Nadia Boulanger
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
The French composer, conductor, organist and influential teacher, Nadia (Juliette) Boulanger, was born to a musical family. Her grandmother, Marie-Julie Boulanger, was a celebrated singer at the Opéra Comique. Her grandfather, Frédéric Boulanger won first prize for the cello in his fifth year (1797) at the recently founded Paris Conservatoire. Her father, Ernest Boulanger (1815-1900), entered the Conservatoire at the age of 16, studying piano, violin, and composition. In 1835, he won the Conservatoire's top prize, the Prix de Rome, for a one-act opera, Le Diable à l'École (The Devil at School). He later taught singing at the Conservatoire. In 1874, while he was performing in Russia, he met a young, married Russian schoolteacher, Raissa Suvalov (née Myschetsky).
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She moved to Paris to attend his singing class at the Conservatoire, and in 1877 they married; she was aged 20 and he 62. Their first child, Juliette Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris ten years later. By her sixth birthday, she was studying music under her mother's tutelage. A second child, Lili, was born in 1893. The ageing father asked Nadia to promise to look after the newborn girl for the rest of her life.
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Her younger sister Lili, who was, as Boulanger acknowledged, the more talented composer, won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1913, the first woman composer to do so. By that time, Nadia was firmly established as a teacher, and had little time to compose.
Photo by Joel Filipe
SIBLINGS
- Ernestine Mina Juliette (died as an infant)
- Maria Juliette Olga ( known as: Lili Boulanger)
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CHILD HOOD
- Nadia’s mom wanted to continue living above their means, so Nadia wanted to help support her family
- So Nadia studied to be a teacher
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After Lili Boulanger’s death, Nadia performed in more than twenty concerts, often programming her own music and that of her sister
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Nadia Boulanger's compositions, published between 1901 and 1922, comprise 29 songs for solo singer and piano; nine larger-scale vocal works, some with orchestra; five works for instrumental solo (organ, cello, piano); two orchestral works, and an opera, La ville morte, and a song cycle, Les heures claires, both composed jointly with Raoul Pugno, for whom she composed a Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra. The opera was due to be staged in 1914, but owing to Pugno's death and events leading up to World War I, it was never performed.
Photo by Joel Filipe
Boulanger's teaching methods included traditional harmony, score reading at the piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and sight singing (using fixed-Do solfège).
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Even though her eyesight and hearing began to fade towards the end of her life, Nadia Boulanger worked almost until her death in 1979.
Photo by Joel Filipe
Nadia Boulanger's European students included Igor Markevitch, John Eliot Gardiner, Jean Françaix, Francis Chagrin, and Lennox Berkeley.
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Boulanger's first teaching position was at the Conservatoire Femina-Musica in Paris in 1907. Later, she was one of the first staff members at Alfred Cortot's École Normale de Musique de Paris, beginning in 1920, where she taught a large variety of subjects.
Photo by Joel Filipe
WEBSITES USED
- YouTube
- Wikipedia
- Biography.com
- PBS.org
