The musical work of Nadia Boulanger : performing past and future between the wars 9780511920646, 0511920644, 9781107009141, 1107009146

Citation preview

THE MUSICAL WORK OF NADIA BOULANGER Nadia Boulanger – composer, critic, impresario, and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century – was also a performer of international repute. Her concerts and recordings introduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to unfamiliar historical works and new compositions. This book considers how gender shaped the possibilities that marked Boulanger’s performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s to origins in the classroom and the salon. Brooks investigates Boulanger’s promotion of structurally motivated performance styles, showing how her ideas on performance of historical repertory and new music relate to her teaching of music analysis and music history. The book explores the way in which Boulanger’s musical practice relied upon her understanding of the historically transcendent masterwork, in which musical form and meaning are ideally joined, and show how her ideas related to broader currents in French aesthetics and culture. J E A N I C E B R O O K S is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. She has published extensively on French music and culture of the Renaissance and on domestic music-making in Britain around 1800, as well as on French musical culture between the wars. Her book on the strophic air de cour and court culture, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (2000) received the 2001 Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book of the Year in Music or Art History.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE AND RECEPTION

JOHN BUTT

General editors and L A U R E N C E

DREYFUS

This series continues the aim of Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs to publish books centred on the history of musical instruments and the history of performance, but broadens the focus to include musical reception in relation to performance and as a reflection of period expectations and practices. Published titles Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance john butt Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music james garratt Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music jo h n h a i n e s The Keyboard in Baroque Europe c h ri s t o p h e r h o g w o o d ( e d .) The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance daniel leech-wilkinson Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style michael musgrave and BERNARD SHERMAN (EDS.) Stradivari STEWART POLLENS

Beethoven the Pianist TILMAN SKOWRONECK

The French Organ in the Reign of Louis XIV DAVID PONSFORD

Bach’s Feet: The Organ Pedals in European Culture DAVID YEARSLEY

Histories of Heinrich Schütz BETTINA VARWIG

Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn MATTHEW DIRST

The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars JEANICE BROOKS

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

THE MUSICAL WORK OF NADIA BOULANGER Performing Past and Future Between the Wars JEANICE BROOKS

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107009141 © Jeanice Brooks 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed andiboundiin the United Kingdom byitheiMPGiBooksiGroup A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Brooks, Jeanice. The musical work of Nadia Boulanger : performing past and future between the wars / Jeanice Brooks. p. cm. – (Musical performance and reception) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-00914-1 1. Boulanger, Nadia. 2. Music teachers – France – Biography. 3. Conductors – France – Biography. I. Title. ML423.B52B76 2013 780.92–dc23 2012027495 ISBN 978-1-107-00914-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

For Amelia

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 07:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of music examples List of abbreviations Acknowledgements

page viii xi xii xiv xv

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

1

PART I The work in performance

17

Chapter 1: Nadia Boulanger between the wars

19

Chapter 2: Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

41

Chapter 3: Performing the work

77

PART II. The work in history

125

Chapter 4: The problem of concerts

127

Chapter 5: New links between them

163

Chapter 6: Tomb or treasure

194

Chapter 7: The art of assembling art

217

Conclusion

251

Bibliography Index

261 280

vii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 15 Feb 2020 at 16:19:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Figures

0.1. List of tableaux from the program, Epiphany concert at the salon of Étienne and Édith de Beaumont, January 23, 1936. page 2 0.2. “La Fête des Rois chez la Comtesse Étienne de Beaumont,” Le Figaro, January 24, 1936, p. 5. 3 0.3. “La Vie mondaine en France et à l’étranger / Les Tendances de la mode” and “Élégances,” Le Figaro, January 25, 1936, p. 2. 4 0.4. Program, Epiphany concert at the salon of Étienne and Édith de Beaumont, January 23, 1936. 5 1.1. Nadia Boulanger in rehearsal, London, 1936. 35 1.2. Rehearsal for the Fauré Requiem, Boston Symphony, February 1938. 37 1.3. Nadia Boulanger and Jean Françaix at the piano, United States, spring 1939. 38 2.1. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Wie will ich mich freuen” from BWV 146, Wie müssen durch viel Trübsal (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 15 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880), 178. F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 30 UFNB. 47 2.2. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Erfühlet ihr himmlischer göttlichen Flammen” from BWV 1, Wie schön leuchtet die Morgenstern (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851), 36). F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 01 UFNB. 49 2.3. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Durchs feuer” from BWV 2, Ach Gott, von Himmel (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851), 68). F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 01 UFNB. 50 2.4. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), 1. F-Pn Vma 1938a. 52

viii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 26 Jan 2020 at 16:50:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

List of figures Program, duo recital by Nadia Boulanger and Clifford Curzon at the Union Interalliée, May 19, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 3.2. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 2–3. F-Pn Vma 1938a. 3.3. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), p. 10. F-Pn Vma 1938a. 4.1. Program, salon of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, June 30, 1933. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.2. Program, Grand Court, Wanamaker’s Department Store, Philadelphia, January 9, 1925. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.3. Program, salon of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, January 21, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.4. Program, La Sérénade, Salle Gaveau, June 9, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.5. Program, Conservatoire Américain, Fontainebleau, July 7, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.6. Program, Sanders Theater, Harvard University, April 26, 1939. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 4.7. Program, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, December 18, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 5.1. Nadia Boulanger and Annette Dieudonné, “Tableau résumé de filiation des formes musicales,” MM 46, no. 11 (November 1935): 334–5. 5.2. Typescript schedule for Boulanger’s Wednesday sessions at the rue Ballu, 1935–6. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 128. 5.3. Program, Lecture-demonstration for the In-and-About Pittsburgh Music Educators Club, January 28, 1939. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. 6.1. Ensemble in an unidentified room in the Gallery, c. 1928. Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archive. 7.1. Nadia Boulanger et al., “Les 100 disques qu’il faut avoir,” Maison & Jardin 24 (November 1954), 51. 7.2.–7.3. Dumbarton Oaks Music Room, c. 1931–5. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, AR.PH.MR.009–010.

ix

3.1.

83 104 108 134 146 148 149 152 155 161 176 178 180 214 222 227

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 26 Jan 2020 at 16:50:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

List of figures

x 7.4. 7.5.

7.6.

7.7.

7.8.

Program, Dumbarton Oaks, May 8, 1938. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi ♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 1. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi ♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 7. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi ♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 6. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. Front cover, Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi ♭ pour orchestre de chambre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), copy with dedication to Nadia Boulanger, F-Pn Vmg 22935.

233

243

244

245

249

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 26 Jan 2020 at 16:50:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Tables

4.1. Contents of Nadia Boulanger, Petit Concert (Paris: Les Éditions de la Boîte à Musique, 1949). Four 78rpm discs, BAM 79–82, matrices 211/215 (recorded July 6, 1949) and 218/220 (recorded July 8, 1949). page 158 7.1. Bach cantata extracts performed at Dumbarton Oaks, May 8, 1938. 237

xi

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 07 Jan 2020 at 20:10:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Music examples

Sound clips to accompany many of the music examples are available on the Cambridge University Press website at www.cambridge.org/Boulanger 2.1. Gabriel Fauré, Kyrie, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (after the orchestral score, Paris: Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 17–20. page 53 3.1. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 1, mm. 9–17. 84 3.2. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 1, mm. 34–49. 85 3.3. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 2, mm. 1–12. 87 3.4. Johannes Brahms, Op. 39, no. 2, mm. 9–16, after Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XII, Werke für Klavier zu vier Händen, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, n.d.), pp. 26–7. 94 3.5. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 2, mm. 66–72. 99 3.6. Gabriel Fauré, Kyrie, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (after the orchestral score, Paris: Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 8–10. 106 5.1. William Byrd, “The Woods so Wild,” mm. 1–4, after J. A. Fuller-Maitland and W. Barclay Squire, eds., The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (London and Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899), p. 263. 183 5.2. Franz Schubert, “Die liebe Farbe,” from Die schöne Müllerin, D 795, mm. 18–26, after Franz Peter Schuberts Werke, Serie XX: Sämtliche einstimmige Lieder und Gesänge, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1894–5), pp. 172–3. 184

xii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 19 Jan 2020 at 03:54:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

List of music examples

xiii

5.3. Gabriel Fauré, Madrigal, Op. 35 (1883) (Paris: Hamelle, 1884), mm. 1–19. 186 5.4. Consilium (Jean Conseil), “L’autre jour,” mm. 7–14, after Henry Expert, ed., Trente et une chansons musicales (Attaingnant 1529), Vol. V, Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française (Paris: Leduc, 1897). 187 5.5. Guillaume Costeley, “Las je n’iray plus” after Costeley, Musique, ed. Henry Expert, Vol. XVIII, Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française (Paris: Leduc, 1904), mm. 88–98. 189 5.6. Claude Debussy, “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” from Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Durand, 1908), mm. 1–5. 190 7.1. J. S. Bach, “Es ist genug” from BWV 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (after Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke, Vol. XII.2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1863), p. 190). 239

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 19 Jan 2020 at 03:54:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Abbreviations

To save space in references to archival documents such as personal correspondence and diaries, I have abbreviated Boulanger’s name as NB in the notes. I indicate locations for primary source material with the abbreviations below. Where possible, I have followed standard usage as represented in the Repertoire international de sources musicales and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ch-Bps CNLB F-LYc F-Pn GB-CaBBC GB-Lbl HUA MM NLa ReM US-Wc

Basel, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Bibliothek Paris, Centre Internationale Nadia et Lili Boulanger Lyon, Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France Caversham, UK, BBC Written Archives London, British Library Cambridge, Pusey Library, Harvard University Archive Le Monde musical Nouvelles lettres autographes La Revue musicale Washington, DC, Library of Congress

xiv

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 08 Jan 2020 at 06:22:45, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Acknowledgements

I have incurred many debts in writing this book, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge them here. Ian Bent, Lawrence Bernstein, William Brooks, Myriam Chimènes, Allen Combs, Jennifer Doctor, Annegret Fauser, Catrina Flint de Médicis, the late Nigel Fortune, Kenneth Hamilton, Roy Howat, Noël Lee, Jann Pasler, Aaron Ridley, Tom Riis, Maurice Saylor, Nigel Simeone, Patrick Taïeb and Richard Wattenmaker have been wonderfully generous, supplying essential materials, advice and information when I needed it. Stephen Walsh has shown endless patience with my questions about Stravinsky, and Nicholas Cook has cheerfully read and advised on more versions of my work than anyone had the right to expect. Philip Gossett and the late François Lesure encouraged my exploration of the Boulanger archive – possibly never suspecting it would take me this long to write a book about it – and in the early years of my research I received precious help from two of Boulanger’s regular performance partners, Hugues Cuénod and Doda Conrad, and from her former assistant Cécile Armagnac. More recently, Kimberly Francis has been a valuable interlocutor, and I have learned enormously from her work on Boulanger’s career. I owe special thanks to Alexandra Laederich of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger; without her constant support this book would simply not have been possible. I have relied heavily on the expertise and generosity of librarians and curators in several countries. I would especially like to thank Élisabeth Vilatte and Pierre Vidal, former curators of the Boulanger archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the former and present head librarians of the Département de la Musique, Catherine Massip and Élizabeth Giuliani. I am grateful to Laurence Languin of the Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon; Jonathan Summers of the British Library; Katy Rawdon-Faucett of the Barnes Foundation; James Carder of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; and Felix Meyer of the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. These people and the staff at all these institutions, as well as staff at the BBC Written Archives and at the Harvard University Archive, have helped to make documentary work on this project a genuine pleasure. xv

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 10 Jan 2020 at 00:24:55, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

xvi

Acknowledgements Audiences in Australia, Ireland, France, Britain and the United States have heard early versions of various portions of this study. I’m grateful to the seminar and conference organizers who provided me with opportunities to work out my ideas and garner reactions: in particular, James Carder, Amanda Glauert, Orhan Memed, Felix Meyer, Carol Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, Tom Riis and Anne Shreffler. I thank David Bretherton, Isabelle His and Rachel Moore for their help in preparing the manuscript, and am grateful to series editors John Butt and Laurence Dreyfus, and to Victoria Cooper, Fleur Jones and Rebecca Taylor at Cambridge University Press for their help in bringing my work to publication. The School of Humanities of the University of Southampton has supported my work through sabbatical leave and research grants, and I am deeply grateful for a publication subvention from the Lloyd Hibberd Endowment of the American Musicological Society. This book is dedicated to Amelia, who wasn’t around when I finished the last one and insists that this one is hers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 10 Jan 2020 at 00:24:55, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Introduction The works that stand for the time

On January 23, 1936, le Tout-Paris gathered for a concert at the count and countess de Beaumont’s luxurious salon on the rue Duroc. Étienne and Édith de Beaumont were well-known figures on the Parisian artistic scene, famous for hosting spectacular masked balls that often featured newly commissioned music. This concert was, in contrast, a more serious affair. A charity event for the worker relief programs of the Archbishop of Paris, it was conceived as a celebration of Epiphany, the revelation of Christ the son.1 The theme was the Nativity story, illustrated by tableaux vivants based on Byzantine, medieval and early modern religious art. The directors included the painter Marie Laurencin and the designer Christian Bérard; novelist Louise de Vilmorin provided original prose commentaries to gloss the biblical and liturgical citations announcing the scenes, which were acted by prominent figures of contemporary fashion, arts and letters (figure 0.1).2 While this kind of salon performance might be considered a largely irrelevant remnant of an earlier era – a nostalgic attempt to revive a world definitively destroyed by the Great War – it has long been recognized that in Parisian avant-garde musical circles, aristocratic patrons such as the Beaumonts were a major force throughout the interwar period. Private concerts could be part of a suite of activities that included organization or subvention of public concert series, commission of new works for public institutions, and other contributions to wider concert culture. In the Beaumonts’ case, support for new music overlapped with a lively interest in new technology, particularly radio and recording. One of the most intriguing aspects of this Nativity charity is that it was not only an exclusive private event, reported in the press as a highlight of the social season

1

2

Cardinal Jean Verdier’s Chantiers du Cardinal, launched in 1931, was designed to create new churches and parish buildings in the rapidly expanding Parisian suburbs while providing employment for workers hit by the economic crisis. On the Beaumonts, see Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 226–34; Myriam Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens: Du salon au concert à Paris sous le IIIe République (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 609–17; Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 162–6. Program held at CNLB; the copy at F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 lacks the insert listing the tableaux vivants.

1

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

2

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

Figure 0.1. List of tableaux from the program, Epiphany concert at the salon of Étienne and Édith de Beaumont, January 23, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

3

(figures 0.2–0.3),3 it was also radio broadcast, so that at least some of the large number of ordinary French people who had enthusiastically integrated the new medium into their lives could listen in, even if they could not see the costumed actors or the minks and diamonds of the wealthy audience. In this somewhat unlikely yet quintessentially modern blend of old and new, elite and mass culture, fashion and faith, the Beaumonts’ concert points toward the strong desire to reconcile tradition and innovation that so heavily marked interwar France. This concern also affected the selection and performance of the music heard by the Beaumonts’ guests. Nadia Boulanger directed vocal soloists, a choir and chamber orchestra in music she had chosen to speak to the

Figure 0.2.

3

“La Fête des Rois chez la Comtesse Étienne de Beaumont,” Le Figaro, January 24, 1936, p. 5.

Two reports appeared in Comoedia (January 25, 1936): one on the music, and a second in the column “Réceptions” that concentrated on the audience. On January 24, Le Figaro ran pictures of the tableaux vivants on the arts page and photographs of the attendees’ gowns in the “Vie Mondaine” section, and Vendémiare printed a satirical article by “Snob” on society music-lovers, recommending that they seek musical training from “notre Nadia nationale” if they wished to be really chic.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

4

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

Figure 0.3. “La Vie mondaine en France et à l’étranger / Les Tendances de la mode” and “Élégances,” Le Figaro, January 25, 1936, p. 2.

paintings as each new tableau was revealed (figure 0.4). Framed by Bach and Buxtehude at the start and close, the program included music from the middle ages to the twentieth century, juxtaposed so that chronologically distant pieces flowed in and out of each other for different scenes. For a Byzantine mosaic, Boulanger placed music by Stravinsky next to an anonymous Elizabethan consort song; for a Murillo painting, a de Falla lullaby led into a Bach chorale. The program surprises, not only by the sheer range of the repertory, but also for its seemingly random sequence. Much of the music was little known at the time, and few concerts of the period, especially those including such relatively unfamiliar music, showed such striking disregard for chronology in their organization. Yet, as Boulanger explained to the audience, her choices were intentional, aimed at demonstrating a crucial aesthetic point. Her performance was meant to show “how the true affinities in art are outside of the logical progression of time – how, suddenly, across the centuries, kinships assert themselves – and link the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

5

Figure 0.4. Program, Epiphany concert at the salon of Étienne and Édith de Beaumont, January 23, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Figure 0.4.

(cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

7

most distant present with the days to come.”4 The event is emblematic of her approach to music from all times and places, and of her attempts to perform the timeless qualities of the historical and modern masterpieces she saw at the center of her life’s work. “ v o u s a v e z l e s o e u v r e s q u i r e´ p o n d e n t pour le temps” Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) is an intriguing figure in the history of twentieth-century music, seemingly central yet stubbornly elusive. By the end of her life, she was the object of a formidable hagiography, and a pilgrimage to Paris to study with her had become a near-obligatory rite of passage for aspiring American musicians. In 1970, the heroine of the blockbuster film Love Story could express her ambition for a musical career by telling her new boyfriend of her plans to work with Boulanger; the French pedagogue’s reputation was by then so great that this could serve as shorthand for Jenny’s musical dreams to a popular film audience.5 Nearly a half-century later, Boulanger’s name retains something of this talismanic quality. Few biographies of musicians fail to mention a connection with her if one exists. But how to account for that impact has not always been clear. Boulanger’s extraordinary charisma and inspirational effect on her students emerged compellingly from homages during her lifetime and biographies published after her death.6 But the musical foundations of her appeal have often been less apparent than the portrait of her personality. Boulanger’s abundant personal magnetism seems insufficient to account for the extent of her influence: there was also clearly something about her approach that resonated deeply with contemporary musical beliefs and practices, and which helped to persuade her audiences that she held the key to understanding and creating 4

5 6

“J’avais pensé […] expliquer comment en art les vrais rapprochements sont en dehors de la suite logique du temps – que tout à coup à travers les siècles des parentés s’avèrent – et relient le plus lointain présent avec les jours à venir.” Nadia Boulanger, ms. notes, c. December 1936. These notes for her spoken interventions are held with other uncatalogued materials for the concert (including scores, running order, and continuity music for the organ) at F-LYc. Love Story, dir. Arthur Hiller; see also the novel/screenplay by Erich Segal (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music (New York: Norton, 1982). Jérôme Spycket, Nadia Boulanger (Lausanne: Payot, 1987). (English translation by M.M. Shriver, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992). See also Alan Kendall, The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger (Wilton, CN: Lyceum Books, 1977); Teresa Walters, “Nadia Boulanger, Musician and Teacher: Her Life, Concepts, and Influences” (DMA diss., Peabody Conservatory of Music, 1981); the special number of ReM 353–4 (1982) devoted to Nadia and Lili Boulanger; and Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary film Mademoiselle: Nadia Boulanger (Paris: Éditions du Léonard, 1987) which was compiled from interviews originally made for radio and television broadcast between 1973 and 1978. Material from the interviews, including segments used in the documentary, was also reworked into a fictive dialogue with Boulanger, published as Bruno Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger (Paris: Van de Velde, 1981). English translation, Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, trans. Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

8

great music. Studies of her compositional training and original music only partly address the problem.7 Although she continued to think as a composer, Boulanger stopped producing new pieces relatively early in her career. And as attractive as some of her works have proven, they were little performed after 1920 and have only recently begun to claim a modest presence in the concert hall and recording catalogue. No one could plausibly claim that Boulanger’s own compositions justify the iconic status she enjoyed in twentieth-century musical culture. Boulanger herself, however, promoted exactly such a focus on original musical works. When asked by Bruno Monsaingeon to describe what she considered the most important musical trends of the century, she responded by reeling off a list of pieces and their dates of composition, concluding with the remark, “You have the works that stand for the time.”8 The statement resonates with the emphasis on the self-sufficient, fully realized musical masterwork that characterized Boulanger’s approach to music generally, and which anchored her practice of analysis and performance as well as her concept of music history. In her own view, her failure to produce works worth considering would justify her absence from the story of twentiethcentury music. As it is usually told, this story has often been characterized not only by emphasis on musical works, but also by heroic narratives that trace composers’ progress toward artistic maturity. Such tendencies mark both popular and scholarly writing on Boulanger’s career, which has overwhelmingly concentrated on her role in promoting new music and fostering composers’ development. General music history textbooks, if they mention her at all, treat her as accessory rather than agent. Boulanger’s own accounts of her life placed her in a similar position by underlining the aspect of service to music, but she almost invariably downplayed the role of composers in favor of emphasis on their compositions. Her promotion of a version of Werktreue, or fidelity to the work, as the principal goal of all musical activity was enthusiastically echoed by her admirers, and she was regularly described as a servant, handmaid, or religious intercessory figure such as a priestess or apostle, a medium through which great music spoke rather than a musical force in her own right.9 But, at the same time, her insistent focus on the work instead of the composer, coupled with her advocacy of a creative practice emphasizing artisanship and technique, provided a brilliant validation of her activities as defender of the music and musical values she believed in. In this book, I propose the 7

8 9

Caroline Potter pointed out the problem with previous assessments of Boulanger’s career in Caroline Potter, “Review of Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1998),” Music & Letters 80 (1999): 315–17. Her own study, Nadia and Lili Boulanger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) thus focuses on Boulanger’s compositions. “Vous avez des oeuvres qui répondent pour le temps.” Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Nadia Boulanger, transcribed in Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 111. Jeanice Brooks, “‘Noble et grande servante de la musique’: Telling the Story of Nadia Boulanger’s Conducting Career,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 92–116.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

9

study of these activities – Nadia Boulanger’s musical work rather than her works of music – as a mode of understanding her influence. Such research has become possible in ways not available to Boulanger’s earlier biographers. Boulanger’s life was long and eventful, and her archives are dauntingly voluminous. She knew almost everyone who counted in European and American musical circles for much of the twentieth century, and, despite living through two world wars and two transatlantic moves, managed to keep astonishing amounts of paper related to nearly every facet of her multifaceted musical life. Boulanger’s use of the language of musical service was undercut – or, at the least, complicated – by her growing understanding of her own importance, suggested by the project she imagined of a Boulanger family museum, which would display artifacts from her own career and those of her sister Lili and father Ernest (both composers), mother Raïssa Mychetsky and grandmother Marie-Julie Halligner (both singers). Her lifelong attachment to letters and documents seems to have sprung initially from their use in constructing personal memories and reflections, an attitude toward things that she shared with the rest of her family. But her indecision about what her executors should do with them after her death suggests she had become conscious of a broader historical value.10 The creation of a Boulanger museum proved impossible, however, and her estate was instead split up and donated in several directions in 1981.11 Her archive was in considerable disarray, and its sheer volume has been an obstacle. When I first began my research in the late 1980s, much of the largest gift – to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – was still loose in cartons and plastic supermarket bags, and there have been major shifts in its organization as librarians have struggled to catalogue the vast number of scores, books, correspondence, and personal and professional papers that formed this part of the legacy. The personal correspondence alone, for example, contains more than 13,000 items from nearly 2,500 10

11

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 124 includes a letter of last wishes from Boulanger to Annette Dieudonné and Marcelle de Manziarly, written in 1955 and opened, according to a note by Dieudonné, three days after Boulanger’s death on October 22, 1979. It instructs them to give family portraits, manuscripts, scores, and books, along with the organ, to the Paris Conservatoire for a Boulanger family museum; especially significant papers held in three small cases were to be burnt. For other correspondence, Boulanger wrote “Lettres – ? je crois brûler – peut-être revoir. Faites ce que vous pourrez – encore pardon de tant de trouble – un jour je vous dirai tout ce que je vous dois” [“Letters …? I think burn them – perhaps think again. Do what you can – again apologies for so much trouble – someday I will tell you everything I owe you”]. While some letters were apparently burnt, Dieudonné donated the vast majority to the Bibliothèque Nationale; even some of the sensitive material was conserved, although the conditions of the donation required it to be sealed until 2011. See Florence Abondance, “Nadia Boulanger au futur Musée de la Musique,” ReM 353–4, special issue on Nadia and Lili Boulanger (1982): 93–4; Jeanice Brooks, “The Fonds Boulanger at the Bibliothèque Nationale,” Notes 51 (1995): 1127–37; Alexandra Laederich, “Les Fonds Nadia Boulanger: Un héritage complexe,” Bulletin du Groupe français de l’AIBM hors série (2005): 39– 48; Laurence Languin, “Le Fonds de la médiathèque Nadia-Boulanger du Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et danse de Lyon,” Bulletin du Groupe français de l’AIBM, no. hors série (2005): 49–52.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

10

correspondents.12 A smaller but still enormous gift of Boulanger’s working library to the Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon has posed similar problems. As these sources have emerged, more nuanced historical assessments of various aspects of Boulanger’s career have begun to appear. An essay collection edited by Alexandra Laederich demonstrates the value of underpinning recollections of those who studied with Boulanger with documentary research.13 The meaning of the arrangement and décor of the salon at 36 rue Ballu, where Boulanger received her pupils, has been attentively deconstructed by Cédric Segond; and recent work by Annegret Fauser on Copland, Alexandra Laederich on Poulenc, and Kimberly Francis on Stravinsky employs the rich resources of the Boulanger legacy to offer important insights into the role she played in these composers’ music and lives.14 Here I take a similar methodological tack, but propose the story of performance rather than composition as a mode of understanding Boulanger’s impact. I argue that shifting the emphasis to performance, and broadening the scope to include historical repertory as well as new composition, provides a fresh view of Boulanger’s work that helps to illuminate why her audiences found her approach so compelling. My definition of performance is deliberately broad: although I am principally concerned with Boulanger’s appearances on the concert stage, I am also interested in other types of performing – recordings, radio broadcasts, lecture-recitals and performances in other teaching contexts – and in her comments on others’ performances in concert reviews, masterclasses and classroom teaching. In construing “performance” to encompass all of these domains, I am aware of overriding arguments about the differences between these activities and their meanings that have exercised the fields of performance studies, sound recording analysis, history of broadcasting and many other established and emergent areas of research. But thinking of “performance” in the broader sense of Christopher Small’s concept of 12

13

14

See François Lesure, “A travers la correspondance de Nadia Boulanger,” Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 5 (1982): 16–22; Catherine Massip, “Nadia Boulanger et ses réseaux à travers sa correspondance,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 51–64. Jean-Claire Vançon, “Inventaire du fonds de correspondance reçue par Nadia Boulanger conservé au département de la Musique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 485–530. Laederich, ed., Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger; Jeanice Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 415–68; “Noble et grande servante.” Cédric Segond, “36, rue Ballu: les ‘appartements’ de Nadia Boulanger,” in La Maison de l’artiste: construction d’un espace de représentations entre réalité et imaginaire (XVIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Jean Gribenski, Véronique Meyer, and Solange Vernois (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 203–15; Annegret Fauser, “Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger and the Making of an ‘American’ Composer,” Musical Quarterly 89 (2006): 524–54; Alexandra Laederich, “La Première Audition à Londres des Litanies à la Vierge noire par Nadia Boulanger (novembre 1936),” in Francis Poulenc et la voix: Texte et contexte, edited by Alban Ramaut (Lyons: Symétrie, 2002), 153–67.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

11

“musicking” – as anything that involves making music for a listening public – is a particularly useful way of directing attention beyond composition and composition teaching toward Boulanger’s wider musical activities.15 Inevitably such activities are linked to composition through Boulanger’s advocacy of new music in performance, particularly when she had a hand in the music’s genesis in some way, as teacher (as for Copland or Françaix) or sounding board (as for Poulenc or Stravinsky). Expanding the inquiry to include her approach to historical repertory illuminates her thinking to a far greater degree, however, and restores an essential dimension to the models of musical meaning she endorsed. And attention to Boulanger’s performance of historical repertory not only provides a better understanding of her training of composers (virtually all of whom studied and performed older music with her), but widens the field to include students who went on to be performers, conductors, teachers and scholars. If this book differs from most previous research on Boulanger in investigating her engagement with historical repertory as well as new composition, it also differs from recent work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to early music. Studies by Katharine Ellis, Jann Pasler and Catrina Flint de Médicis have helped us to understand the activities of the nineteenth-century French early music revivalists who shaped the repertorial traditions that Boulanger inherited.16 Boulanger’s advocacy of early music – particularly the sixteenth-century French chanson, Monteverdi and French baroque opera – built on turn-of-the-century editions and performances by musicians such as Henri Expert, Vincent d’Indy and Charles Bordes. Her approach to this music was marked, however, by the formalist aesthetics and structurally motivated performance styles that increasingly dominated the musical culture of her own generation, styles that would become widely prevalent after World War II and for which Boulanger was both an early practitioner and a forceful advocate. Sound clips illustrating Boulauger’s approach, and keyed to music examples in the book, are available on the Cambridge University Press website at www.cambridge.org/Boulanger. In contrast to the repertorial focus of most studies of nineteenth-century historical performance, scholarship on historical revival in the twentieth century has concentrated on questions of performance style, and particularly on the early music movement and attempts to reconstruct interpretive techniques used for music near the time of its composition.17 Yet while 15 16

17

Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009); Catrina Flint de Médicis, “Nationalism and Early Music at the French fin de siècle: Three Case Studies,” NineteenthCentury Music Review 1 (2004): 43–66. John Butt’s Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–52 provides an overview of previous contributions to the debate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

12

claims to recovery of historical sounds have been subject to intense scrutiny, the historiographical implications of performing anti-historical musical autonomy have been less often studied. Boulanger was both passionately interested in early repertory and resistant to historically informed performance practice. Rejecting the lure of historical authenticity, she promoted instead the performance of a structurally defined, transcendent “workhood”; but the relationship between her ideas and those promulgated in specialist early music circles was complex and her approach to certain performance parameters shared important common ground. Here I investigate the relationship of Boulanger’s structural-analytical approach to her performance choices, and explore what happened when she applied the formalist performance aesthetics of modernism to earlier repertories with the specific goal of rescuing historical masterworks from history. The relationship of musical structure to performance decisions has long been a central concern in performance analysis, but until recently much of this research had little historical dimension.18 Nearly all of it has been strongly characterized by the explicit statement or implicit assumption that a structural understanding of music is a sine qua non for successful interpretation of music of any period. Notably, writers who studied directly or indirectly with Boulanger have been responsible for some of the most influential of such studies.19 While I do not wish to argue for a direct filiation, I will contend that Boulanger was an important advocate for this approach and instrumental in its establishment in academic discourse. Multiple meanings of the “musical work” of my title define the goals of this study. I apply the notion of “work” in a broadly sociological sense, referring to the interpretive activities that produce the artwork in the form that it takes, and which endow it with meaning and value as art – and as a particular kind of art – in a given setting. Boulanger’s performances, her writing and teaching on performance, and the many other ways she disseminated her beliefs about music helped to construct the meaning-making frame within which musical utterances gained or maintained their status as masterworks in listeners’ minds. Her interpretations were aimed at 18

19

The essays in John Rink, ed., The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1995) give a good overview of the different areas subsumed under the rubric of performance studies as it emerged in the 1990s. See also Jonathan Dunsby, Performing Music: Shared Concerns (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Among the clearest examples is Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). See also Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: Norton, 1968). Berry studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Boulanger in 1953–4; Cone was at Princeton, where he studied with Boulanger’s pupil Roger Sessions. (A similar basic approach comes from a posthumously published work by Boulanger’s near-contemporary Erwin Stein (Erwin Stein, Form and Performance (London: Faber & Faber, 1962).) Nicholas Cook’s forthcoming study Music as Performance: Changing the Musical Object argues for an approach that does not take the pre-existent, structurally defined musical work as a necessary starting point or “structural performance” as a unchallenged ideal. I am grateful to him for allowing me to read his work prior to publication.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

13

producing a structurally coherent work of music, a transcendent entity in which form and content were ideally joined; her success was in persuading listeners that the music itself was in control of this signification. Boulanger’s interpretive “work” – in collaboration with that of her contemporaries, both performers and audiences – was essential to producing the modernist version of the musical work concept.20 And this “work” was applied to music of the distant past as well as to music composed during her lifetime. Boulanger was of course not alone in thinking of music primarily in terms of works, and in understanding works above all in terms of structure. The idea of the work as a self-contained, autonomous entity that exists separately from its instantiation in performance has had a powerful role in Western music discourse for at least the past two hundred years, if not longer. In her widely read 1994 study, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr began to trace the concept’s history, emphasizing both its contingent quality and the increasing regulatory function it acquired after 1800. She points to Boulanger as something of a culminating figure, whose extreme formalism can represent the apogee of the idea’s power in the mid twentieth century.21 Some version of a structurally oriented musical work concept continues to underpin large sections of classical musical culture and to inform much academic writing on music. However, recognizing the musical work as a historically variable mode of thinking about music rather than a fixed or absolute ontological category has opened rich possibilities for exploration of the concept’s use in particular times and places, as well as of differences in the way the concept itself was conceived. My examination of Boulanger’s performances can thus serve as a case study for an investigation of how modernist understandings of the musical work shaped performance culture of the first half of the twentieth century. How does one perform workhood? What does it mean to say “You have the works that stand for (literally, ‘respond for’ or ‘answer for’) the time”? What implication does this have for performance of historical works, and what kinds of histories result from their performance? The brand of historiography Boulanger herself promoted, based on a strong work concept and 20

21

On the notion of “work” used here, see Tia DeNora, “How is Extra-Musical Meaning Possible? Music as a Place and Space for ‘Work’,” Sociological Theory 4 (1986): 90–3; and Peter Martin, “Over the Rainbow? On the Quest for ‘the Social’ in Musical Analysis,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127 (2002): 131–3. On the role of interpretive work in the construction of an ostensibly objective formalist aesthetics, see the “postscript” (“Towards a ‘Vulgar’ Critique of ‘Pure’ Aesthetics”) in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), 485–500. On aesthetics as social activity (producing, for example, art categories such as the masterwork), see Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (1982), updated and expanded 25th anniversary edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 131–64. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 1994), 266–8. According to Goehr, “Central to formalism is an overriding emphasis on the well-formed, self-sufficient work, whose material and form are united such that even the relation of expression joining composer to work is overridden by the demand that one looks only to the work itself.” For further discussion of Goehr’s writing see Michael Talbot, ed., The Musical Work: Reality or Invention (Liverpool University Press, 2000).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

