Boulanger’s remarks were made as part of her Lectures on Modern Music presented at Rice University in Houston, Texas (January 1925).
Juliette Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
In the world of classical music composition, Nadia Boulanger is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant and influential teachers of the craft. In that capacity, Boulanger guided the education of several generations of composers in their formative years – most famously ones from the United States and other English-speaking countries.
The list of noted American composers who made the pilgrimage to France to study with Boulanger, either at the American School at Fontainebleau or privately at her Paris apartment, reads like a veritable “who’s who” of twentieth century greatness: Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and George Walker, to name just some of the best-known names. (George Gershwin attempted to become her student as well, but Boulanger demurred, declaring, “I can teach you nothing.”)
Ernest Henri Alexandre Boulanger (1815-1900) was a winner of the Grand Prix de Rome first-place prize for composition in 1835, at the age of just 20 years. His daughters Nadia and Lili also competed for the prize, but only Lili would win the first-place prize in 1913 — also at the age of 20 years. (ca. 1872 photo)
Nadia Boulanger grew up in a musical family. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a composer who had won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1835 and who married late in life. Eldest child Nadia was born in 1887 when her father was 72, and younger daughter Lili was born six years later. Both girls exhibited an early interest in music — particularly focusing on composition.
Nadia entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine, studying composition with Gabriel Fauré and keyboard performance with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne. Proof of her keen interest in composing during her early years, she entered the Prix de Rome composition prize competitions four years running (1906-09), but failed to win each time.
In 1900 Ernest Boulanger passed away at age 85, which resulted in looming financial hardships for the family. In the event, Nadia was required to became the chief breadwinner for her mother (an impoverished Russian-born princess and former singer) and her younger sister Lili, who was then just seven years old.
A vintage copy of the score to Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII. Note the different numbering in the title (Vulgate version of the Bible).
To contribute to her family’s financial well-being, Nadia began to concentrate on teaching in addition to undertaking a demanding schedule of organ and piano performance gigs – including playing the important organ part in the premiere of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII presented at the Paris Conservatoire the day after Christmas in 1906.
The home of the Boulanger family from 1904 onwards, where Nadia Boulanger also taught privately. Located in the 9th arr. of Paris, the former Rue Ballu address has been renamed Place Lili-Boulanger in honor of Nadia’s younger sister, who won the Prix de Rome first prize for composition in 1913 and who left an astonishing legacy of compositions in the wake of her untimely death in 1918, at just 23 years of age.
In 1904 Boulanger had begun teaching privately from the family’s home in Paris, helping to produce a stable stream of income for the family. In her 1982 biography Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music, Léonie Rosenstiel writes about Nadia’s activities during these early years of her career:
“Nadia auditioned Fauré’s composition class for several years before joining it officially. She had begun work with Andre Gédalge, Fauré’s assistant, as early as 1904. Perhaps her most important early associations were in the Fauré-Gédalge circle: Charles Koechlin, Georges Enescu, Florent Schmitt, Raoul Laparra, Maurice Leboucher, Maurice Ravel, Alfred Cortot, and the master’s favorite disciple, [Jean] Roger-Ducasse.
Of them all, Ducasse was admittedly the closest to the Boulangers, followed at some distance by Enescu, Koechlin, Cortot and Schmitt. Despite Nadia’s constant proximity to some of the most eligible and talented musicians of her day, there was never any hint of romantic involvement with any of them. Her personality, her family situation, her training — all removed her from such consideration.”
Nadia (l.) and Lili Boulanger, photographed in about 1914.
Also at this time, Nadia began to take a keen interest in cultivating younger sister Lili’s prospects as a composer, recognizing her as the greater talent. Some years later, Nadia would explain to her erstwhile composition teacher, Gabriel Fauré, why she stopped composing: “If there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that I wrote useless music,” she declared.
And in an interview she gave later in life, she expanded on this, stating, “When I decided to abandon composition, it was because I knew that I would never be a great genius. My music could perhaps have been played — but music played because ‘it is by a good friend’ doesn’t interest me at all.”
Indeed, rather than Nadia, Lili was the one to win the coveted Prix de Rome composition prize in 1913 at the age of just 20 years — the same age as her father nearly 80 years before.
A photo from the back of the 1960 Everest LP record jacket, showing Nadia Boulanger at the playback sessions.
