Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918)
Lili Boulanger accomplished what her older sister Nadia had failed at: She became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for composition.
She was born in Paris as Marie-Juliette Olga Boulanger. She was called Lili and often “petite Lili.” She displayed musical talent at a very early age. She was about six years younger than Nadia but began studying at the Paris Conservatoire by tagging along with her sister. This Nocturne for Violin and Piano is an early composition dating from 1911:
At a very early age, Lili contracted bronchial pneumonia. She was ill and very often in pain for the remainder of her life. It is speculated now that she might have suffered from Crohn’s disease, but at the time she was diagnosed with intestinal tuberculosis. Illness hampered her ability to compose and to travel.
She won the Prix de Rome on her second try in 1913 with her half-hour cantata Faust et Hélène with a text based on Goethe’s Faust. Entries for the Prix de Rome were often deliberately bland without innovation or experimentation, but Lili Boulanger’s entry does display a Debussyan impressionistic influence.
A few years later, Lili Boulanger began discussing the possibility of an opera with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote the play Pelléas and Mélisande that became the basis of Debussy’s opera. But this never happened.
Lili Boulanger wrote some piano music and chamber music, but a considerable amount of choral and orchestral music as well. Many of her compositions were unpublished or destroyed, and they are now considered lost. What remains is tantalizing for what it reveals of the composer who might have been.
Lili Boulanger wrote the first version of D’un matin de printemps ("On a Spring Morning") for violin and piano, then adapted it for violin, cello, and piano, and then as a duet for flute and piano. In January 1918, she composed the orchestral version of D’un matin de printemps that is performed in the video below. She died two months later at the age of 24.