Paris teacher conducted doors once locked to women
Nadia Boulanger, born 16 September 1887, taught a who's who of twentieth-century composers after deciding her own scores fell short. From a Paris family flat she also became the first woman to lead many top orchestras, premiering Copland and Stravinsky works before dying in 1979.
She was born on her father's 72nd birthday. Ernest Boulanger had won the Prix de Rome in 1835 and taught singing at the Conservatoire; her mother Raissa was a Russian princess who had been his student. As a small child Nadia hid whenever music played, until, during her mother's pregnancy with Lili in 1892, a fire bell sent her running to reproduce it at the piano. Ernest made the six-year-old promise to look after her new sister.
She entered the Conservatoire at nine, studied with Fauré, and in 1904 took first prizes in organ, piano accompaniment and fugue. Her father's death in 1900 had left money tight, and that autumn she began teaching from the family flat at 36 rue Ballu, adding a Wednesday class in analysis and sight-singing that ran almost until her death. She chased her father's Grand Prix de Rome but won only the second prize in 1908, after a row over submitting an instrumental fugue instead of the required vocal one.
Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913; together they ran a wartime charity for musician-soldiers before Lili died in 1918. Grieving and convinced she lacked real compositional talent, Nadia gradually gave up writing music for teaching at the École normale and, from 1921, the American school at Fontainebleau, where Aaron Copland was in her first class.
More than 250 notable pupils followed, from Philip Glass and Astor Piazzolla to Quincy Jones and Daniel Barenboim. She was the first woman to conduct the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Hallé and Philadelphia orchestras, and led premieres by Copland and Stravinsky, whose genius she had spotted at The Firebird.
Source: Nadia Boulanger
