Lili Boulanger / D’un soir triste (Of a Sad Evening)

An orchestral odyssey in which a lifetime of hope and suffering, triumph and loss, sails outside the boundaries of time.

Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916). Reflection, c. 1900–5. Pastel on paper. Private collection

Woven into the biographies of nearly every woman composer born in the 19th century is a story of sustained denial.

Louise Farrenc was barred from studying composition when she entered the Paris Conservatory. Fanny Mendelssohn received the same musical education as her younger brother Felix, but her father — believing a woman’s role was that of housewife and mother — denied Fanny the professional opportunities lavishly afforded to Felix. Even Clara Schumann, one of the most acclaimed piano soloists of her time, had to shelve her work as a composer when, after the death of her husband Robert, she became the sole provider for the couple’s eight children.

The biography of Marie-Juliette “Lili” Boulanger, however, spins a very different story — one in which she received nothing but encouragement and support from her family as she developed her artistic gifts.

Of course, it helped that music was the dominant vocation in the Boulanger household. Lili’s father, Ernest, composed operas and taught voice at the Paris Conservatory, and her mother, Raïssa Myschetsky (who may or may not have been a Russian princess), was a singer. The pair were among the chief musical taste-makers of fin de siècle Paris, with composers like Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns frequently attending dinners and intimate performances at the Boulanger home in the 9th arrondissement.

Even Lili’s older sister Nadia proved instrumental to her artistic growth. After Nadia was accepted into the Paris Conservatory, six-year-old Lili sat by her sister’s side during class, filling notebook after notebook with advanced harmony exercises and her first stabs at composition.

So no, the primary barrier Lili faced as a promising young composer wasn’t the institutionalized misogyny of her time. It was her health. At the age of two, she suffered a bout of bronchial pneumonia that permanently damaged her immune system. Recurring episodes of pneumonia throughout her childhood ultimately led to a diagnosis of intestinal tuberculosis — known today as Crohn’s disease — which terrorizes the body with acute intestinal pain, frequent diarrhea and fevers, and unquenchable fatigue.

With treatment options unreliable at their best and humiliating at their worst, Crohn’s disease ended Lili’s life at just 24 years old.

Illness dictated the pace of Lili’s life, with periods of prolific creativity followed by weeks of poor health and slow recovery. But despite being deprived of momentum, which every artist needs to meaningfully develop their craft, she composed with ferocious intensity.

Much of that creative drive stemmed from her desire to extend the Boulanger family’s legacy as composers — especially when it came to the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious and highly coveted award in French music. Ernest Boulanger (who died when Lili was seven) had won the prize in 1835, and in Nadia’s four attempts between 1906 and 1909, she came as close as second place.

After collapsing from illness during the competition’s preliminary round in 1912, Lili’s entry the following year yielded a very different outcome. The French Academy awarded her the 1913 Prix de Rome for Faust et Hélène, a work for choir and orchestra the jury praised for its sublime poeticism, the heightened drama her music brought to the text, and her dazzling approach to harmony and orchestration. Lili was the first woman to win the prize in its 115-year history.

Given the inroads the Boulanger sisters had made in a male-dominated field, critics had begun warning of an encroaching péril rose (“pink peril”) in French music. But as one writer noted following Lili’s win, it was clear her work stood head and shoulders above that of her fellow finalists, who were not only all male, but also between six and ten years older than her.

“Do not be fooled: this [win] stands on its own merits. Not only did the gallantry of the judges not intervene to facilitate her victory, but it could be said that they were stricter with this young girl of nineteen than with her competition.

The misogyny of the jury was known. … And it required all the crushing weight and indisputable authority of this woman’s work to triumph over the students’ homework that surrounded it.”

The Prix de Rome gave Lili the opportunity to spend four years composing at the Villa Medici, as well as a contract with the prestigious publishing house Ricordi, complete with an annual income. At just 19 years old, Lili was no longer a student — she was a professional composer.

Left: Lili Boulanger, 1913. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Right: Finalists of the 1913 Prix de Rome, from left to right: Claude Delvincourt, Lili Boulanger, Marc Delmas, and Édouard Mignan. © Bibliothèque du conservatoire de Genève

With her goal of returning the Prix de Rome to the Boulanger family now fulfilled, Lili had little interest in following the French Academy’s strict rules for her time in the Eternal City. She arrived in Italy four months late, and to make matters more vexing for the Villa Medici’s director, Albert Besnard — who barred family from accompanying residents during their stay — Lili arrived with her mother and nurse in tow.

Lili enjoyed the socialite life in Rome — feasting at the finest restaurants, cycling around town, and frequenting the city’s movie houses and gelaterias. Her charisma and charm won over her fellow residents, but not the Villa’s director, who often scolded the young composer for her behavior.

Frustrated with Besnard, she went over his head and received permission from the Academy to travel to northern Italy for “research purposes.” But Lili never took that trip — instead, she returned to Paris under cover of night, having spent fewer than four months in the Villa Medici. After the outbreak of World War I, she ignored Besnard’s call to return to Rome that fall, choosing instead to co-found, with Nadia, the Franco-American Committee of the Paris Conservatory, which raised morale among musician soldiers through letter-writing and care packages delivered to the front lines.

