Nadia Boulanger: music’s greatest teacher

On Friday 19 January, the talent of Nadia Boulanger, acknowledged as the most influential teacher of classical music in the 20th century, was affirmed. As a composer. 

At the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens the premiere of an opera, La ville morte, composed by Boulanger and Raoul Pugno, thirty-five years her senior and Nadia’s only known lover, received its premiere in a co-production with New York’s Catapult Opera, conducted by Neal Goren. A true first.

Next week, in Part II of this Boulanger tale, the performance of La ville morte will be reviewed. Post Athens, Catapult is staging the work at New York’s Skirball Center in April. 

Recherché, moi? Does any of this obscure obsession matter? Of course it does! There is an explanatory back story. In October 2022 Goren delivered Hanjo, composer Toshio Hosokawa, at the Skirball. Goren’s performance was so compelling that when news of La ville morte reached the ears of Reaction’s opera critic, tickets to Athens were booked pronto.

Why is this premiere so significant? Boulanger gave up composition on the death of her younger sister, Lili at the age of 24 in 1918. Nadia always considered Lili, the first woman to win the Paris Conservatoire’s coveted Prix de Rome composition prize for her cantata Faust et Hélène aged 19, the better composer.

Reading between the lines, Nadia was so affected by her sister’s death that she simply wanted to leave Lili’s considerable opus as an unchallenged monument. She considered her own compositions inadequate. Gabriel Fauré believed she was mistaken to stop composing, but she told him: “If there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that I wrote useless music.” Whatever, the elder Boulanger would focus on performance, conducting and teaching. Composition was consigned to the closet, including La ville morte.

It is impossible to overstate the influence Nadia Boulanger exerted as a teacher on 20th-century music. During her lifetime she schooled thousands of pupils, and not just performers. Composers, too. The doors of her fourth-floor family apartement at 36 rue Ballu, (today 3 Place Lili-Boulanger, at the corner of rue de Vintimille, in the Saint-Georges neighbourhood of Paris’ 9th arrondissement) were open to all until 1979. It was a place of pilgrimage.

Those who were useless did not stay long. Anyone – but anyone – with any sort of talent was welcomed, but for many a quick rap over the knuckles with the famous Boulanger ruler and a polite “au revoir” was all that was on offer. 

Others, such as pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, stayed on to nourish their talent at the Boulanger well, not only improving technique, but acquiring a deeper understanding of the purpose of music. Barenboim recalls proudly rattling off a Prelude and Fugue in B flat, only to be told to play it again in E flat. “But it’s not written in E flat.” “You have to understand the totality of the music before you can interpret it”, was the uncompromising response. 

It is no exaggeration to assert that Boulanger singlehandedly changed the course of 20th-century American music. Her pupils included icons such as Aaron Copland, Phillip Glass and Walter Piston. She befriended Leonard Bernstein who recalls when after playing her a composition, he was told off for having included a “thoughtless” bass clef B flat to round off the piece. “It is simple repetition. Adds no colour. No intention. Careless.” Maestro Bernstein took the point. Corrected the error. And never forgot it. 

One of her most unlikely disciples is jazz legend Quincy Jones. Whilst not an ardent fan of jazz, Boulanger appreciated Jones’s manifest talent. Her disciplined understanding of the foundations of any music, the combination of expression guided by emotional control applied as much to jazz as the classical genre. 

Jones acknowledges his debt to Boulanger. Advice given to him in 1957 was, he says, “the best in my life”. “Your music will never be more or less than what you are as a human being.” From then on, focusing on being a human being became Jones’s lifelong mission. His massive contribution to American music and society stands on that Boulanger foundation.

Groves Musical Dictionary lists an astonishing 130 or so American composers, all pupils of Boulanger. Many came to the American School at Fontainebleau, at which she taught harmony. Founded in 1921, Boulanger thought the school necessary. She considered American schools at which she had taught inadequate, lacking in the instillation of basic musical disciplines essential to ensure proper interpretation of a composer’s intentions. 

Glass acknowledges that Boulanger’s influence persists in American music today and the richness of the current musical landscape in the USA is her legacy. George Gershwin was fond of proudly recollecting that Boulanger turned him away because, after listening to him perform some of his famous compositions, she simply said, “I have nothing to teach you.” He seems to have been unique. Or, perhaps Boulanger was just being polite.

Scratch the surface and the seemingly withdrawn French music teacher’s influence pops up everywhere. Igor Stravinsky, she admired greatly. Not so much scions of the Viennese School of atonal music, especially Arnold Schonberg. She thought the school introspective and exclusive. They responded by mockingly dubbing her classes ‘La boulangerie.’ 

For a deeper dive into the Boulanger legend, I recommend mademoiselle  a 1977 docu-film by Bruno Monsaingean, or a compact, 23-minute offering from an excellent website, Inside the Score, How Nadia Boulanger Raised a Great Generation of Composers. The impression left with the viewer is of a musical prophet who insisted on instilling rigorous discipline to empower her pupils to fly free, having acquired a complete mastery of their craft. The black and white imagery of the elderly lady surrounded by her goggling pupils looks old fashioned. It is anything but.

When The Beatles sought spiritual refreshment from the Indian Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1970s, resulting in the Dadaistic Yellow Submarine and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, their journey was hailed as novel. Nope. For decades before, Maharishi Nadia Boulanger had been nourishing the musical souls of successive generations of musical practitioners. There is little new under the sun. Today Boulanger would be recognised as an “influencer” par excellence: #nadiaboulanger. 

Next week, Part II: Nadia Boulanger, the teacher, stands alongside Nadia Boulanger the composer. Curtain up on La ville morte.

And another thing!

Back to Temple Church, at the heart of London’s Inns of Court, for choral evensong. In the early 2000s Temple was our centre of family life. Both sons were choristers there. Total commitment required from the boy trebles and their parents. Most rewarding.

Temple still offers the richest spiritual and musical experiences to be found anywhere in London. And under Thomas Allery, the recently appointed Director of Music, the choir of Temple Church is retaking the place it held at the top of the premier league of innovative musical excellence in the noughties days of Stephen Layton – Polyphony, Holst Singers, Kings College Cambridge. In the darkening evening The Anthem, O nata lux by Kerry Andrew, words from Hymn for the Transfiguration, Cantiones Sacra 1575 transported the congregation last Thursday to another world. 

The choristers split, seniors remaining in their stalls while the boys – soon to have girls added – were led up the aisle by Chorister Tutor, Emily Elias, to the high round at the West door of the church. Dolby surround sound in a twelfth-century church!  Elias’s mastery of the fading chorus, as each treble voice dies away, leaving… silence, was extraordinarily moving.

Kerry Andrew has a gift for capturing the ethereal in her works. The anthem focuses on voices of praise. The general chatter of the world was represented by the treble voices in the Round. The underpinning narrative delivered clearly by the men in the stalls. Beautiful counterpoint.

Andrew is a composer with much to say – and the courage to say it. True to herself. I think she and Nadia Boulanger are on the same page.

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