14

bolstered by formalist analytical procedures, was a dominant approach after World War II; and though in postmodern scholarship it has come in for heavy criticism, many of its key elements remain prominent in classical musical culture today. Exploration of Boulanger’s activities illuminates how such ideas of music history were constituted and disseminated in the years between the wars, helping both to establish the cultural specificity of these attitudes and to expose some of the mechanisms through which they achieved their persuasive power. And research into Boulanger’s advocacy for modernist musical approaches also furnishes insights into the rise of “structural performance,” arguably the most important development in classical music interpretation of the twentieth century. If the study of Boulanger’s activities often reveals faultlines in the strong work concept, it also shows how it could become a powerful stimulus to musical imagination and a potent creative tool. One final meaning of the word “work” has emerged compellingly during the course of my research. Boulanger was a devout believer, a mystic who was profoundly influenced by the movement for Catholic renewal that swept France early in the twentieth century. She shared her approach to faith with many of her closest friends and colleagues, including composers such as Stravinsky and Poulenc and several of the performers she worked with most frequently in the 1930s, such as Maria Modrakowska and Paul Derenne. Her belief in musical works was closely tied to her religious vision, and her performances of music often took on the character of a “good work” or act of Christian charity. Like many women of her background, she was educated for charitable activity, and throughout her life she regularly organized and performed concerts, lectures and other events for worthy causes; her 1936 concert for the Beaumonts is just one example. Often her concerts were literally on behalf of her oeuvres (“works”), the charitable organizations she supported through financial donations and unpaid labor. But even when they were not, for her the ideal performance served as offering to God and to others, and as a fulfillment of obligation and duty. Both the performance of individual works and the concert as a whole became an exercise in faith, the creation of a ritual frame in the hope of a visitation of grace. As she explained to a Radio Times interviewer in 1936, “We make a frame for Beauty. We do not know whether she will come to fill it.”22 In taking such a spiritual approach, Boulanger – like many others of her generation – strove both to salve the deep wounds of the Great War and to remove music from the increasingly fraught political and social landscape of the 1930s into an ostensibly pure and ideologically uncontaminated 22

D. F. Aitken, “A Distinguished French Teacher.” The Radio Times 53 (November 13, 1936): 19. Aitken says that Boulanger was quoting Rodin here, but I have been unable to locate the source of the citation.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Introduction: the works that stand for the time

15

domain.23 And she also saw this process as a form of self-redemption: Boulanger’s intimate diary entries and letters of the interwar period reveal how she used music to combat the feelings of loneliness and depression that regularly sapped her strength and energy. On Christmas Day in 1938, as war loomed once more and her solitude had become a particularly heavy burden, she reflected on the emptiness of merely living, concluding that, “One must not think of that vacuum – but find something to do – otherwise it’s only absurd despair – or unconscious nothingness where there is no happiness or beauty or being.”24 In her musical work, she found a route to what she could consider an active, and thus meaningful, life. This approach, though deeply rooted in pre-war cultural and social patterns, first emerged as a response to the traumatic years Boulanger endured during World War I, when nearly every part of her personal and professional existence was profoundly shaken. Boulanger was a charismatic advocate for modernist musical credos, one whose career was so long that she witnessed many transformations from avant-garde to old hat: the naturalization of certain assumptions in musical culture to the point where they became difficult to see. Looking at her musical “work” in a range of media, as opposed to her musical works in composition, helps to render visible these assumptions and ideas, underlining their status as constructions characteristic of time and place rather than timeless universals as she herself would have had them. As a musician trying to reconcile her love of tradition and desire for the new, Boulanger appears as an exemplary representative of a distinctly modernist predicament: one in which the drive to understand art in terms of technique and form was inflected by inability to escape the past. 23

24

This brand of idealism is in itself a political position, as Jane Fulcher has argued in Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 275–96. NB, diary entry, F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102, December 25, 1938: “Il ne faut pas penser à ce vide – mais trouver à faire – sinon c’est le désespoir absurde – ou l’inconscient néant où il n’est ni bonheur ni beauté ni être – ”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:17, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.001

part i

The work in performance

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 31 Jan 2020 at 19:29:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 31 Jan 2020 at 19:29:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

chapter 1

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

On March 29, 1918, the Parisian church of Saint Gervais was hit by German artillery during Good Friday Mass. The roof collapsed and nearly a hundred congregants were killed, in the greatest loss of civilian lives at any one time during World War I. A year later, on the bombing’s liturgical anniversary, the combined Colonne and Lamoureux orchestras played at the Théâtre du Châtelet for their first concert there since the conflict’s end. The Châtelet, only 300 meters along the Seine to the west of Saint Gervais, had been home to the Concerts Colonne since the founding of the series by Édouard Colonne in 1874, and to mark the return the program featured pieces chosen to resonate with the Easter season and the orchestra’s history. Devoted to works by Beethoven and César Franck, the concert opened with Franck’s Rédemption and included Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto with Alfred Cortot as soloist. Nadia Boulanger began her review of the concert for Le Monde musical by citing the church calendar. “Vendredi-Saint, 18 avril”: no more was needed to recall the bombing of Saint Gervais the year before, which was still being actively discussed in the French press in early 1919. She then evoked the atmosphere of symbolic weight and emotional intensity that, for her, profoundly marked the performance: The memories the concert evoked; the vanished presences that it brought back to this place where they were so beloved (I think of Édouard Colonne, of Raoul Pugno); the audience rendered more nervous, more sensitive, in this much larger hall; the return of a great artist who had been long absent; all this created an irradiated atmosphere, supercharged with emotional emanations. Was it fact, was it imagination – it seemed to me on entering that there was a little of that latent enthusiasm that precedes those collective communions that are so mysterious and so rare. We know nothing about each other. Each of us comes with an individual reason for wishing to become absorbed in music, and suddenly, we feel richer, profiting from emotions that are transmitted without being expressed. We isolate ourselves completely in the mass in which each person can take all for himself, at the same time as everyone’s sensibilities converge toward the same center. … Nothing is better than music – when it takes us out of time, it does more for us than we have any right to expect: it has expanded the limits of our sorrowful lives, it 19

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

20

has provided a halo for the sweetness of our hours of happiness, in erasing the pettiness that diminishes us, bringing us pure and new towards what was, towards what will be, towards what it has created for us.1

What was, what will be, what it has created for us: Boulanger’s reworking of the close of the doxology (sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be) links music’s purifying action on the spirit to the Mass. The concert figures here as both commemoration and redemption, simultaneously conjuring a cherished past, the presence of the departed as resurrected spirits, and an eagerly desired future. The listening experience is a mystic communion that brings the audience into emotional union; their contact is mediated by music, the “same center,” or fixed point toward which all listeners’ sensibilities converge. And not only does music guide toward eternal truths; in constructing its domain “out of time” the work somehow creates the truths toward which it leads. Boulanger closed her review with a list of orchestra members who had died in the war or who had been recently demobilized from armed service, lending further emphasis to Good Friday themes of sacrifice and redemption that imbue her essay, and tying those themes to the contemporary reality of post-war recovery for the performers and their public.

vers la vie nouvelle World War I was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable dimensions for Nadia Boulanger’s France. Well over a million men – most of them from her generation – were killed; another million were disabled from wounds sustained in action. Entire towns and cities, large numbers of schools, hospitals and churches, great swathes of agricultural land and countryside, and significant portions of the national infrastructure of roads, bridges and 1

NB, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” MM 30, no. 5 (May 1919): 136–7: “Les souvenirs qu’il évoquait, les présences disparues qu’il ramenait dans ce milieu où elles furent si chères (je songe à Édouard Colonne, à Raoul Pugno), le public plus nerveux, plus sensitif, dans cette salle plus vaste, le retour d’un grand artiste longtemps absent, tout cela créait une atmosphère irradiante, surchargée d’émanations émotives. Est-ce un fait, est-ce de l’imagination, il m’a semblé qu’il y avait en entrant un peu de cet enthousiasme latent qui précède les communions collectives si mystérieuses, si rares. On ne sait rien les uns des autres. Chacun arrive avec sa propre raison de s’absorber dans la musique, et soudain, on se sent plus riche, bénéficiant d’émotions qui se transmettent sans s’exprimer. On s’isole totalement dans cette masse où chacun peut tout prendre pour lui seul tandis que toutes les sensibilités convergent vers un même centre. … Rien n’est meilleur que la musique – quand elle nous emmène hors du temps, elle a fait plus pour nous que nous n’avions le droit d’espérer: elle a élargi les limites de notre vie douloureuse, elle a auréolé la douceur de nos heures de bonheur, en effaçant les mesquineries qui nous diminuent, nous menant alors purs et neufs vers ce qui fut, vers ce qui sera, vers ce qu’elle crée pour nous.” Colonne had died in 1910; the first version of Franck’s Rédemption was premiered under his direction in 1873. Pugno had frequently performed with the Colonne orchestra and was renowned for his interpretations of Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos. Cortot gave no concerts at all during the war, and had spent October 1918–January 1919 on his first American tour; the Good Friday concert was one of his first appearances before a large Parisian public for several years (Bernard Gavoty, Alfred Cortot (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1977), 128–32).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

21

railways were devastated or completely destroyed. Against this backdrop of collective trauma, Boulanger’s experience of the war was framed by profound personal loss: in 1914, the death of her mentor and beloved, Raoul Pugno; and, in 1918, that of her adored younger sister Lili. Pugno was a charismatic pianist 35 years Nadia’s senior with an enviable international reputation. The Boulanger family became increasingly close to him after 1904, when he offered advice on Nadia’s compositional development after hearing her examinations at the Conservatoire. Pugno rapidly became a central figure in their lives; the Boulangers purchased a Paris flat near his and spent their summers with him in Gargenville, where he had a country house, eventually purchasing a neighboring property in 1908. Despite the age difference between them, Pugno’s married status, and his reputation as a flirt and womanizer, his relationship with Nadia soon moved beyond a professional interest in a young colleague and developed into an intense emotional attachment, from Nadia’s side at least. And Pugno used all his considerable influence to help launch her career. From 1908 onward, they frequently appeared as a keyboard duo, and she made her début as an orchestral conductor in 1912–13 when she directed performances of Pugno’s Concertstück and her own Rhapsodie for piano and orchestra in La Roche-sur-Yon and Berlin, with Pugno himself as the soloist. These were remarkable occasions, given Boulanger’s youth and the rarity of female conductors. Pugno was powerful enough to overcome any reservations organizers may have had about Boulanger’s gender and age, and he seems to have enjoyed promoting his protégée’s challenges to convention: in an article for Excelsior he explicitly drew attention to Boulanger’s conducting ambitions.2 In the years before the war the pair embarked on increasingly ambitious collaborative compositions, completing a song cycle, Les Heures claires, in 1909 and embarking on an opera the following year. Their work together brought Boulanger intense joy, as she explained to her student Marcelle de Manziarly in a happy letter from the summer of 1912.3 But Pugno died in dramatic circumstances in January 1914 while they were on a Russian concert tour, leaving a distraught Nadia stranded in Moscow without even enough money to arrange repatriation of his remains until a wealthy friend of Lili’s cabled emergency funds. His death was not only a devastating personal blow, which she felt as the loss of the one great love of her life; it also had grave consequences for Boulanger’s professional 2

3

Concerts of April 17, 1912 (La Roche-sur-Yon) and January 17, 1913 (Berlin). The Berlin concert was entirely devoted to works by women composers, but Boulanger alone conducted her own piece. Pugno’s article appeared in Excelsior, January 20, 1913; see Jeanice Brooks, “‘Noble et grande servante de la musique’: Telling the Story of Nadia Boulanger’s Conducting Career,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 101. On Boulanger’s concerts with Pugno, see Alexandra Laederich, “Au clavier et au pupitre: les concerts de Nadia Boulanger de 1901 à 1973,” in Nadia et Lili Boulanger: témoignages et études, ed. Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 179–81. F-Pn NLa 289 (1–2), NB to Marcelle de Manziarly, September 6, 1912.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

22

career.4 Their major collaboration, the opera La Ville morte, had been completed the previous summer but was as yet unperformed. When it went into rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique later in the year, the outbreak of war obliged suspension of the production; it was never to be taken up again.5 While Nadia’s career had been flourishing with Pugno’s aid, Lili Boulanger had herself begun serious compositional study despite her fragile health. In 1913, she achieved what Nadia had been consistently denied, and became the first woman to win the Premier Grand Prix of the Prix de Rome. Her prize-winner’s stay at the Villa Medici was never completed, however, interrupted first by the declaration of war, and then by illness. She returned to France definitively in summer 1916, and for the next two years Nadia watched her sister die. The successive crises of Lili’s illness harnessed her family to a rollercoaster of despair and hope, as she suffered a barrage of excruciating, but ultimately ineffective, medical treatments. She was moved to a variety of locations for treatment and recovery, often far from Paris, so that Nadia was obliged to shuttle constantly between Lili’s sickbed and the lessons and classes in Paris that were among the family’s main sources of income.6 Lili died on March 15, 1918 at only 24 years old. The funeral four days later, at the family’s home church of the Trinité, was attended by nearly a thousand people, despite the wartime conditions. The invitation to the service included a phrase that would be reproduced on cards announcing the Mass in Lili’s memory that would take place at the Trinité in March every year until the end of the century: “I offer my sufferings unto God so that they may fall again upon you as joys.”7 The German shells that terrorized Paris from March until August 1918 must have seemed like a prolongation of the blow that had just struck the 4

5 6 7

See Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 51–119, and Jérôme Spycket, À la recherche de Lili Boulanger (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 96–151 and 207–19, on Boulanger and Pugno. A fuller evaluation of their relationship must await the release of diaries and correspondence held at F-Pn that are not currently available for consultation, and some documents that would have provided deeper insights were apparently destroyed after Boulanger’s death. However, there is abundant evidence in existing archival material that Boulanger was deeply in love with her mentor. For years after his death, she marked the date in her personal calendar (for example, in F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 90 (datebook for 1922), January 2, is marked “Moscou 1914. R.P.”), and letters from her friends offer consolation in terms that clearly indicate a profound attachment. In 1922, Boulanger told her would-be suitor Melville Smith that a relationship with him was impossible because of her fidelity to Pugno’s memory (see Smith’s letter to Bernard DeVoto, January 3, 1922, cited in Mark DeVoto, “Melville Smith: Organist, Educator, Early Music Pioneer and American Composer,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland, 2000), 58. See Caroline Potter, “Nadia Boulanger’s and Raoul Pugno’s La ville morte,” The Opera Quarterly 16 (2000): 397–406. Spycket, À la recherche, 321–58 traces Lili’s last years in detail. Faire-part for the funeral of Lili Boulanger, March 19, 1918 F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 120 (8)): “J’offre à Dieu toutes mes souffrances pour qu’elles retombent en joies sur toi.” This dossier also contains the livre de condoléances, the register signed by the service-goers, and invitation cards and correspondence relating to the memorial Mass celebrated from 1919 onward. The phrase was not reused on the 1919 card, but was included sometime before 1928 (the next extant invitation in this dossier) and in all subsequent cards, including those after 1935 (when the Mass included the memory of Raïssa Boulanger) and 1979 (when Nadia Boulanger herself was added to the memorial service).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

23

Boulanger family. When armistice was declared in November, it found Nadia physically exhausted and emotionally drained. Though she was herself only just over thirty, her letters breathe the world-weariness of someone who believes the best part of her life to be over. They provide a bitter contrast to the hopeful message of the short piano work, Vers la vie nouvelle (“Towards new life”) which Nadia had composed in aid of a regeneration charity after the first year of the war, and which was published by Ricordi at the conflict’s end. The epigram to the piece reads: “In the heavy atmosphere – doubt and discouragement creep in. But distant sounds arise, clear and pure, and towards the hope of a better life, man walks, confident, tender, and solemn.”8 The dichotomy between private grief and public strength was strongly characteristic of Boulanger’s frame of mind in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Guilt at surviving her talented sibling seems to have led to determination to deserve Lili’s death, which Nadia framed as redemptive sacrifice, by throwing herself into work and domestic responsibility: as Nadia wrote in her datebook in January 1919, “I place this new year before you, my little beloved Lili – may it see me fulfil my duty towards you – so that it is less terrible for Mother and that I try to resemble you.”9 But the struggle to maintain the façade came at a cost. When Boulanger began her 1920 diary in a calendar that had once belonged to Lili, she confided, “I take up with emotion this notebook which She had in her hands! A new year begins and never has my external optimism been further from what is going on inside me.”10 In any case, prolonged grieving for her sister (much less for Pugno) in public was difficult; in the face of widespread destruction and death, how could Nadia claim compassion for her individual loss? Her postwar criticism, with its frequent calls for commemoration of the war dead and determination to deserve their sacrifice, not only reflected the wider mood of national unity and self-abnegation that characterized the French response to the war, but can also can be read as sublimation of her mourning into the nation’s, as an acceptable outlet for her grief. 8

9

10

“Dans l’atmosphère lourde – se sont infiltrés le doute, le découragement. Mais des sons lointains, clairs, purs s’élèvent, et vers l’espoir d’une vie meilleure, l’homme marche, confiant tendre et grave.” The piece was completed in November 1915, for publication in Lisa Frouin, Les Écoles de l’avenir, écoles régénératrices (Paris: I. Rirachovsky, 1916), a pamphlet for a charity aimed at building new schools and homes for war orphans and to provide accommodation for working-class families in aid of efforts to repopulate the country. Boulanger’s piece was separately published by Ricordi in 1918: see Alexandra Laederich, “Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Nadia Boulanger,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, ed. Laederich, 345–6. F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 88 (1): “Je place cette nouvelle année devant toi, ma petite Lili adorée – qu’elle me voit remplir mon devoir vis-à-vis de toi – qu’elle soit moins terrible p[ou]r Maman et que j’essaie de te ressembler.” This was a 1918 datebook that had apparently first belonged to Lili; Nadia crossed out the printed 1918 year, replacing it with 1919, and reused it as a correspondence register for the first year after Lili’s death. F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms.89 (1), January 1, 1920: “Je reprends avec émotion ce cahier qu’Elle a eu entre les mains! Une nouvelle année commence et jamais mon optimisme extérieure n’a été plus loin de ce qui se passe en moi.” This was another 1918 datebook that had been given to Lili Boulanger for Christmas, and which Nadia used as a correspondence diary through 1920.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

