The Fonds Boulanger at the Bibliotheque Nationale

Abstract

Nadia Boulanger hoped that after her death her home would become the seat of a foundation that would preserve her collection of books, scores, and papers in its original setting, surrounded by her pictures, furniture, and memorabilia. When after years of illness she died in October 1979, her estate did not have sufficient funds to realize this project.(1) After taking care of numerous personal bequests, her heir, Annette Dieudonne, donated Boulanger's possessions, in Boulanger's name, to a large array of universities, societies, and public collections. The number of gifts involved means that Boulanger's collection is now widely dispersed, consequently presenting difficulties of access for scholars of twentieth-century music. This study provides an overview of the types of material donated to different institutions, and presents a more detailed outline of the most easily accessible group of scores, books, and papers from her collection, now held by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.(2) Boulanger's apartment, formerly 36, rue Ballu (now 1, place Lili Boulanger), was given to the Academie de Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France. It is currently rented out and the proceeds are used to fund prizes, named after Nadia and Lili Boulanger, for musical composition and performance. Dieudonne donated a few notable paintings, including a Berthe Morisot given to Boulanger by Marie-Blanche de Polignac, to Parisian art museums. Clothing and personal objects belonging to Boulanger, her sister Lili, and mother Raissa (including dolls and other articles from the end of the nineteenth century) were given to the Union Francaise des Arts de Costume. Boulanger's large collection of recordings was donated to the Phonotheque section of the Bibliotheque Nationale. The contents of Boulanger's salon and the adjoining small salon, including all of the furniture, the pianos, the Cavaille-Coll-Mutin organ, the bookshelves and their contents, and objects and paintings kept in the rooms, were donated to the Musee Instrumental du Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, which has now moved to the premises of the new Conservatoire in the northern suburb of La Villette. These materials were intended to serve for the reconstruction of the two rooms with which so many notable composers and performers of this century were familiar and where generations of students came for lessons and classes.(3) The interest of such a reconstruction is not limited to nostalgia or to the history of interior decoration (although the rooms do feature some fine early nineteenth-century furniture and decorative objects). The way the salons were organized and the display of documents and images within them were concrete manifestations of many of Boulanger's ideas about music history and how it was constructed; it is possible to read her salon as one kind of text she supplied for her students. Unfortunately, the reconstruction project has suffered from problems of administration and space. Nearly fifteen years after the donation, it has yet to be realized. The furniture, objects, and instruments, as well as hundreds of books and scores from the bookcases of the salon, have remained in storage and are almost completely inaccessible to scholars. The scores include a large number from the collection of Boulanger's grandmother, Marie-Julie Halligner Boulanger (1786-1850), a famous singer at the Opera-Comique, who took leading roles in premieres of operas by Auber and Boieldieu. A few manuscripts also form part of the gift to the Conservatoire, including an autograph of the piano-vocal score of Lili Boulanger's cantata Renouveau and autograph libretto material from the opera La Ville morte, written in collaboration by Nadia Boulanger and Raoul Pugno.(4) The remaining portion of Boulanger's library and her personal papers were dispersed in several directions. Manuscripts of music by American composers were given to Harvard University.(5) Most books and manuscript and printed scores by Boulanger's Polish students and friends were donated to the Bibliotheque Polonaise de Paris. …