La Boulanger

The world has yet to produce a great woman composer. But some of today's most brilliant and brilliantined names in music went to a dame school to get their shine.

For 25 years, U.S. composers have crossed the Atlantic to study with austere Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau's American Conservatory. Among them: Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson. Another Boulanger alumnus, Marc Blitzstein, was recently commissioned by Boston's Serge Koussevitzky to write an opera. Last week Teacher Boulanger made news in her own way--quietly.

It was the anniversary of her sister's death. Sister Lili died in 1918, a few years after winning the coveted Grand Prix de Rome.* Nadia considered her sister's talent greater than her own. In the large, cold chapel of Paris' La Trinite Church, 100 people gathered to attend a low Mass for Lili. As she does every year, Nadia Boulanger had arranged a music program in Lili's memory. Nadia sat in a front pew; she did not play the organ music--though she is a top organist.

At 59, Nadia Boulanger is a spare, prim, grey-haired woman whose piercing eyes are frozen behind pince-nez. She dresces severely in black, brightened by a sunburst clip or a silver chain. When she talks, which is often, her hands are as eloquent as her speech.

Chained Art. Nadia Boulanger was born in a house full of music. Her grandfather was a composer and so was her father, who in 1835 won the Prix de Rome. Her grandmother was a famous singer at the Opera-Comique and her mother a Russian princess. Nadia herself won prizes in every subject she studied at the Paris Conservatory, topped it off with the second Grand Prix de Rome.

As a teacher of composition, she is exacting, enthusiastic and compelling. She likes to absorb her pupils' lives completely, is apt to beguile them into carrying her packages, ask them to drive her car, or come in the middle of the night to do copying for her. Students either enter into the spirit of things or leave. Nadia Boulanger is a classicist who regards classicism as an attitude and a discipline, rather than a slavish conformity to formula. Says she: "Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains."

Before the war her old-fashioned apartment (sometimes called la boulangerie) in Montmartre was a musical rendezvous of Paris. There, with the framed visages of Liszt, Rubinstein, Beethoven and Stravinsky staring from the walls, students gathered every night to talk, listen, play and, on occasion, eat. The two pianos and pipe organ in the apartment were seldom silent.

Darkened during the war years, the lights were burning late last week in the Rue Ballu, and students, some old, some new, were flocking again to Boulanger. She had spent most of the war in the U.S., teaching at Cambridge, Baltimore and Washington.

She was the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony and the Paris and London Philharmonics. When a Boston reporter asked her how it felt, she snapped: "I have been a woman for a little over 50 years, and have gotten over my initial astonishment."

*Other winners: Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy.

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