24

Yet in the 1920s, a decade of collective reconstruction and her own attempts to rebuild her life, Nadia Boulanger’s career was reconfigured and the foundations of her mythic status were laid. Before the war, in the masculine world of the French musical establishment, the success that her abundant gifts might reasonably have led her to expect had often eluded her. Her début had been brilliant: despite the institutional misogyny of the Paris Conservatoire, where many teachers still refused even to accept female students in their classes, she won her first Premier Prix in harmony in 1903, aged only 15. In the following year, she took four Premiers Prix in one week, in organ, fugue, composition and accompagnement au piano (solfège), a feat that attracted the notice of the musical press. But she repeatedly failed to win the Prix de Rome, although in two of the competitions it was widely believed that she had composed the best cantata; and in 1908 her participation was particularly marked by the brutal experience of “l’affaire fugue,” which gained her the fury of Camille Saint-Saëns but only the Deuxième Grand Prix.11 Although she began teaching privately in 1904 with great success, her application in 1910 for a vacant post at the Paris Conservatoire was unsuccessful. Her institutional teaching was limited to the far less prestigious Conservatoire Femina-Musica, where the student body of young upper-class women was largely excluded by choice or training from the professional avenues represented by the Paris Conservatoire.12 But in the immediate post-war years, the creation of new institutions offered new possibilities. In 1919, Alfred Cortot, then near the height of his pianistic career, joined forces with the educator and publisher Auguste Mangeot to found the École Normale de Musique. The school would provide advanced training of the kind supplied by the Paris Conservatoire to students who did not fulfil the requirements for Conservatoire entry: both foreigners, to prevent them from relying on German and Austrian conservatoires, as well as French students seeking more flexible programs and conditions of enrollment than those offered by the older institution. The starry performance faculty included not only the much-admired Cortot, but also Marcel Dupré, Jane Bathori, Marguerite Long, Blanche Selva, Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals; Jacques Dalcroze was in charge of “gymnastique rythmique.” There was considerable emphasis on history and historical performance practice: Wanda Landowska taught harpsichord and Henri Casadesus viols, while highly reputed scholars such as Henri Expert and Henry Prunières were engaged to teach music history. Boulanger was 11

12

Boulanger was nearly disqualified for writing an instrumental fugue rather than the vocal fugue specified by the rules: see Annegret Fauser, “La Guerre en dentelles: Women and the Prix de Rome in French Cultural Politics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 83–129. On women and the Conservatoire, see Fauser, “Comment devenir compositeur? Les Stratégies de Lili Boulanger et ses contemporaines,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, ed. Laederich, 273–81 and 87–8. Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, 32.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

25

appointed as the only woman in a composition department that included Georges Caussade, Charles Koechlin, Roger-Ducasse and Florent Schmitt.13 By the mid 1920s, her classes in harmony and music analysis were filled to overflowing, serving as a source of private composition pupils and enhancing her international reputation as her foreign students enthusiastically spread the word at home about their fascinating teacher. A further boost to her reputation was provided by Le Monde musical, which was restarted after the war under Mangeot’s editorship. Boulanger was a featured artist in the journal’s concert supplement during the first year, and between 1919 and 1924 wrote a large number of concert reviews. Even after her increasingly busy schedule obliged her to abandon regular music criticism, Le Monde musical continued to act as a promotional tool for her work at the École Normale, frequently printing notices, profiles and accounts of her classes.14 Boulanger’s teaching at the École Normale during the academic year was soon augmented by summer work at the new American conservatory at Fontainebleau. Both Nadia and Lili had been deeply involved in charity activity during the war, collecting aid for mobilized musicians through their personal and professional connections. The sisters recruited American musicians and diplomats sympathetic to the French cause, and founded an organization – the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire de Paris – with the Harvard-educated composer and diplomat Blair Fairchild as the principal American contact. Nadia had been working on her English since 1906, when her first American pupil, Marion Bauer, traded English lessons for harmony sessions. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Nadia became an ideal liaison for American musicians eager to contribute to the war effort. Among these were Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Society, and the influential patrons behind Damrosch’s work with American military musicians. After the war, 13

14

The two-page spread in Le Monde musical for the school’s opening claimed it would provide an “Enseignement Musical complet pour la formation de Compositeurs, Virtuoses, Exécutants, Artistes lyriques et Professeurs, à l’usage des Etrangers (afin qu’ils n’aillent plus dans les Conservatoires d’Allemagne et d’Autriche) et des Français ne remplissant pas les conditions voulues pour entrer au Conservatoire” (MM 30, no. 9 (September 1919): 292–3). The publicity features a full roster of teaching staff, including Boulanger. See also Gavoty, Alfred Cortot, 132–7 and Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 145–6, although she claims that Boulanger was not included in the school’s publicity until 1921. A cover photo and biography of Boulanger featured in an early supplement, MM supplément hebdomadaire 26 (October 26, 1919); later promotion included MM 42, no. 10 (October 1931), which had a cover photo of Boulanger and a profile by Maria Modrakowska (pp. 289–90). Boulanger’s own articles appeared monthly from January 1919, became more sporadic in 1922 and ceased altogether after 1924. She continued to contribute occasional articles to Le Monde musical and to other journals, and after World War II wrote regular reviews for Le Spectateur, though these were far less wide-ranging than her earlier work: see Jeanice Brooks, “Les Écrits de Nadia Boulanger,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, ed. Laederich, 451–4. See also Rémy Stricker, “La Critique de Nadia Boulanger: À la recherche d’une passion objective,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, ed. Laederich, 131–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

26

a continuation of the training program for American musicians Damrosch had helped to found in France seemed a promising way to build on wartime Franco-American cooperation and to inject much-needed funds into the French educational network, while at the same time offering the still obligatory European finish to budding American professionals. The Conservatoire Américain, established in the former royal palace of Fontainebleau just outside Paris, opened its doors to the first of many generations of American students in the summer of 1921, with Nadia as a founding member of staff.15 As at the École Normale, her teaching soon became a major draw. Many students followed the example of Aaron Copland, who began his work with Boulanger in the inaugural class at Fontainebleau and stayed on for three further years of private lessons and classes with her in Paris. The New York and Harvard connections that underpinned the Conservatoire Américain were also to prove crucial to Boulanger’s future concert and lecture tours of the United States. If Boulanger’s growing success in the 1920s was partly due to her work in these new educational institutions, it was just as firmly rooted in a different major site of early twentieth-century musical practice: the salon. For a Parisian of Boulanger’s gender and social class, connections to this milieu were a normal part of life from an early age. Among her papers is a small leather-bound diary used to record the receiving days of friends and acquaintances; Nadia’s mother Raïssa began it sometime before 1900, and entries continued in the hands of both daughters as they became old enough to visit and receive.16 One of the earliest concert programs in Nadia’s archive is from a 1902 charity benefit held by the comtesse de Béarn, a private concert that featured the Quatuor Gaston Poulet and the noted Opéra soprano Jeanne Raunay as well as the 14-year-old Nadia.17 Up to and after World War I she continued to perform in aristocratic salons such as those of the princesse de Broglie, the baronne de Bourgoigne, Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux and the princesse de Polignac.18 Such concerts did not only represent a crucial platform for new music and for the promotion of performers’ careers. As in the case of the Beaumonts’ Epiphany concert, private musical events were often held to benefit charitable organizations and institutions, and in the near-complete absence of state provision were part of an essential funding base dominated by wealthy women.

15 16 17 18

See Kendra Leonard, The Conservatoire Américain: A History (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), xvii–xxix. F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 129. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, February 17, [1902], a benefit for the École Féminine de Gravure Musicale. Boulanger played César Franck’s Pièce héroïque for organ. Boulanger’s diaries from 1919 to 1920 regularly note invitations to play for salons. See also Myriam Chimènes, “Nadia Boulanger et ses mécènes: Connivences sociales,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 99–109.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

27

It was characteristic of this environment that divisions between charitable social work, sociability and education were often unclear. Boulanger’s activities bring this point home with particular force: she participated in social work throughout her life, donating performances and organizing concerts for a range of musical and non-musical charities, and stepping up her work in particular during both world wars. She performed not only in private salons, but in luxury hotels, clubs and even on cruise liners; that is, in any place where wealthy people congregated, and she could musically persuade them to part with their cash. She frequently accepted payment for private concerts only on the condition that she could use the proceeds for her chosen charities or to support needy students. Discussion of charitable work pervades her correspondence with wealthy friends, and her letters reflect a constant effort to drum up funding both for the educational institutions in which she worked and for particular students she thought deserving of support.19 Although shared with men whose background allowed them to function in this environment, the salon milieu accorded women far greater agency than did most state institutions, and provided an arena for effective action under the cloak of sociability. Building on these possibilities, Nadia created her own educational institution in the Boulangers’ Haussmannian apartment at 36, rue Ballu. The family had moved to the flat in 1904 when Nadia finished at the Conservatoire, equipping it with everything she needed to begin her professional teaching career, including an organ by Mutin-Cavaillé-Coll. From fall 1905, she taught not only private lessons but also “cours collectifs,” group classes in harmony, accompaniment and sight-reading. These classes were originally held on Fridays, but in 1921 Nadia moved them to Wednesday afternoons, the time when her mother Raïssa had previously received callers for her own “at home.” This was the beginning of Boulanger’s famous “Wednesdays” – described in her registration lists of the 1930s as “classes on choral singing and analysis” (cours de chant choral et d’analyse) – devoted to commented performances of musical works. The classes packed her salon to overflowing, as thirty to fifty students from the École Normale and from Boulanger’s private composition roster gathered to hear her analyses and to sing and play through the chosen pieces. Orchestral parts were played at two pianos or the organ, occasionally with a string quartet or small instrumental ensemble. Boulanger directed

19

For example, when Boulanger played a recital with Paul Makanovitsky in April 1936 for Alice and Arthur Sachs, Makanovitsky was paid, but Boulanger insisted on 3,000 francs in donations to her “oeuvres” (good works) rather than a fee (CNLB, “Programmes concerts” book). Her correspondence with other patrons such as the Blisses, Sachses, Flaglers and Loudons, about charitable donations and studentships, show that even when contributions were bankrolled at least nominally by men (whose fortunes often in reality belonged to their spouses), the decisions were nearly always presented as coming from their wives.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

28

from one of the pianos, prefacing and following the performance of each section with remarks on compositional style and technique. Afterwards, guests invited for tea mingled with chosen students while her mother presided over the samovar, accentuating the aura of upper-class sociability suggested by the domestic setting.20 In the pre-war period, 1905–13, the Boulangers had also frequently hosted private concerts in the salon, with professional singers drawn from the Opéra and virtuosos such as Pugno adding lustre to programs that often featured the Boulanger sisters’ own compositions.21 As in the appropriation of aspects of the “at home,” the Wednesdays of the 1920s took over some functions of these prewar private concerts. Boulanger regularly recruited professional musicians to perform with and for her students, ensuring that her analyses – whether of Bach cantatas or the newest piece by Stravinsky – were effectively doubled by performance and listening. For the rest of her career, the salon of the rue Ballu functioned as classroom, concert hall and “at home,” in a combination that was as distinctive as it was marked by contemporary concepts of femininity. The years after World War I did not only represent the establishment of Boulanger’s international reputation as a teacher. They also saw a brief but significant revival of her career as keyboard performer. She regularly substituted for Fauré at the grand Cavaillé-Coll instrument at the Madeleine, and between 1919 and 1921 she appeared as organ soloist with nearly all the main Parisian orchestras. In March 1919 – the anniversary of Lili’s death – she played for her sister’s Pour les funérailles d’un soldat with the Concerts Colonne at the recently constructed Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She performed Handel concerti with the Concerts Pasdeloup, the Concerts Ignace Pleyel, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and the Concerts Classiques of Marseille; she played Franck with the Orchestre de Paris, and Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony with the Société des Concerts. Though these performances were secondary to her teaching activity, they kept her name in the public eye and contributed to her increasing status in Parisian musical life. Boulanger also made regular appearances as a pianist in chamber music performances, particularly for the rival new music series the Société Nationale (SN) and the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI).22 20

21 22

Segond, “36, rue Ballu,” 208. Although she would later claim that she had always given her courses on Wednesday, Spycket shows that Nadia’s group teaching originally took place on Fridays, while her mother received on Wednesday afternoons, until the fusion in 1921. Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, 26. For programs, see Laederich, “Au clavier,” 176–7. See ibid., 182–5 for dates and repertoire; programs are held in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195. On the main concert series between the wars see Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 41–57. Boulanger was elected to the Société Nationale committee in 1919. On the SMI, founded by Ravel in 1909 as an alternative to the SN, see Michel Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939 (Liège: Mardaga, 1997), 66– 122 and 305–27. Boulanger appeared as a performer on SMI concerts from 1919, and in 1921 became a member of its program committee; programs she helped to arrange are held in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 119 (11). She stepped down in 1934 (according to a note in Le Ménestrel (January 12, 1934): 396).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

29

Unusually, she was appointed to the program committees of both organizations, a role she used to advocate for her students and colleagues. Here too her ability as a performer stood her in good stead, as her old classmate Charles Koechlin, also on the SMI committee, recalled: Nadia Boulanger (at whose home we held the meetings of the program committee), an admirable pianist, had the art of presenting her American students’ work in such a skillful way, that they seemed excellent and we accepted them immediately without hearing them in their entirety: this sometimes led to disappointment in concerts.23

Nadia herself, however, harbored doubts about her ability as a player. Pre-war reviews of her performances with Pugno had often expressly or inadvertently highlighted the difference in artistry between the seasoned virtuoso and the young woman he had taken under his wing, and this may have contributed to the crises of confidence Boulanger often endured before solo engagements. In 1922, before embarking to give an organ recital in Italy, where she would be hosted by Lili’s friends from her Prix de Rome days, Nadia noted in her diary, “very strong feeling of being ridiculous for travelling to Rome without being a virtuoso – but I am not fooling myself – in any case, all that is secondary – in the foreground, memories, sadness and solitude.”24 But, despite her misgivings, Boulanger had become sufficiently renowned by 1925 to realize plans for a concert tour of the United States that had first been mooted by Damrosch in 1918. The program was remarkably ambitious, including concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Damrosch and the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitsky. Boulanger featured as soloist for a Handel concerto, her sister’s Pour les funerailles d’un soldat, and the world premiere of Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, written for her. She played solo organ recitals on the giant Wanamaker’s organs in New York and Philadelphia, and gave lectures and performed at a huge array of other public venues and educational establishments, not only on the East Coast but also in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Houston and Minneapolis. For American music clubs and in private homes, she duplicated aspects of her European salon performances and pedagogical “Wednesdays.” In an 23

24

Charles Koechlin, “Quelques souvenirs sur ma situation et mes activités dans le monde musical” (unpublished manuscript, Archives Charles Koechlin, Paris), cited in Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 91: “Nadia Boulanger (chez qui avaient lieu les comités de lecture), admirable pianiste, possédait l’art de présenter les oeuvres de ses élèves américains de si habile façon, qu’elles semblaient excellentes et qu’on les admettait d’emblée, sans les avoir entendues in extenso: aux concerts, on avait parfois des déceptions.” F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 90 (1), February 6, 1922: “sentiment très fort du ridicule d’aller jouer à Rome sans être virtuose – mais je ne suis pas dupe de moi-même – d’ailleurs, tout cela au 2d plan – en avant, souvenirs, tristesse et solitude.” After the concert (February 12) Boulanger wrote that portions of it had been “ignoble,” because she hadn’t worked hard enough; she concluded, “It was a disgrace” (“C’est une honte”).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

30

epistolary journal she wrote for her mother, she described each day’s activities and impressions, sending entries along with postcards and drawings to Raïssa at regular intervals throughout the two-month tour. The journal reveals how Nadia’s self-assurance was bolstered by the ecstatic reception she received from American friends, students and audiences, which soon resulted in offers of further tours as well as tempting invitations to accept a permanent teaching post in the United States.25 Here she also discovered, with a touching exhilaration, her talent as a musical advocate on a large scale. Though she was billed as the “World’s Foremost Woman Organist” on concert programs and posters, and the flyers advertising her exclusive use of Baldwin pianos resulted from the same kind of endorsement deal offered to other star soloists, the revelation of the American tour was not her playing. In her journal, she continued to recognize the limits of her keyboard ability; but, equally frankly, she described the success of her public lectures, which soon took on the character of virtuoso improvisations. Writing from Saint Louis, she told Raïssa: It has been a real success here – they want me to come next year for at least three lectures – made a big impression. … The atmosphere was so warm that I found myself in good form – and from my first words, I felt I could let myself be taken over by the emotion, the interest my topic inspires in me. For … I improvise like nobody’s business – I do, just on a large scale, a class, as if to my friends – and from the heart, with sincerity, decidedly, you can create immediate bonds.26

