Program Note by Jeffrey Tucker

All of the composers on today’s program died relatively young, but even by the standards of Bizet, Griffes, and Mendelssohn, the life and compositional career of Lili Boulanger proved tragically abbreviated. Her death from extrapulmonary tuberculosis on March 15, 1918, at the age of 24 deprived the musical world of an extraordinary compositional talent. Boulanger was the youngest member of one of France’s most distinguished musical families: her father Ernest was a Conservatoire professor; while her sister Nadia was a composer, conductor, and the teacher of generations of the 20th century’s most significant compositional talents (including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Philip Glass among the Americans). Lili Boulanger’s skills were nurtured and promoted from a very early age, not only by her family but by French musical luminaries such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. In 1913, at 19 years old, Lili Boulanger became the first woman composer awarded the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious composition prize in France, for her cantata Faust et Hélène. As might be predicted, given her youth when she died, her compositional output, focused principally on vocal works, was not extensive, but it is exceptionally distinctive, incorporating elements of world music, “Impressionism,” French lyric theater, and the developing sound-worlds of Stravinsky (a family friend) and neo-Classicism. In today’s program, we will audition two of her works for solo voice, chorus, and orchestra.

Pour les funérailles d’un soldat (1913) for baritone, chorus, and orchestra

The words of For the Funeral of a Soldier are selected from French poet Alfred de Musset’s 1831 verse play La Coupe et les lèvres. 

Chorus:

Let the drums be muted, let the priest come forward.
On your knees, companions, bare heads and silence.
Say before us the prayers for the dead.
We will carry the captain to the tomb.
He died as a soldier on Christian soil.
The soul belongs to God; the army will have the body.

Baritone Solo:

If these purple curtains and these ardent clouds,
Which chase the breath of storms through the ether,
Are warriors lying in their golden armor,
Beat yourselves, noble heart, on these green hills,
And see your companions break their javelins
On this cold earth, where your body is at rest.

Chorus:

Let the priest come forward.

Say before us the prayers for the dead.

Ah! Ah!

The martial nature of this work is apparent from the opening bar, where the percussion beats out a slow march rhythm to accompany the soldier’s funeral rites. Although Boulanger composed the work prior to the Great War, it “remains her only composition that deals unambiguously with the wartime suffering of soldiers,” notes Anya Holland-Barry. Although brief (around 8 minutes), the work depicts a battle scene, the death of the soldier, and the ascent of his soul to heaven. This was the only choral-orchestral work that Boulanger would hear performed during her lifetime: after the commencement of World War I, the Société des Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux performed it at benefit concerts in November 1914 and November 1915. The first American performance was by the New York Philharmonic in October 1918, leading a reviewer for the New York Times to praise the composer’s “effective use of antique ecclesiastical modes.” For the technically inclined: the opening and closing phrases for the chorus, in B-flat Dorian mode, quote a snippet from the opening phrase of the Dies Irae, the plainchant liturgical sequence for the dead.

Vielle prière bouddhique (1917) for tenor, chorus, and orchestra

Initially drafted in 1914 but not completed until the year before her death, the Vielle prière bouddhique (Old Buddhist Prayer) is one of Boulanger’s last works and one of her most affecting and satisfying. Boulanger was introduced to the prayer, originally in Pali (the language of the most ancient Buddhist texts), by her friend Suzanne Karpelès, who was reading Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne and who translated the prayer into French for Boulanger to set. The subtitle of the work, “Daily Prayer for the Whole Universe,” in other words a prayer that would be spoken by Buddhist laypeople, is apt introduction to the conception evoked. 

Chorus:

Let everything that breathes, without enemies, without hindrance,

Transcend sorrow and attain bliss.

Let all move freely, each in the path to which he is destined.

Let all creatures and everything, all spirits, and all those yet to be born,

Without enemies, without hindrance,

Transcend sorrow and attain bliss.

Let all move freely, each in the path to which he is destined.

Tenor Solo: 

Let all women and all men, all our people and all others, 

All the gods and all humans and those who are fallen,

Without enemies, without hindrance,

Transcend sorrow and attain bliss.

Let all move freely.

Chorus:

Each in the path to which he is destined.

In the East and in the West,

In the North and in the South,

Let every being which exists, without enemies, without hindrance,

Transcend sorrow and attain bliss.

Let all move freely, each in the path to which he is destined.

Ah, ah …

The theme of universal fellowship is conveyed here through choral writing that is simple, direct, and often in unisons and octaves, with everyone singing the same lines. Modal touches, for instance in the main melody (primarily C-final Phrygian mode, for those keeping score at home), move the musical language away from the specifically Western classical style in which the composer had been trained to something less time- and place-bound. The most obviously “exotic” element arises in the long flute solo line that is both an elaboration of previously-heard choral material and an evocation of the cultural practices of south Asia in its incantatory style and rhythmic flexibility.

The path to which Lili Boulanger was destined did not include ever hearing the work performed. It premiered at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on June 9, 1921; the composer’s beloved sister Nadia took the celesta part. Although her life was cut brutally short, depriving the world of all the works she would have brought forth had she been permitted a normal lifespan, we may hope that Lili Boulanger indeed transcended sorrow and attained bliss.