Boulanger Nadia

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSIC
TEACHERS 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 father’s 72nd birthday; she was to become a
musical phenomenon. She has been variously described as a demanding pedagogue, a musical phenomenon and a tender 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 Boulanger, later studied at the same conservatory (his teachers included CharlesValentin 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 singing 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 composer. In the first capacity she was responsible for the musical training of a generation of distinguished composers from
Europe and the USA. Her work as an interpreter 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 century, particularly music from the Renaissance and Baroque.
Her career as a conductor, although successful, was also eclipsed by
her teaching. Nadia, who liked to be
known as 'Mademoiselle', was the first
woman to conduct several major symphony 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.
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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 become a bit of a handicap to her not having
those first years of her life being very enthusiastic 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 because 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, encouraged by her father—a composer, orchestral conductor and voice professor —
who entrusted her to Louis Vierne. Entering 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 obtained in 1904, at the age of 16, first
prizes in organ, accompaniment and composition.
Because the Boulanger sisters
were from such a musical family, musical
careers seemed inevitable. So many musi-
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 Mutin-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 actually 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 proceed 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 performance.
After his sudden death, she littleby-little abandoned composing, devoting
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her time instead to teaching and conducting. 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.
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Nadia seated at an organ.
(working with Pugno) and completed in
1912.
Some people think the death in
1914 of such an influential supporter perhaps had more influence on her abandonment 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 impressionist 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 environment:
Several months ago, in this column, I warned musicians of the
imminence of the ‘pink peril’:
events have not hesitated to
prove me right. Mlle Lili Boulanger has just triumphed in the
‘Prix de Rome’. The misogyny
of the jury was known. The entry
of an Eve into the earthly paradise 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 orchestral forces continues to compel admiration.
Nadia gave private lessons at her
legendary Paris apartment. Her first teaching 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 talented 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 determined 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 Professor of Harmony at the American Conservatory 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 Walter 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 progression 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 premiered). She impressed the need upon her
students to forge a sound technique based
on disciplined ear-training, without necessarily 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 disciples.
Before World War II, she had already become the teacher of choice for
Nadia with her class of 1923, including
Aaron Copland.
aspiring composers. for her American students Boulanger represented Europe’s
best. She embodied the idea of the highly
cultured French intellectual, which made
her legendary Wednesday afternoon musical analysis classes both terrifying and
compelling.
Certainly for her American students this was a very big part of her appeal. 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 musician.
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, during which students may have been introduced to figures such as Stravinsky or the
writer Paul Valery. All sorts of people
popped in for tea.
During these Wednesday afternoons 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 continuum 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.
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During World War II she taught in
the USA, mainly as a teacher at the Washington (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 Musgrave.
The education Nadia gave her students was very much a well-rounded education. Her influence as a teacher was always 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
music should be subdivided into disciplines 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 Clavier Books 1 and 2, and to learn to improvise 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 intense 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 conscious 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 carefully enough. If you take general education, 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 pretended to become a painter. But most people 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, championed 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 conductor. 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 conduct major symphony orchestras in the
United States, including the Boston Symphony in 1938 and the New York Philharmonic in 1939, followed by the Philadelphia orchestra. She had already become
(1936) the first woman to conduct an entire program of the Royal Philharmonic in
London.
Nadia is supposed to have said, after 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 little 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 characteristic elegance and generosity, she
dedicated the Sunday afternoon performance 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 understand 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 actually. One of her former students mentioned 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
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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 Wagner might have been a rejection of this
musical style that she had herself abandoned as a composer.
The frustrating thing for those who
have studied Nadia’s music is that her larger scale compositions, such as the opera
she wrote with Raoul Pugno and her Fantaisie Variee for piano and orchestra are
unplayable in their present states. There is
no complete manuscript of either work.
There are some very, very interesting touches in her opera, not least an extraordinary piano cluster where the pianist
actually has to play using the forearms
rather than conventionally using the fingers. 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 associations to Debussy and Messian, pack a
lot into a short span. The first is a muted
and gently rocking work with syncopations remeniscent of The Snow is dancing.
It is a transcription of the Improvisation
from the collection Maitres contemporains de l'Orgue. The second is one long
canon at a quaver's distance, with a reference to pre-Baroque music. And the last
uses an oriental scale with a flattened second 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,
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 afternoons 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.’
catalogues since the 1970s. This reissue
comes with other recordings made between the years 1930 and 1949.
C o ve r of a r ece nt CD fe at ur i ng
N a di a’ s Lie der (w or ld pre mi er e )
an d C hambe r Mus i c. The w or ks
o n t hi s r eco r di ng 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).
Many will be familiar with Nadia Boulanger’s 1937 selection of Monteverdi
Madrigals, a seminal recorded set, and
one that has been in and out of the reissue
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