Boulanger was profoundly tempted by the prospect of moving permanently to America. She was impressed by the energy and efficiency of American institutions as well as by their material resources, and inspired by the 25

26

F-Pn NLa 282 (1–115). In the entry for February 2, 1925 (pièces 15–17) Boulanger wrote: “autour de moi, une atmosphère comme jamais de ma vie je n’ai rien eu de semblable – Et cela vous donne des forces, du courage, le désir de se sentir vraiment soi-même. … Et je suis seulement anxieuse de tenir le coup – un tel piédestal vous soulève ou vous écrase.” [around me an atmosphere such as I’ve never had the like in my whole life – And that gives you strength, courage, the wish to feel truly yourself … And I’m only worried about living up to expectations – such a pedestal either lifts you up or crushes you.] “C’est un vrai succès ici – ils veulent que je vienne l’an prochain pour au moins 3 conférences. […] L’atmosphère étant si sympathique, je me suis trouvée en train – et dès les premiers mots, ai senti que je pouvais me laisser porter par l’émotion, de l’interêt que me donnait mon sujet. Car – j’improvise à perte de vue – je fais, en plus grand, un cours, comme à des amis – et avec du coeur, de la sincérité, décidément, on crée des liens immédiats.” F-Pn NLa 282 (68–70), February 2, 1925. Her first public lecture in New York inspired similar feelings: “Mercredi restera un des bons jours de ma vie – cette 1ère conférence a été une chose incompréhensible – j’en étais malade. A peine arrivée sur la scène, je me suis sentie autre, plus légère, plus affinée, et les paroles sont venues si simplement, si bien, presque en bon anglais – les gens visiblement en sympathie, intéressés – Et je n’avais pas préparé un seul mot, pas de programme.” [Wednesday will remain one of the great days of my life – that first lecture was an incomprehensible thing – I was sick [with apprehension]. But I had hardly come on stage when I felt myself different, lighter, more polished, and the words came to me so easily, so well, almost in decent English – and the audience was visibly sympathetic, interested – And I hadn’t prepared a single word, hadn’t a program at all.] F-Pn NLa 282 (26–30), January 16, 1925. Audiences for her lectures sometimes had as many as 800 members, and at various points during the tour she received formal or informal approaches about teaching posts from Mannes, Eastman, Juilliard, Curtis and Cleveland conservatories.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

31

limitless possibilities they seemed to offer. At the same time, she was troubled by the pace of industrialization and commercialization in the United States, and by what she saw as the anonymity and banality that resulted from too great an investment in speed and profit. Her letters home return incessantly to this problem, often in terms of a conflict between tradition and progress: One has the impression that it can’t last – that everything will disappear, the trees, the sky if possible, to make way for machines, for Industry – I don’t feel myself in my own time here – and this regimentation of houses, of people, without there being any tradition of beauty, seems a terrible thing for America.27

France, even if mangled by the war and hobbled by lack of initiative, was still to her more beautiful, more poetic. By the end of her tour she reassured her mother that despite several alluring offers, a move to the United States would not be her ideal: “No, if I could, what I would like is to found a school in France – one could do such admirable things – taking inspiration from what has been done here …”.28 She imagined a place where progress incorporated the values of beauty as well as efficiency and profit, but where respect for tradition did not stifle. She continued to reflect on these ideas on her return to France: from Vienna three years later, she wrote to Raïssa describing how too great an investment in the past could be stultifying, comparing the “dead civilization” of Austria with the vibrancy of the United States, but concluding that neither achieved her ideal: “On the one hand New York, where memories seem excluded – on the other, this country turned toward the past, where memory is everything.”29 Her observations often reflect conventional period attitudes toward America. But they also reveal how her contact with the United States sharpened her consciousness of the European tradition – all the more precious to her after the destruction and loss of the war – and fed preoccupations that she would later reinterpret in musical terms. The immediate question of where she would pursue her career proved to be moot, however. Raïssa’s accelerating physical decline after Nadia’s return to Paris meant that further American projects were shelved until after her mother’s death in 1935.

27

28

29

“Mais on a l’impression que cela ne peut pas durer – que tout va disparaître, les arbres le ciel si possible, pour faire place aux machines, à l’Industrie – Je ne me sens pas de mon temps ici – et cet enrégimentement des maisons, des gens, sans qu’il y ait une tradition de beauté, me parait terrible pour l’Amérique.” F-Pn NLa 282 (71–76), Chicago, February 5–7, 1925. Similar reflections appear in her letters of January 25, February 2 (when she wrote: “I’ve been treated here as I’ve never been treated in France, but I need … our old streets, our old churches, the Past – how much I miss that here – Yet it is lovely to see life growing”), February 6, February 9, and February 14. F-Pn NLa 282 (89–93), Cincinnati, February 7, 1925: “Non, si je pouvais ce que j’aimerais c’est fonder une école en France – on pourrait faire des choses admirables – en s’inspirant de ce qui a été fait ici …” “D’un coté New York, d’où les souvenirs semblent exclus, de l’autre ce pays tourné vers hier – où les souvenirs sont tout.” NB to Raïssa Boulanger, F-Pn NLa 282 (133–134), June 19, 1928.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

32

the path to the podium Boulanger’s international reputation as a teacher and lecturer was thoroughly consolidated after her 1925 tour. But in the years after her return from America, her career as a keyboard performer flourished less well. She played in a mere handful of concerts, generally as an accompanist or chamber ensemble player and usually for only a portion of the program. None were solo recitals, and none equalled in prestige the appearances with major orchestras she had made in Paris in 1919–20 or during her American tour. Most performances took place in clearly pedagogical contexts, whether in her regular classes or in public lectures such as those sponsored by the École Normale de Musique. Her six-session series on dramatic music at the École in 1926–7 was typical of these events: each lecture was devoted to a single work, extensively illustrated by leading singers from the Parisian lyric theaters, accompanied by Boulanger. Her presentation of Albert Roussel’s Padmâvatî, for example, featured six singers from the Opéra, with the orchestral parts realized at two pianos by Boulanger and her student Marc Blitzstein.30 And although she had by now largely stopped composing herself, Boulanger remained a significant force in new music performance circles. Her position on the comité de lecture of the Société de Musique Indépendante led to regular performances for her students, in which she sometimes participated: as at the Salle Gaveau in May 1927, when she took the piano part in Roy Harris’s Sextet.31 In addition to helping her students to launch their careers, she fought to secure performances for Lili Boulanger’s work, in which her own participation as pianist or organist could serve both to sanction the concert and to add an appealing element of human interest. Most such performances took place in educational institutions, but in 1927 Boulanger played the organ with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, under Monteux’s direction and with Charles Panzéra as tenor soloist, for a concert of French music that included Lili Boulanger’s Psalm 129 and Psalm 24.32 If the late 1920s represented a settling of Boulanger’s activity into a clearly pedagogical groove, the next decade saw a new direction in her work, marked by an explosion of conducting activity in France and abroad. Despite her early professional engagements with Pugno, the real beginning of Boulanger’s conducting career was in the early 1930s, and it was launched with the help of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, one of the most powerful women 30 31

32

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (January 22, 1927). On the SMI, see Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 66–122. Boulanger’s correspondence with the SMI secretary, Charles Kiesgen, in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 138 (1926–33) reveals her influential role in its programming. The program, on January 16, 1927, included works by Roussel, Franck and Duparc. Other concerts in which Nadia performed Lili’s music included those on July 18, 1929 at Fontainebleau, entirely dedicated to Lili’s work; at the École Normale on June 30, 1930, which included Lili’s Vieille Prière bouddhique on a program featuring the Paris première of the string orchestra version of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. All programs figure in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

33

on the early twentieth-century Parisian musical scene. Though they had known each other since at least 1917, their close friendship began to grow in 1932, when a meeting to discuss a commission for Boulanger’s student Igor Markevitch led to an invitation for the princess to attend a group class in the rue Ballu.33 Polignac began attending Boulanger’s “Wednesdays” and rapidly fell under the younger woman’s spell. The performances in Boulanger’s salon led to more elaborate concerts in the princess’s opulent Greek Revival mansion, where she hosted regular musical events, including premieres of the new works she commissioned. Boulanger’s first concert for Polignac in June 1933 garnered reports in the press that helped draw attention to Boulanger’s move into the international performance world inhabited by the princess. Inspired by the experience, they conceived a plan for a regular series of private chamber-music concerts to be directed by Boulanger. The first of these took place on January 8 and 21, 1934, followed by two more in May and June. This established a precedent for the next four years, in which Boulanger organized and directed a set of winter concerts at the princess’s home, sometimes supplemented by one or more concerts in the late spring.34 Singers and players were recruited from among Boulanger’s colleagues and students, but also from performing organizations, such as the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (OSP), who enjoyed the princesse de Polignac’s patronage and financial support.35 In February 1934, Boulanger also began to appear as a conductor in the École Normale’s concert series, which had been launched by Cortot on the completion of the school’s new 400-seat concert hall in 1929.36 Later in the spring, an invitation from Prince Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craon, a regular guest at the Polignac salon, led to a concert for the Cercle Interallié 33

34 35

36

Markevitch was introduced to Polignac through Diaghilev in 1929, and in 1931 she commissioned his Partita for piano and chamber orchestra. See Igor Markevitch, Être et avoir été (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 158–224; and Sylvia Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (University of Rochester Press, 2003), 281–2. Boulanger and Polignac regularly crossed paths at Parisian musical events from 1908 at the latest. Boulanger played for Polignac’s salon in 1917 and possibly in 1921, and attended concerts there in 1923 and 1925. On the growth of their relationship through 1932–3, see Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” 425–31; and Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse, 295–305. Programs and dates for Boulanger’s Polignac concerts are listed in Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” 466–7. See also Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse, 396–404. The OSP, founded in 1928 by Cortot, Ernest Ansermet and Louis Fourestier, and resident in the new Salle Pleyel, was by this time directed by Pierre Monteux. The princesse de Polignac was its principal patron, becoming présidente d’honneur in 1933. OSP programs in F-Pn Arts du Spectacle, 8o RO 5968, list the orchestra’s personnel; further on its early history see Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens, 532–41. The École Normale moved to its current location at 114bis boulevard Malesherbes in 1927. The hall was commissioned from the Perret brothers, architects of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. See Gavoty, Alfred Cortot, 136–7, and Philippe Olivier, “Grande Histoire et petits souvenirs,” in Musique: École Normale de Paris Alfred Cortot, edited by Catherine Laulhère-Vigneau (Paris: Plume, 2002), 119–23. The concert series initially bore the label “concerts privés,” with limited attendance (by membership to the school or its supporting association); in 1935–6 the “private” label was removed, and the opportunity for members of the public to buy tickets was advertised on the programs. From the inception of the series, the concerts were regularly reviewed in the press.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

34

of the Union Interalliée; Boulanger’s first performance there on May 22 was successful enough that the club’s entire series of monthly concerts was turned over to her from the next season.37 The spring of 1934 also marked the beginning of Boulanger’s move from salon and educational settings to more public concert venues in her new role as conductor. In May she and Igor Stravinsky co-conducted a memorial for Blair Fairchild at the Salle Gaveau, and she returned there in June to direct part of a program for the new music series, La Sérénade. In December 1934, for a glittering audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, she shared the podium with Roger Désormière for the inaugural concert of the Orchestre de la Société Philharmonique de Paris.38 These concerts not only garnered widespread attention in France, but also received enthusiastic reviews in the international press, helping to build anticipation for Boulanger’s conducting appearances abroad in the later 1930s.39 This increase in concert appearances came to an abrupt halt with Raïssa Boulanger’s death in March 1935 and the cancellation of all of Nadia’s engagements for the remainder of the season. But the break was only temporary, and from the autumn of 1935 the scale and visibility of her work as a conductor began rapidly to grow. While she continued to work with soloists such as soprano Maria Modradowska, tenor Frédéric Anspach and bass Armand Narçon, who had performed with her in the early 1930s, in the summer of 1935 she recruited a small vocal ensemble that could be more regularly employed for her projects. The core of the group consisted of sopranos Marie-Blanche de Polignac and Gisèle Peyron, mezzos Irène Kédroff and Lucie Rauh, contralto Nathalie Kédroff, tenors Hugues Cuénod and Paul Derenne, and bass Doda Conrad. Boulanger provided keyboard accompaniment when necessary, directing from the piano as she did for her Wednesday classes at the rue Ballu.40 When other instruments were needed, she recruited players from the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris or from among performance teaching staff at the École Normale. From the autumn of 1935, her ensemble performed for private concerts in 37

38

39

40

The Union Interalliée was founded in 1917 as a meeting place for influential men from the Allied countries. For the period 1934–40, press notices and announcements for its activities were mounted into a large scrapbook now in the club’s library. A letter of October 1, 1934 from Beauvau-Craon to the membership announces that Boulanger has taken over responsibility for the concert series. Programs in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (May 18, June 9 and December 18, respectively). The Orchestre de la Société Philharmonique was founded by Cortot to continue the work of the Walter Straram orchestra after its founder’s death. From 1935, it was conducted by Charles Munch. A letter from one of Boulanger’s students describes American reviews of several of her concerts in spring 1934, including the Fairchild memorial, and relays the news that the critic of the New York Times had described Boulanger as “born to the podium.” Jane Campbell to NB, F-Pn NLa 59 (98–99), August 9, 1934. For accounts of how the group was formed, see Doda Conrad, Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe: 44 ans d’amitié avec Nadia Boulanger (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1995), 63–6; Jérôme Spycket, Un diable de musicien: Hugues Cuénod (Lausanne: Payot, 1979), 53–64; Jacqueline Paul Derenne, Une vie en duo (Rouen: Éditions Médianes, 1992), 13–14. Other singers who frequently performed with the group included soprano Madeleine Dubois and bass Nicolas Kiritchenko.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

35

the salons of Isabel and Henry Gouïn, René and Marcelle Dujarric de la Rivière, the Dutch ambassador John Loudon, and Étienne de Beaumont, as well as that of the princesse de Polignac. They regularly appeared in concerts at the Union Interalliée, and in a similar new concert series, the Nadia Boulanger Morning Musicales, begun with the princesse de Polignac’s backing in November 1936 and held at the luxurious Hôtel George V.41 At the same time, they performed for and with Boulanger’s students in her salon, at the École Normale and at Fontainebleau, providing demonstrations of pieces she wished her students to hear, and acting as a pool of soloists for the lectures and concerts in which her students performed. It was not long before Boulanger began to export her performance work abroad (figure 1.1). Her group’s London début was made with a series of

Figure 1.1. Nadia Boulanger in rehearsal, London, 1936. Photo © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger.

41

Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” 442–3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

36

BBC broadcasts and a Queen’s Hall concert in November 1936, and in the spring of 1937 Peyron and Cuénod joined Boulanger for part of a short lecture tour to the United States. In 1938 and 1939, she repeated her London engagements in November, and the entire vocal ensemble accompanied her to America in the spring for more extended tours lasting several months. During their trips, the group not only performed in concert halls but also replicated their Parisian salon performances in English and American music clubs and society homes, such as Dumbarton Oaks, the Washington mansion of Mildred and Robert Bliss. In the United States, they also visited an enormous range of educational institutions – now often staffed by Boulanger’s former pupils – where they interacted with American high school and university students as they had with Boulanger’s pupils at Fontainebleau, the École Normale and the rue Ballu. Although vocal chamber music dominated her concerts of the 1930s, Boulanger’s success soon led to engagements with a much wider range of performers. In Paris she worked principally with recently founded ensembles, or those with a pronounced commitment to new music, such as the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, the Orchestre de la Société Philharmonique de Paris and the Vlassof Russian chorus. But outside France she began to make notable appearances with established mainstream groups. For her 1936 London concert at Queen’s Hall, principals from the London Symphony Orchestra made up the instrumental ensemble. When she and her singers returned the following year, Boulanger became the first woman to conduct the Royal Philharmonic Society in the orchestra’s 126-year history. During her tours of the United States in 1938 and 1939 she became the first woman to conduct some of the oldest orchestras in America – the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra – as well as one of its youngest, the fledgling National Symphony in Washington (figure 1.2). These performances often featured her Parisian singers as vocal soloists, and for some concerts, even in the large halls used by the major symphonic societies, her ensemble performed alone for vocal chamber works on programs otherwise devoted to large-scale choral and instrumental concert repertory. At the same time, Boulanger began once again to concertize as a pianist. She accompanied singers such as Anspach, Marie-Blanche de Polignac, Modrakowska, Cuénod and Conrad, mainly for private song recitals but occasionally for public events.42 Even more frequently, she appeared in tandem with young players who were also her students. These included the violin prodigy Paul Makanovitsky, who had made his public solo début at age 9 in 1929, and whom she accompanied not only for salon performances 42

For example, Maria Modrakowska’s public recital at the École Normale in June 1934, Conrad’s performance of Die schöne Müllerin at the Salle Chopin in January 1937, and Peyron and Cuénod’s program of solos and duets for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in April 1937.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

37

Figure 1.2. Rehearsal for the Fauré Requiem, Boston Symphony, February 1938. Photo © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger.

but also for solo recitals at the Interallié, the École Normale and the Salle Gaveau. Even more numerous were the piano four-hand or two-piano performances she gave with her students Clifford Curzon, Jean Françaix and Dinu Lipatti, in a fascinating gender-reversed version of her own relationship with Raoul Pugno early in her career (figure 1.3). In a few cases the repertory was even the same, with pieces such as Schumann’s Andante and variations – played with Pugno on an all-Schumann program in 1910 – reappearing on concerts with Curzon and Françaix in the 1930s. As Pugno had done for her, she used her considerable influence to further her students’ performance careers, sharing the stage not only for duo recitals but in larger orchestral appearances: conducting Mozart, Brahms and Weber concerti with Curzon as soloist in Paris, for example, and taking Françaix to the United States in 1939 to play his own piano concerto under her direction. From the mid 1930s, Boulanger began not only to export her programs internationally, but also to promote them through developing forms of mass media. From 1935, her concerts for the Union Interalliée were radio

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

38

Figure 1.3.

