Lili Boulanger
(1893-1918)

LÉONIE ROSENSTIEL

Born into a family of musicians active in France since the late eighteenth century, Lili Boulanger outshone all her relatives in creative ability. Her grandfather had been a cellist with the King’s Chapel, her grandmother a popular singer at the Opéra-Comique. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, a professor of singing at the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris and composer of comic operas, won the Prix de Rome in 1835. Late in life he married a Russian emigrée, the self-styled “Princess Mychetsky,” who had been a student of his at the Conservatoire.

Although Lili’s elder sister, Nadia (1887-1979), a pianist, organist, conductor, and sometime composer, was destined to become one of the twentieth century’s most famous teachers of music and to break new paths in music for women, it was Lili who became the darling of the French music world while she was still in her teens. A semi-invalid from early childhood, Lili astonished her family and their friends, including Gabriel Fauré, with her ability to read music at sight. Her seemingly intuitive grasp of harmony, counterpoint, and composition enabled her to leam in months what took most other musicians years. As with most composers, Lili learned to play a number of instruments, among them violin, piano, organ, and harp.

Despite her delicate health, Lili managed to complete the rigorous courses at the Paris Conservatoire in only three years. She not only won a composition prize in the process but also decided to become a professional composer and win the Prix de Rome, which had not been awarded to Nadia. In 1913 she succeeded, much to the amazement of her compatriots. The controversy aroused by a teen-age girl winning a prize that often eluded men in their twenties, and in a competition that had been open to women for only a few years, brought the young composer much publicity. That, in turn, resulted in a publishing contract with the firm of Ricordi. World War I intervened in 1914, but Lili took time out from her vigorous activities on behalf of French war relief to compose, perform, and conduct, sometimes with Nadia.

The years 1913 — 18 were Lili’s most productive period, during which she finished some 50 works. Her prize cantata, Faust et Helénè; Vieille prière bouddhique (Old Buddhist Prayer); and three Psalms for voice and orchestra are her major works in the larger forms. (An opera she began in 1916, to a text by Maurice Maeterlinck, was never finished.) In addition to short works for violin, piano, flute, and voice, Lili wrote a song cycle, Clairières dans le del (Rifts in the Sky), to poems by the Symbolist Francis Jammes. Often, the composer would rearrange her works for different combinations of instruments or voices. Her Psalms exist in various versions, as do some of her instrumental works and songs (with orchestra or piano, for example).

The song cycle, completed in 1914, shows Lili Boulanger at her deeply passionate and sensitive best. It is an ambitious, successful work, not only in its understanding and exploitation of the sonorities of both the voice and the piano, but also in its projection of the nuances of the text, in the French tradition. Knowing that she was already gravely ill with the ileitis and ulcerative colitis that would eventually kill her, the young composer identified with the heroine of the cycle, a girl who disappeared, seemingly evaporating into the mist.

In the songs “Je garde une médaille d’elle” (I keep a medal of hers) and “Demain fera un an” (Tomorrow it will be a year), Lili Boulanger shows us the range of her emotional power. They are the last two songs in a cycle of thirteen—a number that had mystical significance for the composer since it accorded with the number of letters in her name. Most of the finest art songs are based on minor poetry by great poets or on the better works of lesser ones, and these songs are no exception. The composer undoubtedly chose them for the freedom they afforded her to evoke moods, for the words themselves are deliberately vague, suggestive, and unabashedly emotional.

“Je garde une médaille d’elle” is a song of gentle melancholy, lasting less than a minute but poignant nonetheless:

I keep a medal of hers on which are engraved a date, and the words: “pray, believe, hope.” But, as for me, I see above all that the medal is dark; its silver has tarnished on her dovelike neck.

“Demain fera un an” is the longest and most ambitious song of the entire cycle. It is also the most complex, tying together the rest of the cycle and interweaving fragments of melody and accompaniment from earlier songs:

Lili Boulanger’s style in these songs is in the tradition of the French art song—Duparc, Fauré, and Debussy spring readily to mind as her role models—but she has made this musical language clearly and creatively her own.

Je garde une médaille d’elle

Lili Boulanger, revised by Nadia Boulanger

Durand & Cie. Reproduced by Permission of the Publisher, Theodore Presser Company, Sole Representative U.S.A. &. Canada.

Demain fera un an

Lili Boulanger, revised by Nadia Boulanger

Durand & Cie. Reproduced by Permission of the Publisher, Theodore Presser Company, Sole Representative U.S.A. & Canada .