Lili Boulanger

Lili Boulanger was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome and was dead five years later at twenty-four. She was the younger daughter of a musical Paris family, and a case of bronchial pneumonia at two left her with intestinal tuberculosis that made her an invalid for the rest of her life; she was taught at home and sat in on her sister Nadia's conservatoire classes from the age of five. She entered the Prix de Rome competition in 1912, collapsed, returned in 1913 and won outright with the cantata Faust et Helene - the first woman to do so in the prize's eighty years, which was reported across Europe. The music she wrote in the five years left to her is her own: the psalm settings, particularly the Psalm 130 Du fond de l'abime, are dark, modally coloured and orchestrated with a weight that has nothing student about it. She spent the war organising a relief fund for French musicians at the front. She dictated her last work, a Pie Jesu, to Nadia from bed. Nadia published everything, promoted it for sixty years, and stopped composing herself, saying her own music was useless by comparison. The Prix de Rome win came with a publishing contract from Ricordi and a stay at the Villa Medici, which her health cut short. Vieille priere bouddhique and the unfinished opera La Princesse Maleine, on Maeterlinck, occupied her last years. Her three psalm settings - 24, 129 and 130 - were performed and recorded through the twentieth century largely because Nadia insisted on programming them. She is buried in Montmartre and Nadia was laid in the same grave sixty-one years later. Recordings of her work have multiplied since the 1990s.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history