Nadia Boulanger and Jean Françaix at the piano, United States, spring 1939. Photo © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger.

broadcast through Radio-Paris, a state-owned station devoted to ambitious arts programs.43 In addition to live concert broadcasts, she directed performances especially for radio, as in May 1937 when she recorded a program at the Schola Cantorum for a consortium of stations including Radio-Paris and the BBC.44 Her November 1936 début for the BBC led to return visits in fall 1937 and 1938, and during her American visits Boulanger and her group performed for the flagship station of the National Broadcasting Company’s Blue Network, radio WJZ in New York, broadcasting shorter versions of the same programs they were touring in concert halls.45 American radio networks also often broadcast her live concerts, including large symphonic appearances as well as programs of vocal chamber music such as those she directed at the Library of Congress in April 1939, which were broadcast by the station WMAL and relayed to

43

44 45

From January 1935, Union Interalliée programs mention that the events were being radio broadcast. Radio-Paris was a private station until 1933, when it was purchased by the state: see Christian Brochand, Histoire générale de la radio et de la télévision en France, 2 vols. (Paris: La Documentation Française / Comité d’Histoire de la Radiodiffusion, 1994), Vol. I: 198–223. Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 178. As broadcasts had no printed programs, the repertory must be reconstructed from newspaper listings or from program and timing lists in Boulanger’s archives, such as the “Programmes Concerts” notebook in CNLB (which includes a program list for a radio recording on February 26, 1937) or the lists devoted to BBC and WJZ broadcasts in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

Nadia Boulanger between the wars

39

regional stations all over North America by the NBC Blue Network and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. During the same years, Boulanger began to make her first consistent forays into recording. Although in 1930 she had played for a recording of her sister’s Nocturne with the piece’s dedicatee, violinist Yvonne Astruc, it was not until 1937 that Doda Conrad was able to help Boulanger commit her new ensemble’s work to disc. With financial backing from the princesse de Polignac and a handful of other subscribers, the group made a pioneering recording of Monteverdi’s concerted madrigals. Announced by the Gramophone Company as a “major event in recording” and launched by three concerts at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, which were introduced by the celebrated poet Paul Valéry and sponsored by the newly founded Société Charles Cros, the recording garnered widespread and enthusiastic reception in the European and American press. Its success convinced Boulanger of the value of the enterprise, and she soon returned to the studio to make recordings of Brahms and Schubert chamber works and of Jean Françaix’s piano concerto. Plans were made to record Bach and Fauré, as well as the medieval and Renaissance works that regularly appeared on her concert programs.46 But, just as in 1914, the impetus of Boulanger’s career was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Her BBC and London concert appearances in the fall of 1939 were cancelled, and other plans were put on hold. In summer 1940, she was able to obtain an exit permit and passage from Lisbon to the United States, where her former student Melville Smith had created a post for her at the Longy School in Cambridge. She arrived in America in November 1940 and would remain there until after the end of World War II, unable to return until 1946. Boulanger’s road to the conductor’s podium was very different from that of most of her male contemporaries. Launched from the salon and the classroom, her conducting career did not really begin until she was nearly 50, and depended more heavily on her reputation as an inspirational pedagogue and spokesperson for modern music than on admiration for her performing skill. Even as her activity took on a more public and international face, her work continued to differ from that of other leading conductors and she continued to face unusual barriers. When she contemplated professionalizing her conducting by hiring an agent, she was discouraged and told to keep using her personal connections to generate engagements; her preparation of 46

On Boulanger’s recordings see Elizabeth Giuliani, “Les Enregistrements de Nadia Boulanger: Une conception et une pratique originales de l’interprétation musicale,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 191–202; a complete discography compiled by Giuliani appears on pp. 403–44. See also Cédric Segond-Genovesi, “Lili Boulanger par Nadia Boulanger, 1918–1993: disques, partitions et normes interpretatives,” in Les Musiciens et le disque, edited by Elizabeth Giuliani (Lyons: AFAS-AIBM, Atelier Blaise Adilon, 2009), 25–38.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

The work in performance

40

concert material continued to have a distinctly “fait main” aspect, as armies of her students stepped in to copy scores and prepare parts, in the absence of more official institutional support. But her outsider status, while exacting heavy costs on herself and her entourage, allowed her to carve a unique place for herself in contemporary concert culture.47 Boulanger seemed to burst onto the conducting scene, making the transition from salon performer to international concert and recording artist in the space of a few short years. But in fact her work had been developed through her earlier performance career, and especially through teaching and private performance in the years after World War I. Although increasing experience on the podium, coupled with her already legendary musical ear, brought greater confidence and more fluent performances, Boulanger was not formally trained as a conductor and never had the gestural polish to match many of her male counterparts. It was instead her ability to provide compelling and illuminating explanations of musical works that fascinated the singers and players who worked with her. Hugues Cuénod and Doda Conrad, founding members of her ensemble in the 1930s who sang under Boulanger’s direction for the rest of their careers, both cited her inspirational interpretations as the main reason for their desire to continue performing with her, in their eyes more than making up for any deficiencies she may have had in conducting technique.48 In the following chapters, I investigate the ideas that underpinned her work, showing how they were developed in her interwar teaching and writing, before moving on to explore how she persuasively attached these concepts to important trends in performance style. 47

48

In March 1939, at Boulanger’s request, Lucien Wulsin (president of the Baldwin Piano Company) and Arthur Judson (manager of the New York Philharmonic and former manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as of a stable of international artists) met to discuss whether she should employ a manager now that the number of her engagements was far beyond what she and her students could comfortably handle. In a letter of March 23, Wulsin reported, “Mr Judson feels that you have been exceedingly wise in the way you have handled your own affairs … and he would strongly urge that you continue following the same plans that you have up to the present, because it will mean a greater net financial return for you and will give you the greatest freedom to do what you want which is so essential for your success. … Under your present plan you are in a class by yourself. If you go into the regular concert field, you have to compete with all the other artists.” F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 144, liasse 24. Interviews with the author, January 9, 1991 (Doda Conrad) and May 1, 1993 (Hugues Cuénod). Interwar sources confirm this was a common reaction from performers: a 1933 letter from violinist Rudolf Kolisch, for example, thanked Boulanger profusely for an “unforgettable” evening when “with magnificent enthusiasm, you made [Kolisch’s quartet] understand the music of Fauré” (F-Pn NLa 78 (56), January 2, 1933).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:39:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.003

chapter 2

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

A little over a year after her first column for Le Monde musical, Boulanger opened her review of the Concerts Colonne’s 1920 winter season by calling into question the value of the entire critical enterprise: If one thought for an instant of what a concert represents as intimate gift, throbbing confession, organized power or tragic impotence, one would stop a while at the threshold before entering into that mysterious dwelling, quivering with memories, hopes, suffering and love – and, instead of arming oneself with perspicacity to discover possible flaws, one would prepare oneself to hear the secret, to deserve it and to understand it.1

Despite her misgivings, she did, of course, continue to write after this opening gambit, and she continued to apply her critical skills to the evaluation of performances and – especially – to the consideration of musical works. Among the most striking features of her journalism was her avoidance of detailed commentary on performers in favor of discussing the music, even when the works were well known and arguably in no special need of comment or explanation for her readers. In her next column, for example, she devoted several paragraphs to Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, whose first two movements had been performed at the Concerts Colonne. Boulanger cited the Mass as lesson to the young, who often believe fugue and counterpoint are restrictive; Beethoven’s masterwork shows how in fact these techniques allow unparalleled liberty, through the superposition of independent voices that are subject only to the overall musical idea. She continued: I am frightened to take up the scalpel to dissect that which occupies the realm of mystery and respect. I abominate talking in the sanctuary, and yet sometimes I would like to take certain works note by note, to put each thing in its place and to

1

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 31, nos. 5–6 (March 1920): 89: “Si l’on songeait un instant à ce qu’un concert représente de don intérieur, d’aveu palpitant, de force organisée ou de tragique impuissance, on s’arrêterait un peu sur le seuil avant de pénétrer dans la mystérieuse demeure frémissante de souvenirs, d’espoirs, de souffrance et d’amour – et, au lieu de s’armer de perspicacité pour découvrir les tares possibles, on se préparerait à entendre la confidence, à la mériter et à la comprendre.”

41

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

42

show how the most tumultuous thought does not prevent the grandes lignes from creating themselves . . .2

In her criticism, Boulanger regularly presented musical experience as a mysterious and ultimately unexplainable moment of grace akin to religious ecstasy. Yet in her approach to the musical work, she was an extreme formalist. Her teaching emphasized structure as the principal source of musical meaning, and analysis as the route to musical understanding. Such a blend of sacred concepts and formalist convictions resonated strongly with broader trends in French artistic culture in the decade following World War I. Though Boulanger performed in public herself in the immediate post-war years – even occasionally playing in the same concert series covered by her reviews – her appearances were relatively limited in comparison with the levels she would later achieve, and she was rarely in charge of entire programs or events. Her criticism and teaching materials, however, shed light on the beliefs and aspirations that motivated her later concerts, and which provided the foundation for the historical vision she promoted through performance. In this chapter, I investigate how Boulanger’s ideas about the nature of musical works developed over the course of the 1920s, showing how her approach was inflected both by the post-war turn toward form and by new currents in Catholic theology. This exploration of Boulanger’s concept of the work can show how her commitment to the formally integrated masterpiece meshed with her understanding of the meaning and purpose of musical performance. Understanding what Boulanger thought the musical masterwork to be is a first step to understanding what she thought concerts were for. the architectural masterwork: boulanger and the turn to form Like the Symbolist writers whose poetry she set in her early compositions, Boulanger was an anti-mechanist and anti-positivist. At the same time, she was typical of her own generation in rejecting the emphasis on subjectivity, sensation and fleeting impression that characterized late Romanticism in France. Against both the vapours of Symbolism and the overwrought expressionism they associated with German aesthetics, French artists coming to prominence in the decades after 1900 sought to reclaim a place for reason and order, which they contended were traits of a quintessentially French tradition that had become obscured in the nineteenth century. Though their ideas had already gained considerable ground before World 2

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 31, nos. 9–10 (May 1920): 154–5: “J’ai l’effroi de prendre le scalpel pour disséquer ce qui tient du mystère et du respect. J’ai l’horreur de parler dans le sanctuaire, et pourtant je voudrais parfois prendre certaines oeuvres note à note, pour remettre les choses en place et montrer que la plus tumultueuse pensée n’empêche pas les grande lignes de se créer . . . ”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

43

War I, the strong nationalist sentiments inspired by the conflict, and the deeply felt need to build in the wake of the seemingly wanton destruction it caused, helped to fuel the post-war retour à l’ordre, whose effects marked new work in literature, art, music and design.3 The aesthetics that emerged from this environment was strongly characterized not only by emphasis on order and clarity, but also by commitment to the integrity and selfsufficiency of form. And concepts of form in the arts reflected a wider trend that marked developments in virtually every intellectual field of the early twentieth century: a tendency to think in terms of structures and surfaces and to locate meaning in unchanging, “deep” structural elements. Among the most consistent traits of its manifestation across different artistic domains was the claim that great art entailed the integration of external elements with underlying, directive structural principles. This ideal was often summed up in one of the most potent words in contemporary aesthetic discourse: architecture. This single term, Architectures, was the title of Louis Suë and André Mare’s monumental anthology of contemporary art produced for the Salon d’Automne of 1920. A luxury publication printed on handmade paper in grand aigle format (twice the size of a normal folio), it was a manifesto for their recently founded design firm, the Compagnie des Arts Français, which brought like-minded artists together to promote a shared aesthetic that prioritized the subordination of color and ornament to underlying geometric and architectural principles. Boulanger knew their work first hand: Suë was active as an opera designer, producing the décors for Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in 1921, and among the firm’s most influential projects was the showroom for the Parisian couturier Jean Patou, where Boulanger bought concert gowns in the early 1920s.4 As its title page declares, Architectures was intended to present “works of architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture and engraving, contributing since 1914 to the formation of the French style.”5 It was the first volume in a projected series that would present “a choice of new works, taken from all the domains of art . . . which, in their free diversity, bear witness to the durability of the architectonic laws to which all the

3

4

5

On the architectural emphasis in French cultural discourse as a response to the war, see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de corps: Art of the Parisian Avant-garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton University Press, 1989), 186–218. On the firm’s early work, see Florence Camard, Suë et Mare et la compagnie des arts français (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 1993), 105–8. Boulanger noted fittings at Patou in her diary during the spring of 1923 (see for example F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 91, March 19, 1923); Süe and Mare also designed perfume bottles and other objects for Patou. Louis Süe and André Mare, eds., Architectures (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921), title page: “ouvrages d’architecture, décoration d’intérieure, peinture, sculpture et gravure, contribuant depuis mil neuf cent quatorze à former le style français.” The book was presented in avantpremière at the 1920 Salon d’Automne; see Camard, Suë et Mare, 99. See also Silver, Esprit de corps, 368–72.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

44

masterpieces of all time are subject.”6 Each volume would itself be a work of art, including not only images, but also a piece on aesthetics by a leading writer. The text would not be an explanation of the images; instead the illustrations would function as a “free commentary supporting the ideas expressed” so that the different elements would work together to promote “modern life according to the measure of French reason.”7 Boulanger’s friend and neighbor, the poet Paul Valéry, was commissioned to produce the literary contribution to the first (and, in the end, only) volume in the series.8 His prose dialogue, Eupalinos, ou l’architecte, not only took architecture as its subject but was spatially designed to fit the book, using a precise number of letters (115,800) determined by the number of pages, their engravings and borders, font size and other visual elements. Though Architectures contains no music per se, Valéry’s Eupalinos features an extended meditation on architecture and music. Here Valéry builds on concepts that had emerged in nineteenth-century aesthetics – such as Goethe’s comparison of architecture to “frozen music,” and Hanslick’s idea of music as sonically moving form – to produce a poetics of structure. Eupalinos would become one of the poet’s most influential prose works, republished throughout the 1920s along with a related dialogue, L’Âme et la danse, which was produced for La Revue musicale – like Architectures, a publication of the Nouvelle Revue Française – in 1921.9 Both dialogues are symptomatic of the assumptions about interconnections between the arts that pervaded French post-war aesthetics. This was the climate in which musical neoclassicism unfolded in the 1920s, and among its principal features was the promotion of a sonic version of the architectural ideal.10 6

7

8

9 10

Promotional leaflet, Architectures, c. 1920: “un choix d’oeuvres nouvelles, prises dans tous les domaines de l’art . . . qui, dans leur libre diversité, témoignassent de cette pérennité des lois architectoniques auxquelles sont soumis les chefs-d’oeuvres de tous les temps.” Copies of the leaflet and subscription form are bound into the front of the example of Architectures at F-Pn Rés. Atlas V57. On architecture as the “constructive metaphor” dominating post-war artistic production, and its links to the reality of French reconstruction efforts in the 1920s, see Silver, Esprit de corps, 185. Promotional leaflet, Architectures: “Ce texte littéraire ne sera pas une explication des gravures. Cellesci, au contraire, viendront comme un libre commentaire à l’appui des idées exprimées, afin que tout dans cette publication, texte, images et documents, concoure à faire cadrer le décor et l’ornement de la vie moderne aux mesures de l’intelligence française.” Valéry and Boulanger probably first met between 1900 and 1914 through the poet’s wife Jeannie Rouart, a fellow pupil of Raoul Pugno’s. See Brian Stimpson, “Nadia Boulanger et le monde littéraire,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 150–6; and Robert Pickering, “À la recherche des rapports Nadia Boulanger – Paul Valéry: Les Ressorts d’une affinité privilégiée,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, edited by Laederich, 157–70. On the publishing history of both dialogues, see Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, edited by Jean Hytier, 2nd edn., 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1992–93), 2: 1400–10. The most extensive study of musical neoclassicism remains Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). On the development of musical neoclassicism in relation to other arts, see Maureen A. Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 1–22; on connections to contemporary work in fashion and design, see Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 178–201.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

45

Boulanger’s application of the architectural principle to music was reflected in concepts integral to her pedagogy and criticism of the early 1920s. The most important was “la grande ligne”: a term she used to describe the structural unfolding of music over time. Implied in her use of the phrase was also the sense of large-scale forward movement, continuity and inevitability that accompanied this unfolding. In August 1920, she wrote to Marcelle de Manziarly: I have also been thinking a lot about music, and the more I do, the more I am certain, not that I’m right, no . . . but that I believe profoundly, definitively in what has been formed through so many years heavy with pain, happiness, hope and memory. The more that music, however complicated it is internally, gives off a pure, true line, the more intelligible it is – and that’s why nine out of ten developments, which are not integral parts of the form, but some sort of filler for the blank spaces between the essential points, are false and wearisome.11

