Download Lili Boulanger

Lili Boulanger
Pie Jesu (1918)
for soprano, string quartet, harp, and organ
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) may well be the outstanding
woman composer of all time. She was born MarieJuliette Olga Boulanger into an extraordinarily musical
French family. Her
father and grandfather
had taught at the Paris
Conservatoire. Her
elder sister Nadia
supervised her musical
education, and Lili,
although in frail health,
often accompanied her
to classes at the Paris
Conservatoire. Following in the footsteps of
Sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger
her father Ernest, who
won the Prix de Rome in 1835, Lil Boulanger won the
Prix in 1913 at age 20, the first woman to win the
coveted prize and an honor that propelled her into the
international spotlight overnight.
Lili viewed her music “as a humanitarian and
political act” during World War I. Returning from
Rome to Paris in 1916, then under German attack, she
helped establish a Franco-American Committee to aid
musicians and their families, forming the genesis of a
steady stream of Americans who would soon study
with her sister Nadia and transform American music.
During her short lifetime of almost constant illness
(today diagnosed as Crohn’s Disease), she composed a
remarkable number of works that show exceptionally
high genius and originality, especially her Pie Jesu for
soprano, string quartet, harp, and organ.
French Liturgical Tradition and the Pie Jesu
The Pie Jesu is a peculiarity of French liturgy, which was
greatly influenced by the late nineteenth-century revival
of medieval plainchant by the Benedictine monks of
Solesmes. The separate treatment of the Pie Jesu (once
declared “a dangerous novelty”) allowed composers to
omit all but this final couplet of the sequence Dies irae
(day of wrath). Rather than a mournful passing, the fear
of death is transformed into a happy deliverance.
4
Writing her own Requiem
Sketches for a Pie Jesu dating from 1909 to 1913 suggest
Lili might have planned to write a complete Requiem
Mass. She returned to this brief, poignant text as her life
ebbed away. When she could no longer hold her pen,
she dictated its notes to her sister Nadia. After receiving
the last rites of her Roman Catholic faith, Lili died on
March 15, 1918. She was 24.
Even though German bombardment of Paris
continued unabated on the day of her funeral, L’Église
de la Trinité overflowed with musicians and Parisian
literary notables. Among the music Lili had chosen for
her funeral was her final composition, the Pie Jesu—
“Blessed Jesus, Lord, grant them eternal rest. Amen.”
“The tortuous, questioning chromaticism of the
opening,” wrote her biographer Christopher Palmer,
“resolves eventually into the transfigured diatonic
radiance of the closing bars—a final utterance, touching
in its simplicity, and unmarred by self-pity or
sentimentality.” (The Musical Times, March 1968)
Printed on her funeral
invitation was Lili’s
deathbed prayer for her
sister Nadia and her mother:
I offer to God my sufferings so
that they may shower down on
you as joys.
The Boulanger family grave
in Montmartre
When the Cathedral Choral Society first performed Lili
Boulanger’s Psaume 130: Du fond de l’Abîme in 1961, her
sister Nadia wrote movingly to music director Paul
Callaway: “Soon you will perform my little sister’s work
. . . I hear my sister say: ‘How strange! Everybody will
have heard this music except myself.’ And she is gone,
hardly having begun to live—but, from time to time,
people are convinced of the greatness of her music.
And they give her the life she lost so soon.”