1893–1918 · France · 20th century
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) was a French composer and the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger. In 1913 she was the first woman to take the Grand Prix de Rome for composition. She died at 24 after chronic illness, yet she wrote instrumental, vocal and choral works. The site offers her songs for voice and piano.
Lili Boulanger was born in Paris on 21 August 1893. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a composer who taught voice at the Paris Conservatoire, and he had won the Prix de Rome back in 1835. Her mother, Raissa Myshetskaya, was a singer from Saint Petersburg. Her grandfather Frédéric Boulanger was a well-known cellist, and her grandmother Juliette was a singer.
Lili's elder sister, Nadia Boulanger, also became a composer and a teacher of composition. In 1900 their father died in Brussels, and the loss hit the family hard.
Lili is a diminutive of Juliette, and that was the name she always went by. All the children of the family were named in honour of her grandmother.
Lili's musical gift showed very early. At the age of two, Gabriel Fauré, a friend of the family and later one of her teachers, found that she had perfect pitch. Her parents encouraged her to study music.
Before she turned five, she went with her older sister Nadia to lessons at the Paris Conservatoire. Soon Lili began studying music theory, and she took organ lessons with Louis Vierne. By the age of six she could read music, before she could read letters.
The girl's health was poor, so she was taught at home. Besides the piano she played the violin, the cello and the harp, and she also sang. She worked with Marcel Tournier and with Alphonse Hasselmans as well. Of her earliest compositions only a Waltz in E major, written in 1906, has survived.
In 1909 Lili entered the Paris Conservatoire and joined Paul Vidal's composition class. Georges Caussade was also among her mentors. Fauré, the director of the Conservatoire, was impressed by her talent.
Specialists who looked over her compositions remarked on the colourful harmony of her music, as well as the orchestration and the skilful handling of the text.
Both sisters wrote music to poems by Maeterlinck.
Her first work was published in 1910: the song "Attente", set to a poem by Maurice Maeterlinck. In 1912, at the composition class examination, she presented "Pour les funérailles d'un soldat" and received the Lepaulle prize.
Lili first entered the Prix de Rome competition in 1912, but illness forced her to withdraw. A year later, in 1913, she returned and became the first woman to be awarded the Grand Prix de Rome for composition. Her entry was the cantata "Faust et Hélène" ("Faust and Helen"), with a libretto by Eugène Adenis drawn from Goethe's Faust.
Her sister Nadia had also aimed for the Prix de Rome, but after four unsuccessful attempts she gave up those plans, although she had won the second prize in 1908. Instead she concentrated on her work as an assistant to Henri Dallier in the organ class.
The cantata was first performed in public on 16 November 1913, at a Colonne concert in the Théâtre du Châtelet, and it was a great success. On 24 November Lili was received at the Élysée Palace by the President of France, Raymond Poincaré. During her stay at the Villa Medici she signed a contract with the publisher Ricordi, which issued the cantata.
In 1914, as a prizewinner, Lili travelled with her mother to Rome, to the Villa Medici, where the prizewinners lived. The Academy was directed by Albert Besnard. Lili spent four months there, and then the outbreak of the First World War cut the trip short.
Maeterlinck gave her permission to set his play "Princesse Maleine" as an opera, but Lili did not live to finish it.
In 1915, together with Nadia, she founded the Conservatoire's composition-class newsletter, the Gazette (Gazette des classes de composition), a private publication backed by Whitney Warren, through which musicians who had gone to war could exchange news. Lili acted as its secretary.
In 1916 Lili went to Rome again with Nadia, partly to continue her stay there and partly for the sake of her health. She then returned to France, where she was mostly confined to bed. An operation in 1917 changed nothing. She created her largest works between 1916 and 1918.
Lili liked to travel, but her worsening health obliged her to go back to France. Back home, she and Nadia arranged help for French soldiers fighting in the First World War.
Her final years were rich in music, as she rushed to finish as many works as possible.
In 1917 Lili finished "Vieille prière bouddhique" ("Old Buddhist Prayer") and also wrote "D'un matin de printemps" ("Of a Spring Morning"). In 1918 she produced "D'un soir triste" ("Of a Sad Evening"), which was the final piece she put on paper unaided. Her very last work, "Pie Jesu", was dictated from her deathbed to her sister Nadia.
Lili Boulanger's life ended on 15 March 1918 at Mézy-sur-Seine; she was 24, and the cause was intestinal tuberculosis. Some later writers linked her illness to Crohn's disease. She was buried in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris; Nadia, who lived until 1979, was later buried in the same grave.
In 1939 Nadia Boulanger set up a memorial fund in her sister's name. Its aims are to keep the composer's music and memory alive and to help young composers, and it gives a prize bearing her name. A Paris association of her friends was formed in 1965; in 2009 it became an international centre named after Nadia and Lili.
In 2018 two Washington musicians set up the Boulanger Initiative to promote women composers, naming it after both sisters.
The composer gave her name to the asteroid Lilith, found in 1927. A sculptor made a bust of her in 1918, and it is now held by the Philharmonie de Paris.
Her catalogue covers music for instruments, for solo voices and for choirs, along with sacred pieces. The poets whose verse she set include Maeterlinck, F. Jammes, Musset, Leconte de Lisle and A. Samain. Her notable works include three psalms (Psalms 24, 129 and 130), the cantata "Faust et Hélène", "Pie Jesu", "Vieille prière bouddhique", the vocal cycle "Clairières dans le ciel" (poems by Francis Jammes) and the paired pieces "D'un soir triste" and "D'un matin de printemps". Her devout Catholic faith lay behind the psalms.
Among her works is "Les Sirènes", written in 1911 for a solo soprano with a three-part choir, accompanied by piano or orchestra, to a poem by Charles Grandmougin. It was first heard at a musical salon held by her mother, and the critic Auguste Mangeot reported that it went down so well that it was encored. Psalm 24 is for a four-part choir with organ, brass, timpani and two harps; Psalm 129 for chorus and full orchestra; and Psalm 130, "Du fond de l'abîme", for chorus and large orchestra, dedicated to the memory of the composer's father. "Vieille prière bouddhique" is for tenor, chorus and large orchestra and was first performed only in 1921; it is not rooted in Catholic tradition. "Pie Jesu" is for a high voice with a string quartet, harp and organ.
Her music fits within neo-Romanticism, yet she tied herself more closely to Symbolism than to Impressionism, and there is understatement and suggestion in it. She also turned to the Impressionists' palette: seventh and ninth chords outside functional harmony, chords moving in parallel and modal turns. Echoes of Fauré and Debussy are audible in her writing, while her innovations affected later composers such as Arthur Honegger. Much of this music conveys a sense of solitude and alienation.
Lili left unfinished her opera "Princesse Maleine", based on Maeterlinck's play of the same name. Her music was recorded by the conductors Nadia Boulanger, John Eliot Gardiner and Igor Markevitch; today it is performed by, among others, the Lamoureux Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir, the BBC Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Gardiner.
For her vocal works she often chose poems that express despondency and melancholy. One example is the finale of the cycle "Clairières dans le ciel", "Demain fera un an".
The site offers 16 works by Lili Boulanger, all written for voice and piano. Five of them are at the "intermediate+" level and eleven at the "advanced" level. Three songs deserve a separate mention. "Attente" is a setting of Maeterlinck that became the composer's first published work. "Demain fera un an" is the finale of the cycle "Clairières dans le ciel". "Dans l'immense tristesse" is her last mélodie. All three are at the advanced level. A good way into her music is through the "intermediate+" songs: "Elle était descendue au bas de la prairie", "Au pied de mon lit", "Deux ancolies" and "Reflets".