Boulanger began to use the term la grande ligne to refer to the “pure, true line” that arises from the integration of content and form, and it would become a trademark concept for the rest of her career. By 1924 it was so familiar to Boulanger’s students that Aaron Copland’s former flatmate, Harold Clurman, could close a letter to her with inquiries for news of Parisian friends and include “La Grande Ligne” as a person on the list; Copland himself would later characterize it as “the be-all and end-all of every composer’s existence.”12 The idea of the grande ligne required more than hortatory repetition to become an effective teaching concept, however. The need for demonstration led Boulanger to propose it as a concept that could be applied in an exemplary fashion to past masterworks, in analyses that aimed to demonstrate the relationship of smaller units to the large-scale continuity represented by the grande ligne. In a 1925 letter to Manziarly, Boulanger used music by Fauré to explain how short- and mid-term musical processes must be subordinated to long-range goals, and how overall coherence results from the imposition of proportion and order at a structural level: 11

12

F-Pn NLa 289 (66–7), August 21, 1920: “J’ai aussi beaucoup pensé à la musique et plus je vais, plus je suis certaine, non pas d’avoir raison, cela . . . mais de croire profondément définitivement ce qui s’est formé au cours de tant d’années lourdes de douleur, de bonheur, d’espérance et de souvenir. Plus la musique, quelle que soit la complication intérieure dégage une ligne pure, vraie, plus elle est intelligible – et voilà pourquoi neuf développements sur dix qui ne sont pas partie intégrante de la forme, mais remplissages quelconques d’espaces vides entre des points essentiels, sont faux et ennuyeux.” Clurman to NB, F-Pn NLa 62 (302–304), July 4, 1924. On how the idea figured in her teaching, see Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 67. Copland discussed la grande ligne in What to Listen for in Music (1939, based on lectures delivered in 1936–7 and compiled with the help of a younger Boulanger pupil, Elliott Carter), as a concept from his student days in Paris, without identifying Boulanger as the source of the phrase (see Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music, 2nd edn. Foreword and Epilogue by Alan Rich, Introduction by William Schuman (London: Signet Classics, 1988), 25).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

46

Analyze a masterpiece like the first movement of Fauré’s quintet. From one column to another, the play of volumes alternates with such harmony that at first the deliberate and magnificent regulation seems to be obvious – but, look closer – and you will see that beyond the lines that at first appear, longer lines carry on that are to music like directing principles are to faith, then there are smaller lines, at first unnoticed, that bring discreet confirmations, which prolong and sharpen the sense – And on one hand, in the end there is nothing but a very simple, uninterrupted form; on the other, an infinity of details that, regulated according to the entire group, each form a perfect whole.13

Boulanger’s own analyses from this period employed different ways of representing the “very simple, uninterrupted form” at the heart of the masterwork. In her extensively annotated copies of the cantata volumes of the Bach Gesellschaft, for example, the grande ligne sometimes appears as a literal horizontal line, above and below which sections of a movement are represented by proportional curves.14 The abstracted image resembles a continuous form in undular movement, like a sea monster dipping above and below an imaginary water line. In other cases, the sections figure as horizontal lines arranged on a vertical axis. In both types of drawing, further curved lines arc across the figures to underline harmonic or thematic connections between related sections, and roman numerals or pitch names indicate tonal centers. In addition to indications of long-range harmonic movement and thematic return, both kinds of analysis involve measure counting, and efforts to represent relative duration through the size of the lines or curves. In each case, the “simple uninterrupted form” – whether represented by a horizontal line read from left to right, or implied by a reading from top to bottom of the vertical diagram – is broken down into a “play of volumes,” differently proportioned units or blocks that are distinguished by tonal center, thematic material or both. Both kinds of diagram appear in the margins of the opening page of the duet “Wie will ich mich freuen” from the cantata Wie müssen durch viel Trübsal (figure 2.1). At the top of the page is a phrase-structural analysis, which divides the duet into three levels and two palindromic sections. 13

14

F-Pn NLa 289 (127–31), October 5, 1925: “Analyse un chef d’oeuvre comme le 1er mouvement du quintette de Fauré. D’une colonne à l’autre, le jeu des volumes se balance avec une telle harmonie que d’abord la volontaire et magnifique ordonnance semble n’être qu’une évidence – or, regarde de plus près – et tu verras qu’au-delà des lignes d’abord apparues, se poursuivent des lignes plus longues qui sont à la musique ce que sont à la foi les principes directifs, puis des lignes plus petites, d’abord inaperçues, qui apportent des discrètes confirmations, qui prolongent et précisent le sens – Et d’un coté, il ne reste à la fin qu’une forme très simple, ininterrompue, de l’autre une infinité de détails qui, s’ordonnant à l’ensemble, forment chacun un tout parfait.” Copland later confirmed Boulanger’s use of Fauré to illustrate the grande ligne, telling Edward Cone in 1967 that “The principal model she held up at all times was Fauré, and the idea of the long line” (see Aaron Copland, A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–72, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2004), 349). Boulanger received her Gesellschaft as a gift at the age of twelve (see Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 45); it is currently housed in F-LYc. Though it can be difficult to tell exactly when her analyses were made, many of the Bach diagrams are in her early hand and were certainly completed by the early 1920s.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

47

Figure 2.1. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Wie will ich mich freuen” from BWV 146, Wie müssen durch viel Trübsal (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 15 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880), 178. F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 30 UFNB. Photo © Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon, Médiathèque Nadia Boulanger.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

48

Curves alternating above and below the horizontal line, sized proportionally to their duration in number of bars, represent smaller divisions. Larger arcs that connect the mirroring elements of the palindrome represent the higherlevel formal pattern. The second, vertical diagram at the bottom left of the page produces a more complex analysis of this structure. It further breaks down the units into antecedent and consequent elements; shows the tonal trajectory, labelling each section by both key and function; and indicates musical forces (“orch” for instrumental passages, and “ch” for vocal entries). Annotations to the score itself show principles of melodic reduction in operation: the letters above the staff mark the opening orchestral ritornello as a descent from the tonic, F, initially proceeding bar by bar, and then extended and decorated in the final A–G preparation for the tonic return in bar 11, where a second iteration of the descent begins. Numerous variations on the two basic types of diagram feature throughout Boulanger’s Gesellschaft. That for the aria “Erfühlet ihr himmlischer göttlichen Flammen,” for example, combines elements of both kinds of analysis in a single vertical form (figure 2.2). It represents the large tripartite formal division with square brackets and the corresponding number of bars on the right of the diagram, while further curved lines to both right and left identify larger periods articulated by thematic return or tonality. Smaller divisions and subdivisions figure as horizontal planes that are packed with information about temporal proportion, phrase construction, tonal areas and musical forces. For the aria “Durchs feuer,” a horizontal phrasestructural analysis (similar to the one for “Wie will ich mich freuen,” though implying a dual rather than three-level hierarchy), is augmented with pitch names of tonal centers, and square brackets underneath the diagram focus attention on the repeated A section of the da capo form (figure 2.3). Boulanger applied the same methods to her interpretation of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, Op. 48, a piece that would accrue an iconic importance in her life. As Fauré’s pupil, she had frequently substituted for him at the organ of the Madeleine, where the composer was titulaire and the Requiem was first performed.15 It was used both for the elaborate funeral of Raoul Pugno in 1914 and the even larger state funeral following Fauré’s death in 1924, at which Boulanger was the only female speaker.16 In an article published in a 1922 special number of La Revue musicale devoted to Fauré, she claimed that the Requiem was not only one of the composer’s best works, but one of the greatest works of all time. “There are none that are greater, none that are purer, none that are more definitive,” she wrote, and the piece continued to be a

15

16

On Boulanger’s studies with Fauré, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, “Nadia Boulanger: La Rencontre avec Gabriel Fauré,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 33–47. Boulanger’s funeral address for Fauré was published, along with those by D’Indy, Bruneau, Dukas, and Vidal, in Comoedia 4339 (18 November 1924): 2, and MM 35, nos. 21–22 (November 1924): 365.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

49

Figure 2.2. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Erfühlet ihr himmlischer göttlichen Flammen” from BWV 1, Wie schön leuchtet die Morgenstern (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851), 36). F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 01 UFNB. Photo © Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon, Médiathèque Nadia Boulanger.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

50

The work in performance

Figure 2.3. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of J. S. Bach, “Durchs feuer” from BWV 2, Ach Gott, von Himmel (Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851), 68). F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 01 UFNB. Photo © Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon, Médiathèque Nadia Boulanger.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

51

central plank in her advocacy of Fauré’s music for the rest of her life.17 Boulanger used a copy of the orchestral score affectionately signed by her teacher throughout her performing career; starting in January 1920, when she was the organist for the Requiem at the Société des Concerts at the Paris Conservatoire, she entered details of each notable performance on the first page and flyleaf.18 Her score includes many layers of performance markings added at different times, but largely postdating the analytical diagrams drawn into the margins at the beginning of each movement. These may have been made during the preparation of her article for La Revue musicale, although the early handwriting suggests they could have been completed some years before. All of the diagrams use the vertical form she often employed in her Bach cantata analyses, identifying each movement’s main sections and their tonal orientation, and including the number of bars over the horizontal lines that represent each section. The resulting pictures furnish a simplified, snapshot view of the proportions of each movement, and, as in her Bach diagrams, they reduce the harmonic structure to tonal basics: in Fauré’s Kyrie, for example, the repeated movement from the D minor tonic, to the major and minor forms of the dominant, to the relative major, and back to D minor (figure 2.4). The clarity of design as represented by the drawings could be used to support her contention in La Revue musicale that the Requiem’s “musical weave, its architecture, its reason and its order, are the essential causes of its sovereign beauty.”19 But, within this basic tonal framework, Fauré uses modal inflections and an expanded tonal palette to suggest frequent and rapid modulation, often to remote areas, and unexpected routes of return. This inventive manipulation of local harmonic events is the most striking element of his musical style. For example, at the end of Kyrie, as Boulanger herself described, “The return to the principal tonality after curves that resemble modulations, and modulations that are nothing but contrapuntal arabesques, is of a completely Fauréan grace.”20 She was referring to the final seven-measure 17

18

19 20

NB, “La Musique religieuse,” ReM 4, no. 11 (special number on Gabriel Fauré) (1922): 110/302 (dual pagination): “Le Requiem est non seulement une des plus grandes oeuvres de Gabriel Fauré, mais aussi une de celles qui honorent le plus la Musique et la Pensée. Il n’en est pas de plus grande, il n’en est pas de plus pure, il n’en est pas de plus définitive.” Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre. Partition d’orchestre. Paris: Hamelle, [1901]. The annotated copy is F-Pn Rés. Vma 1938a. On this version and Boulanger’s annotations see: Gabriel Fauré, Requiem Op. 48, edited by Jean-Michel Nectoux, Concert version (1900) (Paris: J. Hamelle / distribution Alphonse Leduc et Cie, 1998), v and 120. Boulanger performed at the Sunday concerts of January 25 and February 1, 1920 under Philippe Gaubert’s direction; the young Charles Panzéra was the baritone soloist. This was the year of Fauré’s retirement as director of the Conservatoire, a post he had held since 1905. Boulanger noted both performance dates in her score, but no program exists in her collection at F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195. For further details see D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828– 1967, http://hector.ucdavis.edu/SdC (accessed January 19, 2008). Boulanger, “La Musique religieuse,” 110/302: “Certes, sa trame musicale, son architecture, sa raison et son ordre, sont les causes essentielles de sa beauté souveraine.” Ibid., 110/302: “Le retour à la tonalité principale après des courbes qui ressemblent à des modulations, et des modulations qui ne sont que des arabesques contrapontiques est d’une grâce toute fauréenne.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

52

The work in performance

Figure 2.4. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), 1. F-Pn Vma 1938a. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

53

section before the coda, a short transitional passage that follows a characteristic plagal cadence onto A major (V). A diminished seventh on F♯ alternates with A7 for the next two bars in chorus and organ, but the pattern is complicated by a looping unison arpeggio in the strings outlining D7, which suggests a different root for the diminished chord and provides a 6–5 suspension against the A sonority (example 2.1). The subsequent bars continue the return to the tonic via a diatonic descending sequence in the bass, harmonized with chords of B♭ major and C augmented, before finally reaching the perfect cadence on D minor that starts the coda. Boulanger Example 2.1. Gabriel Fauré, Kyrie, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (after the orchestral score, Paris: Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 17–20.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

54

The work in performance Example 2.1. (cont.)

analysed the initial F♯ harmony as V of IV in her diagram. But her Revue musicale article underlines the linear rather than straightforwardly harmonic orientation of the passage. In 1925, she would expand on this aspect of Fauré’s music to her American audiences in the presentations at Houston’s Rice Institute that would be published the following year as Lectures on Modern Music: You never know to what key [Fauré] is leading you, but when you reach your tonal destination, there is never any doubt as to its location. Indeed, you feel almost as

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

55

Example 2.1. (cont.)

though it would have been impossible to have gone elsewhere and you wonder only at the beauty of the voyage and at the skill of your guide who, in coming, has led you so quickly and surely through so many lands. The subtlety of Fauré’s transitory modulations, the ease and naturalness with which he alludes to the most remote keys, are the mind’s sheerest delight.21 21

NB, Lectures on Modern Music, Rice Institute Pamphlet 13, no. 2 (1926), 126. On the Rice lectures, see Walter B. Bailey, “Ima Hogg and an Experiment in Audience Education: The Rice Lectureship in Music (1923–33),” Journal of the Society for American Music 5 (2011), 395–426. Boulanger presented French versions of the lectures at the École Normale after her return from America: summaries made by Marc Pincherle from stenographers’ transcripts appeared in MM 37, no. 2 (February 1926): 59–61: “La Musique Moderne” (d’après la sténographie des cours à l’École

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

56

But, according to Boulanger, Fauré treats harmony as “an element of design” (unlike Debussy, who “tends to conceive it rather as a source of color”). However unexpected they may be, Fauré’s inventive and subtle modulations, as well as the major formal divisions they inhabit, are subject to a “long, self-unfolding line” Boulanger claimed the French musician inherited from Bach.22 As an example, she cited the Allegro moderato of the second quintet, the work she would describe later that year in her letter to Manziarly as a masterpiece in its integration of form and content. To her Houston audience, Boulanger explained that Fauré’s handling of harmony – particularly his use of plagal and deceptive cadences, and the relative lack of strong perfect cadences – meant that although the movement is in sonata form, its sections create instead the impression of a “single, uninterrupted melodic line.” She followed this observation with an extended comparison of Fauré’s and Bach’s sensibilities, declaring that both were “inspired by a similar, mystical view of religion and death.”23 Boulanger applied a similar analytical approach and method of representation to new music. The concept of layered activity – at both pitch and rhythmic levels – was particularly useful in presenting Stravinsky. In her third Rice lecture, she claimed that the composer’s works should be understood primarily as music of line. Citing passages from both early ballets and later works (The Rite of Spring, Petrouchka, Les Noces and the Piano Sonata) she showed how the challenging dissonance that unsettled many listeners was, as in Bach, a consequence of linear unfolding, so that attempts to understand it through conventional harmonic analysis were misguided. As she explained, Ever since the days of Haydn and Mozart, our ears have been trained to hear practically in but one direction, that is, vertically and, in consequence, we have more or less lost the art of listening to contrapuntal music, of following lines rather than chords. Even Bach we hear, in large measure, harmonically and are tempted to pay more attention to the vertical concordance, than we do to the contours of his melodies.24

While it is true that harmonies arise from Bach’s conjunction of lines, Boulanger described them as of secondary importance to line; then continued, “In Stravinsky’s music, we are not only confronted by counterpoint, but by counterpoint whose vertical concordances are new and which, being new, naturally draw our attention so forcibly to them that we lose sight of the lines which produced them and which ought to be our chief concern.”25 Instead, “To appreciate such music, it is obvious that we must establish new

22

Normale de Musique); no. 5 (May 1926), 201: “Les Cours de Mlle Nadia Boulanger, à l’École Normale de Musique”; and no. 6 (June 1926), 242–4: “Les Cours de musique moderne de Nadia Boulanger.” Boulanger, Lectures on Modern Music, 128. 23 Ibid., 128–9. 24 Ibid., 179. 25 Ibid., 180–1.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

57

habits of hearing, re-acquire a new sense of the old linear values which were the pride of the Renaissance and the glory of Bach.”26 As in Bach, Stravinsky’s music is characterized for Boulanger by the integration of contrapuntal movement with larger forms. Kimberly Francis has identified an analysis of Stravinsky’s Symphonie des psaumes (1930) in Boulanger’s archive, dating from shortly after the work’s composition and similar to her analyses of Bach and Fauré.27 It was prepared when Boulanger was working with the composer’s son Soulima on the pianovocal score of the work, a project that led to her collaboration with Stravinsky himself on later publications. She apparently offered her analysis to the composer, who discussed and annotated it with her. The analysis divides the piece into sections reading from the top to the bottom of the page. Columns in each section identify the number of quarter notes (on the left), distinctive thematic material (in the middle) and the relationship to the main tonal center, E (on the right). Boulanger and the composer then annotated the vertically oriented diagram with arcs that connect sections featuring related tonal or thematic material. The result is similar to her analyses of Fauré’s Requiem movements, and to the vertical diagrams she produced for Bach cantatas. Francis has argued convincingly that Boulanger’s analysis, which reduces the formidable complexities of Stravinsky’s rhythmic and tonal language to a simple plan, was part of her program of persuasion, aimed at rendering modern music more accessible and promoting analytical reduction as a mode of moving beyond initial doubt or incomprehension toward validation.28 And by using the same analytical method for Stravinsky that she did for Bach or Fauré, Boulanger worked to establish structural coherence as the hallmark of the masterpiece, and the grande ligne as the principle that bridges the historical diversity of musical styles. When Boulanger completed her analyses of Bach’s cantatas and Fauré’s Requiem, the professional university music theorist of the sort that many of her pupils would become was still some distance in the future. Her analytical practice built on organicist approaches developed in the nineteenth century, and probably grew out of methods for teaching form at the Paris Conservatoire, where she was trained. For example, her technique of melodic reduction is consistent with Anton Reicha’s recommendations in his Traité de mélodie (1814), a highly influential text that was used at the Conservatoire throughout the nineteenth century, and her use of upper and lower arcs and brackets in her phrase-structural diagrams recall (if they do

