"The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion."
~Nadia Boulanger
I am going to attempt this March, during International Woman's Month, to post a diary every Thursday highlighting important female contributors to the world of classical music. I say "important female contributors" while knowing that that is a rather lame way to put it.
Anyway, I begin this month with the story of two sisters. One, perhaps the greatest music educator of the Twentieth Century. The other, ah, the other could possibly have been the greatest composer of the same century, had illness not taken her at the age of 24.
Nadia, the elder, never became the composer her younger sister was. She tried four times for the Prix de Rome, but never won. After Lili's death, and owing to having to provide for her mother, Nadia soon gave up composition and turned to performing and teaching. In 1921, she joined the American School at Fontainebleau where her first student was Aaron Copland. Her estimated hundreds of students (with over 600 Americans)include such names as:
Burt Bacharach
Phillip Glass
Quincy Jones
Astor Piazzolla
Virgil Thomson
When not teaching, Nadia was also an accomplished conductor, and in fact was the first woman to conduct several of the world's leading orchestras.
So, first here is Nadia speaking of teaching and talent:
Now we hear one of her works for piano, played by her protege Emile Naoumoff:
Finally, we hear Nadia at the podium, conducting the BBC Orchestra in Psalm 24 for Tenor, Choir and Orchestra by Lili Boulanger:
As you can tell from the previous example, Lili clearly was the composer in the family. Five years younger than Nadia, she exhibited perfect pitch when she was two, and before she was five she was toddling along with Nadia to the Conservatory where she soon began studying herself. In 1913 at the age of 19 she won the Prix de Rome with a piece entitled Faust et Hélène:
The last year of her life was the most productive. After the War, she returned to finish manuscripts she had started. Here is one finished in the last year of her life:
To think what might have been...the heart weeps.