Lili finally returned to Rome in February 1916, only to be confined to her bed by illness for six weeks. Far from home and unable to continue work on her first opera, she confessed her despair to a close friend, writing:

“I feel discouraged … not because of the suffering, not because of boredom, but because I understand that I would never be able to have in me the feeling that I have done what I would like to do … since I cannot follow whatever it is without being interrupted for a long time so that my efforts cannot be sustained!”

Just four months into her second stay at the Villa Medici, Lili left for good. According to her friend Miki Piré, an Italian doctor had told Lili that nothing could be done to improve her health, and that she only had two years to live. The doctor’s words proved prescient months later, when Nadia wrote in her diary of an “indescribable crisis” in her sister’s health:

“There is something awful in the blistering of this dying being, but for us she wants to live and this fight is tragic, she, happy to end so much suffering but still resisting while understanding our despair.”

Lili’s own diary entry on Christmas Day 1916 sheds further light on the physical agony she experienced:

“I’m shivering all over — my blood leaps and bounds in my veins like a motorbike starting up.”

In early 1918, with her physical energy nearly depleted, Lili completed the final score she would write with her own hand: D’un soir triste (Of a Sad Evening), an orchestral work of searing intensity that reflects the mix of longing and despair that had dominated her daily life. ​​(She dictated her final piece, a setting of the Catholic prayer Pie Jesu, to Nadia, who remained at her bedside throughout Lili’s final weeks.)

Above a hushed, heaving pulse in the strings, a plaintive song emerges in the clarinets, its serpentine contours searching and surging as the orchestra embarks on its emotional odyssey. Illuminated by the expressive markings Lili included in her score — including douloureux (painful), lourd (heavy), plus agité (more agitated), serrant (tightening), doux (sweet) — the melody assumes various guises. In the bronzed voice of the horn, we discover warmth and sensuality; in the ethereal tone of a solo violin, a shimmer of divine calm; and when roared by full orchestra against a seismic jolt of drums, an unassailable defiance and anger.

The final marking — expresif, resigné (expressive, resigned) — leaves us with an existential enigma. At 24, with barely the strength to hold the pen from which her music flowed, had Lili come to accept her impending mortality? The shiver of suspended strings and the shadowy harmony that close the work provide neither clarity nor consolation.

On March 15, 1918, as German zeppelins continued their assault on Paris, dropping 295 bombs in six weeks, Lili Boulanger died at her family’s home one hour outside the capital.

The French musical world, which just five years earlier had been awed by Lili’s triumph at the Prix de Rome, was now thunderstruck by the young composer’s death. The Parisian paper of record, Le Temps, devoted an entire obituary section to Lili’s life, memorial concerts were given to celebrate her work, and the Paris Conservatory established a scholarship for composition students in her name, transforming her brief life into an enduring legacy.

In the century since Lili’s death, history books have presented us with two reductive versions of her biography. One focuses on Lili as the femme fragile, mythologizing her health issues to such an extent that her physical body overshadows the singular body of music she created. The other portrays her as an early icon of the feminist movement that fought to bridge the gap of inequality between men and women.

But neither narrative really gets to the heart of who Lili Boulanger was.

To reduce her life to a series of debilitating illnesses is to diminish Lili’s lust for life: her devotion to musical self-expression, the quotidian delights she shared with family and close friends, the unbridled joy that coursed through her veins while cycling or caring for her Great Pyrenees, Fachoun.

Lili with her Great Pyrenees, Fachoun, at the Boulanger home in Gargenville, France, 1917

And to position Lili as a standard-bearer of women composers glosses over the overwhelming disregard her music has received since her death. In the U.S. alone, the New York Philharmonic — among the oldest and most prestigious of American orchestras — didn’t perform a single note of her music on a subscription concert between 1962 and 2022, by which point a concerted movement to return the work of marginalized composers to the stage had gained significant steam. The only performance of Lili’s work at Carnegie Hall took place 64 years ago — a concert conducted by her sister Nadia. Her works “weren’t lost, hidden, or unplayable,” as New York magazine music critic Justin Davidson wrote in 2019, “they were just treated with a neglect that would be shocking if it weren’t so predictable.”

Lili Boulanger’s music doesn’t deserve our attention simply because she was a woman, or because she was ill, or because she died young. Let’s leave that myopic viewpoint to the realm of the Hollywood biopic.

Instead, we should dive deep into Lili’s compositions because they pull at our heartstrings with melancholy messages of grief and longing. Because of the array of dazzling, diaphonous colors they generate in the mind’s eye. Because they were born of an artistic ambition realized at any cost, showing us how a lifetime of hope and suffering, triumph and loss, can be reflected in music that sails forever outside the boundaries of time.

Take a listen …

Minnesota Orchestra
David Afkham, conductor

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