

Boulanger’s association with highly regarded piano virtuoso Raoul Pugno led to the creation of her piano lesson studio in 1905. She also collaborated with Pugno in composition and in piano performance. Her first major disappointment, though, was her inability to win first prize at the Prix de Romecompetition, a prize awarded only to men at the time. It was Boulanger’s sister Lili, considered by critics to be a genius and more talented than her older sister, who became the first woman to win the first prize in 1913.

Boulanger toured with Pugno, traveling to Berlin and Moscow. While in Russia, Pugno fell ill on the tour and died in 1914. This unexpected and devastating event led Boulanger to temporarily cease her activities. In 1918, Lili also died, profoundly affecting Boulanger. Her grief never subsided as she dedicated the rest of her life to honoring Lili’s memory.

Life’s Work

In 1920, Boulanger was a professor at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. In her harmony, counterpoint, accompaniment, and music history classes, she methodically stimulated students’ curiosity and then challenged them to satisfy that curiosity. Established the following year was an American conservatory, the École de Fontainebleau. Her new students there included a virtual Who’s Who of twentieth century composers such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Roger Sessions.

Boulanger’s long-anticipated first trip to the United States was arranged by friend Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra. In two months during 1925 she presented twenty-six concerts and several lectures that were enormously successful, leading to job offers. However, Boulanger declined the offers because of her mother’s failing health from Parkinson’s disease. Relying on a wheelchair, Raïssa was unable to care for herself. Boulanger, who was physically and emotionally exhausted by this time, provided for her mother until she died in 1935. The lingering deterioration was dreadfully reminiscent of Lili’s illness years before. Boulanger was now the only surviving member of her immediate family.

Boulanger’s reputation as a teacher continued to spread. She advised composer Astor Piazzolla to stop writing symphonic music and devote his time to the Argentine tango. She did not accept Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin as her students because she concluded they were already proficient composers. She categorized her students in three groups: talented with no money, wealthy with no talent, and wealthy with talent. She often remarked that she never had enough students from the third group.

Ever the benefactor, Boulanger would recruit aristocratic patrons to support the talented but impoverished students. She cultivated a friendship with one patron in particular, Princess de Polignac, who had ties to composer Igor Stravinsky. The friendship was timely because the 1929 stock market crash in the United States had reduced the enrollment at Fontainebleau and forced Boulanger to find new opportunities. The princess asked Boulanger in 1936 to be the first woman to conduct London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This milestone was repeated a few years later when she was also the first woman conductor of the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Two more American tours in 1938 and 1939 included more than one hundred combined performances and lectures. In 1939, France had surrendered to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, prompting Boulanger to move to the United States in 1940 and remain there until 1946. During this period she taught at such prestigious schools as Wellesley, Juilliard, and Radcliffe, while continuing to perform. Returning to France after World War II, she was appointed to the faculty of the École de Fontainebleau without even applying. Fontainebleau was closed during the war and reopened on a smaller scale, with Boulanger teaching private lessons and hosting a Wednesday class. During the lessons she incorporated references to ethics, art, and literature. The training and assignments were custom designed for individuals but were lengthy and demanding. New students were mixed with older students in the Wednesday sessions, and the work was equally difficult. Boulanger often ridiculed students in front of others, believing it would encourage them to improve next time. This method had worked for years but was losing favor with the new students.

In 1950, Boulanger was appointed director at Fontainebleau, a position she retained until her death. Her elevated status allowed her to continue discovering talented new students. By now she was acquainted with Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Stravinsky, among many others. While her teaching was legendary, her public piano and organ performances ended because of her arthritis, but she continued lecturing and conducting. In 1962, at the invitation of Bernstein, Boulanger conducted the New York Philharmonic in a sold-out concert.

The remaining years of Boulanger’s life were spent teaching in England at American violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin’s school in Surrey, at the Royal Academy of Music, and at the Royal College of Music, while also continuing at Fontainebleau. Poor health restricted her travels beginning in 1976, and she was forced to stay at Fontainebleau. Eventually she became too frail to teach, and her time was spent visiting with friends and colleagues. Students often comforted her by singing music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Robert Schumann. In 1932 she had received the Legion of Honor. In 1977, French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing appointed her Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.

Significance

Boulanger was referred to as a master teacher by friends, colleagues, historians, critics, and students. For decades she taught students to assimilate ideas, facts, history, and the concepts of music and convert them into individual compositional processes and styles. She inspired admiration and devotion, but also fear, in her students. Besides teaching she also excelled in performance, composition, and conducting.

There were notable firsts in Boulanger’s career: She was the first woman to conduct major symphonies, the first person to revive the music of Claudio Monteverdi and then record it, and the first teacher to educate more than six hundred individual composers. Her teaching methods are as valid and influential today as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. Boulanger’s passion embraced all music, from antiquity to modern times, with the only requirement being quality.

Bibliography

Campbell, Don G. Master Teacher Nadia Boulanger. Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1984. The focus of this book is on articles written early in her career. Divided into four sections: reflections on the master teacher by students and colleagues, her life, notable quotations from Boulanger, and essays on musical styles and composers.

Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. This book of 700-plus pages is an in-depth music history, written in a narrative style and including numerous pictures, musical examples, and several references to Boulanger. Recorded Anthology of American Music, by New World Records, serves as a compatible musical example source.

Kendall, Alan. The Tender Tyrant: A Life Devoted to Music. Wilton, Conn.: Lyceum Books, 1977. The first half is biographical in nature, presented chronologically. The second half probes the foundations of her teaching, her musical philosophy, and what made her unique.

Monsaingeon, Bruno, trans. Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1985. This work brings together research, analyses of a film on Boulanger, and radio interviews with her. The author organized the text into fabricated interviews with questions and answers. The concluding material contains a series of tributes from notable musical personalities such as Leonard Bernstein and Yehudi Menuhin.

Perlis, Vivian, and Libby Van Cleve. Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. An oral history of composers who shaped American music. Also included are transcripts, commentary, and two compact discs of recorded interviews with musical examples (part 6, “From the Boulangerie”).

Rosenstiel, Leonie. Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Boulanger provided personal papers, records, and numerous interviews to the author for this portrait of the renowned composer and educator. A comprehensive biography with more than four hundred pages.