Nadia and Lili Boulanger: Sister Composers

Abstract

Although Lili Boulanger's reputation as a composer is growing, her elder sister, Nadia, remains better known as one of the most important composition teachers of the twentieth century than as a creative artist in her own right. Yet, Nadia helped prepare the ground, musically speaking, for her younger sister; she set a text, Les sirenes, for chorus and orchestra in 1905 that was set by Lili six years later, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they had many musical interests and influences in common. The sisters were born into a cultured family (Nadia in 1887, Lili in 1893), the only two survivors of four daughters. Their father, Ernest Boulanger (1815-1900), had some success as an opera composer after winning the Prix de Rome in 1836 and ended his long career as a singing teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. One of his last pupils was Raissa Myschetsky, who claimed to be a Russian princess (though there is no evidence to support this), and the pupil and master married in 1878. At Lili's birth, their father had asked Nadia to vow that she would always take care of her sister, and throughout her life, Nadia kept her word, feeling her responsibility all the more because Lili never fully recovered from a bout of bronchial pneumonia contracted at the age of two. Nadia knew that, as their father was in his seventies when they were born, it would eventually fall to her to support her mother and sister. She entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten and aimed to win as many prizes as possible in the shortest possible time. As early as 1903, she won a first prize in harmony, following this in 1904, before her seventeenth birthday, with first prizes in organ, fugue, and piano accompaniment. She reached the final round of the prestigious Prix de Rome competition for the first time in 1907.1 That year her cantata Selma failed to win a prize, but the following year she placed second (although she created a stir in the preliminary round when she wrote an instrumental fugue instead of the vocal fugue demanded by the judges). In