In the decades following Lili’s untimely death in 1918, Nadia was to be a ceaseless champion of Lili’s music as a performer and conductor, and she served as an artistic advisor in the making of the world premiere recording of Lili’s most important works for chorus and orchestra featuring the Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur and the Lamoureux Orchestra under the direction of Igor Markevitch, which was released on the Everest label in 1960. As an authoritative recorded document, it has remained in the catalogue nearly continuously in the six decades hence.
The world premiere recording of Lili Boulanger’s works for chorus and orchestra, released on the Everest label in 1960, with musical forces conducted by Igor Markevitch. Nadia Boulanger was present at the recording sessions and served as an artistic advisor on the project. The recording included Lili Boulanger’s three masterful psalm settings, composed in 1916 and 1917. The influence of Florent Schmitt’s Psaume XLVII (composed in 1904) is unmistakable; Lili knew that score well, since she had attended the rehearsals and premiere of Schmitt’s Psaume in 1906, at which Nadia played the important organ part.
In hindsight, we can recognize that Nadia Boulanger’s shift to teaching was a particularly fortuitous move for her, even as she continued keyboard performances and conducting activities throughout her career. Among the latter milestones, she would be the first woman to conduct a host of orchestras around the world including the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, among others.
Boulanger’s teaching responsibilities widened with her 1920 appointment to the faculty of the École normale de musique (headed at the time by the pianist Alfred Cortot), where her academic specialties were organ, harmony, counterpoint and fugue.
The campus of the Fontainebleau Schools of Music and Fine Arts, located approximately 65 kms. southeast of Paris. Wthin a few years of opening, the school was offering concert series featuring the participation of eminent composers and performers. In 1924 alone, individual concerts devoted to the compositions of Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Lili Boulanger and Roger-Ducasse were presented. Performers at the June 28th all-Schmitt concert included tenor Charles Hubbard, pianist Beveridge Webster and violinist André Pascal. Also in 1924, an August 4th concert organized by Nadia Boulanger featured American music by Aaron Copland, Henry Elwell and Melville Smith.
Even more consequentially, in 1921 the French Music School for Americans opened in Fontainebleau, with Nadia installed as professor of harmony. Her success there, and in teaching privately, boosted her fame in the English-speaking world.
In 1924, conductor Walter Damrosch, arts manager Arthur Judson and the New York Symphony Society arranged for Boulanger to undertake the first of her several American tours — one of which was an extended stay in the United States during World War II when she taught at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge (Boston).
Boulanger’s January-February 1925 American tour included the premiere performances of Aaron Copland’s newly composed Symphony for Organ & Orchestra (she was the dedicatee), as well as a series of lectures presented by Boulanger at Rice Institute (today Rice University) in Houston. The three “Lectures on Modern Music” were delivered at the college on successive days in late January, 1925, and her highly perceptive profile of Florent Schmitt and description of his artistry were part of the first lecture in the series, titled Modern French Music.
The three “Lectures on Modern Music,” given by Nadia Boulanger at Rice University (Houston, Texas) on January 27-29, 1925.
Nadia Boulanger’s January 1925 “Lectures on Modern Music” were published in the April 1926 issue of the Rice Institute Pamphlet. In 1960 the Institute was renamed Rice University.
Encountering the text of this lecture a century later, I am struck by how brilliantly Boulanger has captured the true essence of Florent Schmitt’s creative genius – as well as noting key aspects of his personality that come through in his music — and which made him so unique among French composers of his time.
The full text of Boulanger’s description of Schmitt and his artistry is reproduced below:
Florent Schmitt was born in Lorraine (1870) and his music shows clearly the traces of his double Latin and Teutonic heredity. Clarity and balance of form, sensuous harmonies, acute sensitiveness in matters of sonority — in short, traits which we usually think of as being more or less Gallic — alternate or unite with the more Germanic ideals of ponderous force, of imposing construction and of abundance and depth of feeling.
Being of fiery and impetuous temperament, Schmitt naturally revels in the world of rhythm, and many are the contributions which he has made to this aspect of modern music. As early as 1908 to take but a single example, we find him, in the last movement of the Piano Quintet, wielding a type of meter, based on unequal measures, that was later to become a marked feature of Stravinsky’s style:
An excerpt from Florent Schmitt’s Piano Quintet (final movement), illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.
