59 Facts About Nadia Boulanger

1.

Nadia Boulanger taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.

2.

Nadia Boulanger was the first woman to conduct many major orchestras in America and Europe, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Halle, and Philadelphia orchestras.

3.

Nadia Boulanger conducted several world premieres, including works by Copland and Stravinsky.

4.

Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris on 16 September 1887, to French composer and pianist Ernest Boulanger and his wife Raissa Myshetskaya, a Russian princess, who descended from St Mikhail Tchernigovsky.

5.

Ernest Nadia Boulanger had studied at the Paris Conservatoire and, in 1835 at the age of 20, won the coveted Prix de Rome for composition.

6.

Nadia Boulanger wrote comic operas and incidental music for plays, but was most widely known for his choral music.

7.

Nadia Boulanger achieved distinction as a director of choral groups, teacher of voice, and a member of choral competition juries.

8.

Nadia Boulanger joined his voice class at the Conservatoire in 1876, and they were married in Russia in 1877.

9.

Ernest and Raissa had a daughter, Ernestine Mina Juliette, who died as an infant before Nadia Boulanger was born on her father's 72nd birthday.

10.

In 1892, when Nadia Boulanger was five, Raissa became pregnant again.

11.

Nadia Boulanger's sister, named Marie-Juliette Olga but known as Lili Boulanger, was born in 1893, when Nadia was six.

12.

Nadia Boulanger urged her to take part in her sister's care.

13.

Nadia Boulanger came in third in the 1897 solfege competition, and subsequently worked to win first prize in 1898.

14.

Nadia Boulanger took private lessons from Louis Vierne and Alexandre Guilmant.

15.

Nadia Boulanger continued to work hard at the Conservatoire to become a teacher and be able to contribute to her family's support.

16.

In 1903, Nadia Boulanger won the Conservatoire's first prize in harmony; she continued to study for years, although she had begun to earn money through organ and piano performances.

17.

Nadia Boulanger studied composition with Gabriel Faure and, in the 1904 competitions, she came first in three categories: organ, accompagnement au piano and fugue.

18.

At her accompagnement exam, Nadia Boulanger met Raoul Pugno, a renowned French pianist, organist and composer, who subsequently took an interest in her career.

19.

Nadia Boulanger first submitted work for judging in 1906, but failed to make it past the first round.

20.

Nadia Boulanger was appointed as assistant to Henri Dallier, the professor of harmony at the Conservatoire.

21.

The subject was taken up by the national and international newspapers, and was resolved only when the French Minister of Public Information decreed that Nadia Boulanger's work be judged on its musical merit alone.

22.

Nadia Boulanger won the Second Grand Prix for her cantata, La Sirene.

23.

Still hoping for a Grand Prix de Rome, Nadia Boulanger entered the 1909 competition but failed to win a place in the final round.

24.

In 1910, Annette Dieudonne became a student of Nadia Boulanger's, continuing with her for the next fourteen years.

25.

Nadia Boulanger was Boulanger's close friend and assistant for the rest of her life.

26.

Nadia Boulanger attended the premiere of Diaghilev's ballet The Firebird in Paris, with music by Stravinsky.

27.

Nadia Boulanger immediately recognised the young composer's genius and began a lifelong friendship with him.

28.

Lili Nadia Boulanger won the Prix de Rome in 1913, the first woman to do so.

29.

Nadia Boulanger continued to teach privately and to assist Dallier at the Conservatoire.

30.

Nadia Boulanger was drawn into Lili's expanding war work, and by the end of the year, the sisters had organised a sizable charity, the Comite Franco-Americain du Conservatoire National de Musique et de Declamation.

31.

In 1919, Nadia Boulanger performed in more than twenty concerts, often programming her own music and that of her sister.

32.

Nadia Boulanger was invited by Cortot to join the school, where she taught classes in harmony, counterpoint, musical analysis, organ and composition.

33.

Mangeot asked Nadia Boulanger to contribute articles of music criticism to his paper Le Monde Musical, and she occasionally provided articles for this and other newspapers for the rest of her life, though she never felt at ease setting her opinions down for posterity in this way.

34.

In 1920, Nadia Boulanger began to compose again, writing a series of songs to words by Camille Mauclair.

35.

Nadia Boulanger's close friend Isidor Philipp headed the piano departments of both the Paris Conservatory and the new Fontainebleau School and was an important draw for American students.

36.

Nadia Boulanger inaugurated the custom, which would continue for the rest of her life, of inviting the best students to her summer residence at Gargenville one weekend for lunch and dinner.

37.

Nadia Boulanger stopped writing as a critic for Le Monde musical as she could not attend the requisite concerts.

38.

Later that year, Nadia Boulanger approached the publisher Schirmer to enquire if they would be interested in publishing her methods of teaching music to children.

39.

Nadia Boulanger made her Paris debut with the orchestra of the Ecole normale in a programme of Mozart, Bach, and Jean Francaix.

40.

In 1936, Nadia Boulanger substituted for Alfred Cortot in some of his piano masterclasses, coaching the students in Mozart's keyboard works.

41.

When Hindemith published his The Craft of Musical Composition, Nadia Boulanger asked him for permission to translate the text into French, and to add her own comments.

42.

Late in 1937, Nadia Boulanger returned to Britain to broadcast for the BBC and hold her popular lecture-recitals.

43.

Nadia Boulanger never uses a dynamic level louder than mezzo-forte and she takes pleasure in veiled, murmuring sonorities, from which she nevertheless obtains great power of expression.

44.

In 1938, Nadia Boulanger returned to the US for a longer tour.

45.

Nadia Boulanger had arranged to give a series of lectures at Radcliffe, Harvard, Wellesley and the Longy School of Music, and to broadcast for NBC.

46.

Nadia Boulanger is quite slim with an excellent figure and fine features, Her skin is delicate, her hair graying slightly, she wears pince-nez and gesticulates as she becomes excited talking about music.

47.

Nadia Boulanger gave 102 lectures in 118 days across the US.

48.

Nadia Boulanger's classes included music history, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, orchestration and composition.

49.

Nadia Boulanger combined broadcasting, lecturing, and making four television films.

50.

Nadia Boulanger gave lectures at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, all of which were broadcast by the BBC.

51.

Nadia Boulanger worked almost until her death in 1979 in Paris.

52.

Nadia Boulanger is buried at the Montmartre Cemetery with her sister Lili and their parents.

53.

Nadia Boulanger thought they had betrayed their work with her and their obligation to music.

54.

Nadia Boulanger accepted pupils from any background; her only criterion was that they had to want to learn.

55.

Nadia Boulanger treated students differently depending on their ability: her talented students were expected to answer the most rigorous questions and perform well under stress.

56.

Nadia Boulanger always claimed that she could not bestow creativity onto her students and that she could only help them to become intelligent musicians who understood the craft of composition.

57.

Nadia Boulanger's memory was prodigious: by the time she was twelve, she knew the whole of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier by heart.

58.

Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky.

59.

Janet Craxton recalled listening to Nadia Boulanger's playing Bach chorales on the piano as "the single greatest musical experience of my life".