He delights — and particularly excels — in rhythms of nervous force and movement which, like the following, become positively sinister by virtue of their insistence and whose violence and abandon often, as in ‘Orgies,’ rise to the point of frenzy:
An excerpt from the score to the “Orgies et danses” movement from Florent Schmitt’s Antoine et Cléopâtre Suite No. 2, illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.
There is something titanic about the man. Not only his rhythms but his themes, so long in line and so lavish of emotional intensity, his luxuriant harmonies, the extraordinary opulence of his counterpoint — and last but not least, the barbaric splendor and color of his orchestra — all point to a personality of more richness and power than is usually granted even to men of genius.
Instinctively, therefore, Schmitt turns for expression to the grandiose, the ponderous and the mighty. He erects those gigantic and monumental constructions like the Psaume, the Piano Quintet and Antoine et Cléopâtre, which, coming from a feebler pen, would be ‘as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals’ but which, at his hands, have acquired the overwhelming force and that sense of inevitability which only the very great can achieve.
Yet one feels that, after all, it would be impossible to imprison within the pages of even such scores the tumult and the torment of a soul like Schmitt’s. For the man is fundamentally insatiable. He is athirst for the infinite, and no matter how far he may push his lust for intensity of feeling, one knows in advance that he will never quite reach the limit of his desires — that there will always be something more that remains ungiven, unexpressed. And in this abundance of reserve strength lies the chief secret of his power.
In the work of such a temperament, one might expect to find that note of ironic bitterness and disillusion which so often accompanies the sense of human defeat. But with Schmitt’s music, such is not the case. To the composer of La Tragédie de Salomé has been given the rare privilege of rendering the torture of a soul in exile without ever, in so doing, falling into the snares of a futile and destructive pessimism.
In his teacher’s footsteps: This advertisement for a November 1927 lecture by Aaron Copland on new trends in contemporary music appeared in the pages of Musical America magazine. It was one of a series of lectures presented by Copland following his return to the United States from studying in France with Nadia Boulanger.
The immense suffering and solitude which are the glorious lot of every genius, have been sublimated by Schmitt into a life of impetuous and creative activity: No one more than he arouses in us the love and need of living to the full the brief span of our existence. To a generation which (by a reaction that, in its day, was necessary) was given the taste for ‘precious’ trifles and rare sensations, Schmitt’s solid and impassioned music offers the opportunity of dwelling, for a moment, in those high, free regions where, if to suffer means to live more intensely, even suffering is a joy. Hence he belongs among the leaders of men, among those who have brought us light and consolation.
A single quotation from Rêves — to illustrate the richness of Schmitt’s style and to justify the plea that his works be given more frequent hearings and the wider recognition which their greatness merits:
An excerpt from the piano reduction score to Florent Schmitt’s Rêves, illustrating Nadia Boulanger’s 1925 Rice Institute lecture.
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Florent Schmitt, photographed in the early 1920s by two French brothers, Henri Manuel (1874-1947) and Gaston Manuel (1880-1967). In the interwar period, the G. L. Manuel Frères studio portrayed ‘tout’ Paris: Auguste Rodin, Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Aristide Bruant, Colette, Jules Renard, Yvonne Printemps and the best-known composers.
So there we have it: 600 words that neatly sum up the artistry of Florent Schmitt – at the time 55 years old — with uncanny perceptiveness, coming from a fellow musician who knew and observed him keenly from the early years of his creative development.
As American musicologist Christopher Hill notes:
“It’s particularly valuable to hear how Florent Schmitt sounded to a perceptive musician when his music was new. There’s no doubting the fervor with which Nadia Boulanger expresses her admiration. Partly this fervor is due to the role of new classical music in early 20th-century Parisian culture. Music then could play a significant role in structuring one’s sense of social identity; it was not yet the commodity it has since become.
Christopher Hill
That said, Boulanger’s fervor certainly derives even more from the innate power evident in Schmitt’s scores themselves. She articulates well the richness of this composer’s oeuvre — and my 21st-century ears agree.”
Her characterization of Florent Schmitt also helps us to understand, from another vantage point, how the always-insightful Nadia Boulanger came to be such an admired mentor to so many budding composers over so many decades.