26 27

28

Ibid., 183. Kimberly Francis, “A Dialogue Begins: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphonie de psaumes, 1930–1932,” Women and Music 14 (2010): 22–44. Francis reproduces and transcribes Boulanger’s analysis, held at F-Pn Rés. Vma 984, on p. 37. Ibid., 38.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

58

not duplicate exactly) the graphic aspects of Reicha’s work.29 At the same time, her approach resonates with the methods of structural music analysis as they were developing in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is not too far a stretch to see Boulanger’s description of Fauré’s Quintet as a masterpiece, in her 1925 letter to Manziarly, in relation to the analytical thinking of Heinrich Schenker. Like the Austrian theorist, Boulanger posits a unity created by three integrated layers of musical activity: her “lines that at first appear” could equate to a Schenkerian middleground, supported by a foreground of “discreet confirmations” but relying on a fundamental basis of “longer lines.” Although Boulanger never produced anything like an analytical system herself, the compatibility of her position with the principles underpinning structural analysis in general and Schenkerian methods in particular may have conditioned the later activities of some of her pupils: the first English-language introduction to Schenker’s thought, for example, was a 1933 article in Modern Music written by Israel Citkowitz, recently returned from his studies in Paris with Boulanger (1927–31).30 Her extension of these principles into new music was perhaps even more important: concentration on unity and on the connectedness of linear and tonal elements would continue to mark Stravinsky analysis – particularly of his neoclassical works – until very recently, and it is tempting to see Boulanger at the beginning of the analytical tradition that has privileged a synthesizing and unifying approach to the composer’s works.31 And like other structural approaches of the period, Boulanger’s concept of form also has a pronounced ethical dimension.32 Robert Fink has argued that the surface-depth models that dominate twentieth-century music theory may provide a powerful musical index of, or even defense against, 29

30

31

32

See for example Reicha’s analysis of “Non so più” from Le nozze di Figaro from the Traité (presented and translated in Ian Bent, ed., Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Vol. I: 146–51). Reicha’s diagram of sonata form (which he calls the grande coupe binaire) in his Traité de haute composition musicale (1826) also has some visual resemblance to Boulanger’s drawings; see Scott Burnham, “Form,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 886. I am grateful to Ian Bent and David Charlton for their help with this aspect of Boulanger’s work. Citkowitz continued to teach Schenkerian methods through the 1930s and was among the most influential early promulgators in America. See Robert Wason, “Israel Citkowitz,” Schenker Documents Online, www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/profiles/person/entity_000131.html, accessed January 3, 2012). This has been an especially strong strand of Stravinsky analysis in America, where Boulanger pupils such as Arthur Berger and Pieter van den Toorn have been influential figures. See Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–226 for a consideration of this approach and alternative methods stressing discontinuity, fragmentation or atonality. Francis, “A Dialogue Begins,” 42–3, shows how Boulanger’s view of the Symphonie des psaumes resonates with analytical accounts of the piece by later theorists, including several former students. Boulanger’s analytical practice will be explored in greater depth by Cédric Segond-Genovesi in his PhD dissertation, at the time of writing in progress at Université de la Sorbonne-Paris-IV. See Nicholas Cook, “Schenker’s Theory of Music as Ethics,” Journal of Musicology 7, no. 4 (1989): 415–39. Cook’s work reveals further similarities between Boulanger’s and Schenker’s thinking at the level of aesthetics rather than technique, perhaps another factor in the strong appeal Schenkerian analysis exercised for Boulanger pupils.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

59

modernity’s increasing challenges to “deeply rooted social constructions of individuality, interiority, and class identity.”33 In Boulanger’s case, the solidity of the masterwork as represented by architectural form might be seen not only as imaginary refuge from the physical rubble that littered her country after World War I, but as an antidote to the self-disintegration she experienced in the wake of personal loss. This interpretation seems to be supported by Boulanger’s 1920 letter to Manziarly, where her assertion of the primacy of line begins with a credo describing how difficult years, “heavy with pain, happiness, hope and memory,” have led her to belief, and the certainty represented by the hierarchically organized, fully coherent and stable masterwork.34 And in her 1925 letter to Manziarly, Boulanger’s comparison of the role of the longer lines of music to the guiding principles of faith brings a discussion that at first glance seems entirely technical into the moral realm, in a move endowing the masterpiece with sacred authority through the operation of its design.35 listening to the temple: singing architecture and living form Boulanger’s emphasis in the Rice lectures on hearing linear values reveals another important overlap between her work and contemporary structuralanalytical thinking: Boulanger’s analyses are not principally about how masterworks are, but how you are to experience them. Her teaching relied on concepts essential to “structural listening,” a practice persuasively analyzed by Rose Rosengard Subotnik, who has shown how writings by figures such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Adorno promoted this approach.36 This mode of listening assumes musical works to be founded on coherent, integrated and self-unfolding structures that can be objectively determined and whose presence acts as an implicit guarantee of value. A crucial premise is the listener’s ability to perceive musical structures and to understand how they convey meaning in isolation from the social circumstances of a work’s generation or subsequent performance, and from the elements of sound and style that Subotnik has loosely characterized by the word “medium.” Boulanger’s understanding of how this process worked was congruent with visions of architectural form that emerged from French aesthetics in the early 1920s, and in particular with understandings of time and perception that then pervaded Parisian discourse on the arts. 33 34 36

Robert Fink, “Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface,” in Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford University Press, 1999), 107. F-Pn NLa 289 (66–7), August 21, 1920. 35 F-Pn NLa 289 (127–31), October 5, 1925. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 148–252. See also Andrew Dell’Antonio, ed., Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), especially Dell’Antonio’s preface at pp. 1–12, and John Butt, “Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener? Towards a Theory of Musical Listening,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (2010): 5–18.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

60

In all of her analyses, Boulanger’s attempts to represent temporal proportions show a particular concern with the relationship of structural design to the unfolding of musical time. While similar questions had occupied musical aesthetics for many years, this was a particular concern of French musicians in the decades after the publication of Henri Bergson’s most influential work, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). Bergson here attempted to reconcile science and metaphysics, proposing a dual division of consciousness into “intellect,” a pragmatic strand occupied with external expressions and observations, and “intuition,” a deep self capable of directly experiencing realities not available to empirical investigation. Each was characterized by its own mode of understanding and experiencing time: the intellect by mechanical or mathematical time, a borrowing from the world of space and matter that allows time to be enumerated and measured; and intuition by durée, the time of pure consciousness and location of psychic states such as habit, volition and memory. Importantly, durée was also the site of creative energy, and Bergson regularly used aesthetic images – especially musical ones – to describe its qualities. Bergson also speculated on the sensation of time created by art, observing that the experience was completely different from that of ordinary life and thus closer to durée in nature. Musical rhythm and meter, through “oscillation,” suspend the listener’s normal ideas and perceptions of time to impose a time of its own creating. In this, Bergson concludes, it is like architecture, where repeated motifs oscillate in such a way as to absorb the spectator’s attention and subsume it into a dynamic yet self-contained state outside consciousness of one’s own personality.37 Bergson’s impact on the French intellectual landscape was immense: by the end of World War I the Essai was already in its seventeenth edition, and Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France had become subject to cult-like devotion, attended by hundreds of listeners, including not only philosophy students but writers, journalists and socialites. His ideas were especially significant for Catholic activists of the 1920s, and were also applied in art criticism, history, and many other fields more or less connected to the philosophical debates in which his arguments originated.38 Boulanger regularly cited passages from Bergson in her teaching, and several of her Parisian contemporaries explored musical applications of his work in print. Best known today are Pierre Souvchintsky’s speculations on time in musical composition, published in a 1939 special number of La Revue musicale 37 38

A. E. Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 1976), 140. Pilkington shows how Valéry uses the notion of “oscillation” in the same way. On the publication of the Essai, see Henri Bergson, Oeuvres, edited by André Robinet, Introduction by Henri Gauthier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1489. For a cultural history of Bergson’s impact, see R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (University of Calgary Press, 1988). I have been unable to determine whether Boulanger ever attended Bergson’s lectures, though many of her friends – for example, Mildred Bliss – certainly did.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

61

dedicated to the work of Stravinsky; these ideas were taken up by the composer himself in the 1939–40 Harvard lectures that would become his Poétique musicale.39 Boulanger was deeply involved in the genesis of Stravinsky’s text and cited it frequently in her later teaching. The passages on musical form, time and architecture in Stravinsky’s Chroniques de ma vie also provided support for her later work.40 But more significant for her approach in the 1920s were Bergson’s writing on musical experience, and reactions to Bergsonian ideas by the musician and philosopher Gabriel Marcel, and her friend and former classmate, the composer Charles Koechlin. In essays for the Revue musicale in 1925–6, both Marcel and Koechlin took Bergson’s association of music with durée as a starting point. Although Bergson himself showed little interest in questions of form, Marcel’s and Koechlin’s discussions extend Bergsonian concepts of time to embrace notions of music as sounding form in motion that had occupied musical aesthetics since Hanslick. Bergsonian durée concerns interpenetrating rather than successive states, which Bergson compared to the notes in a melody, perceived by consciousness as a continuous unfolding. Marcel concurred that music could not be reduced to disconnected instants, but contended that in its unfolding, music displayed both organization and form: the pure duration of music in the listener’s mind is doubled by a perception of form, but as a dynamic rather than static entity.41 Koechlin’s discussion also reintroduced elements of space into a concept of musical time based on durée: Auditory time is certainly that which most closely approaches pure duration; but it does not appear without some relationship to space, in that it seems to us to be measurable (to the ear) and divisible. The divisions given by note values (whole notes, half notes, quarters, etc.), produce a spatialization of time, but very different from the one (based on sight) considered by Mr. Bergson. Furthermore, on the 39

40 41

Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du Temps et de la Musique,” ReM 191, special number on Igor Stravinsky (1939): 70/310–80/20; see Valérie Dufour, “La Poétique musicale de Stravinsky: Un manuscrit inédit de Souvtchinsky,” Revue de musicologie 89 (2003): 373–92 for an account of Souvtchinsky’s role in Stravinsky’s text. On French applications of Bergson to music, see Jann Pasler, “Experiencing Time in the Quartet for the End of Time,” in “La la la . . . Maistre Henri”: Mélanges de musicologie offerts à Henri Vanhulst, edited by Christine Ballman and Valérie Dufour (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 477–80; Pasler, “Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents and the Dialectic of Discontinuity and Continuity in Debussy’s Jeux,” Musica Scientiae 3, special issue, Aspects of Time in the Creation of Music, edited by Max Paddison and Irene Deliège (2004): 125–40. On how new non-linear modes of understanding time were exploited in the 1920s, see David Trippett, “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme,” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 522–80. Bergson’s distinction between clock time and experiential time has continued to inform recent studies, such as David Epstein’s Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance (New York: Schirmer, 1995). Igor Stravinsky [Strawinsky], Chroniques de ma vie, 2 vols. (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935), Vol. I: 117–18. Gabriel Marcel, “Bergsonisme et musique,” ReM 6 (1925): 219–29; see Pasler, “Experiencing Time in the Quartet for the End of Time,” 477–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

62

topic of measuring duration, musical memory has a role whose importance seems to have eluded many people.42

That is, music creates temporal relations governed by measure and proportion, and the musical ear can understand relations between rhythmic values and metrical proportions in a mode similar to Bergson’s mathematical time. At the same time, Koechlin maintains, music creates a sensation of continuity, a time of its own construction that approaches pure Bergsonian durée. Since musical perception produces both the impression of continuing duration and of divisibility, he concludes that “time, in music, participates simultaneously in Bergsonian ‘quality’ and in a ‘quantity’ comparable to that of space.”43 Koechlin does not speculate on how elements such as tonality or thematic return contribute to this perception. Nevertheless the notion of musical time as simultaneously a kind of pure duration similar to the time of consciousness, and a kind of measurable, spatialized time that can be segmented and whose blocks can be subdivided and arranged in different ways, seems very close to the proportional notion of time that emerges from Boulanger’s analytical diagrams and comments on musical works. Such a concept of time can embrace both the continuous “long, selfunfolding line” comprehended in her expression la grande ligne, and the returns and symmetries that give architectural coherence to musical form. Boulanger attempted to explain her own understanding of how musical masterworks create the sense of both dynamism and monumentality not through music-theoretical or philosophical language, but by literary citations. Among her most frequently used teaching techniques was to follow a technical explanation with a citation from a favorite author that provided an interpretive gloss or analogy for her musical point. Her archives are full of citations copied by Boulanger and others onto small pieces of paper and into notebooks, and her correspondence often refers to the exchange of memorable passages; students in later years attempted to collect some of their teacher’s most frequently used quotes into a single document. Similarly, her concert reviews and articles mix observations on music with literary citations and allusions: her 1922 article on Fauré’s sacred music is typical in beginning with a quote from Goethe and ending with one from Charles 42

43

Charles Koechlin, “Le Temps et la musique,” ReM 7, no. 3 (1926): 46: “Le temps auditif est sans doute celui qui se rapproche le plus de la durée pure; d’ailleurs il n’apparaît point sans quelque rapport avec l’espace, en ce qu’il nous semble mesurable (à l’oreille), et divisible. Les divisions que donnent les valeurs musicales (rondes, blanches, noires) etc., conduisent à une spatialisation du temps, mais fort différente de celle (basée sur la vue) que considère M. Bergson. En outre, au sujet de la mesure de cette durée, le rôle de la mémoire musicale possède une importance qui semble échapper à bien des personnes.” Koechlin had already speculated on Bergsonian concepts in an earlier piece, “D’une vaine dispute: La Musique plaisir de l’esprit ou jouissance sensuelle,” ReM 2 (1921): 219–41. Both pieces are edited in Écrits: Ésthétique et langage musical, edited by Michel Duchesneau (Liège: Mardaga, 2006), 159–79 and 225–40. Koechlin’s and Marcel’s articles were taken up by Susanne K. Langer in Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 104–19, in the context of support for Schenkerian theory. Koechlin, “Le Temps et la musique,” 51.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

63

Maurras. But the author most frequently cited in her discussions of form was Valéry. In her expanded treatment of Fauré’s music for the 1925 Rice lectures, Boulanger used a citation from L’Âme et la danse – on the enduring forms that can be abstracted from the dancer’s fleeting movements – to explain the effects of the composer’s formal coherence: [Fauré] has the Greek’s sense of measure and sobriety. Like Plato, he feels a sort of ecstasy before the austere though sensuous beauty of form or line. [. . .] One is reminded of Valéry’s phrase, “I look upon this woman who is walking and yet who gives me a sense of immobility”. (Je contemple cette femme qui marche et qui me donne le sentiment de l’immobilité.)44

This passage not only illustrates the simultaneously monumental and dynamic qualities of form that Boulanger wishes to attribute to Fauré’s work, but also conveys them in terms of their effect on the spectator. And it was to Valéry that she turned when she wanted to expand on this topic. In the early pages of Eupalinos, Valéry’s interlocutors, Socrates and Phaedra, establish the mysterious connections between music and architecture. Phaedra relates her conversations with the great architect Eupalinos of Megara on the difference between ordinary buildings and masterworks. His own temple to Hermes, Eupalinos says, is the mathematical image of a young woman from Corinth whose proportions he has imitated in a building that takes on her living quality. Phaedra replies that entering his temple she feels the harmony of the person who inspired it; the sensation is like a nuptial song, accompanied by flutes, that sounds in her mind. Eupalinos says that she has touched on a great truth and a great mystery, and continues, “Tell me (since you are so sensitive to the effects of architecture), have you not observed, in walking around the city, that among the edifices that people it, there are some that are mute; others speak; and still others, which are the most rare, sing?”45 This acts as prelude to Valéry’s extended comparison of architecture to music, in which he attempts to establish how both arts create the sensation of life through the ingenious proportions of their forms. From very soon after its publication, Boulanger began to cite Eupalinos in her lectures. She was particularly drawn to Valéry’s comparisons of the effect of music and architecture, which the poet cast as a sensation of mobile 44

45

Boulanger, Lectures on Modern Music, 126. The passage follows the entry of the principal dancer in L’Âme et la danse. Eryximaque says that although walking is for most people a way to get somewhere, for the dancer it is instead a perfect form. She places her steps symmetrically, her body flowing in harmony with each pace, so that her walk takes on monumental qualities; the size of her steps is adjusted to their number, which emanates from music. Socrates replies that he now understands the universal pattern that can be abstracted from her physical motion, and makes the observation that Boulanger cites. Valéry, Oeuvres, Vol. II: 157–8. Boulanger misquotes the passage: Valéry’s text reads, “et qui me donne le sentiment de l’immobile” (not “immobilité”). Valéry, Oeuvres, Vol. I: 93: “Dis-moi (puisque tu es si sensible aux effets de l’architecture), n’as-tu pas observé, en te promenant dans cette ville, que d’entre les édifices dont elle est peuplée, les uns sont muets; les autres parlent; et d’autres enfin, qui sont les plus rares, chantent?”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

64

immobility similar to that created by the dancer’s movements in L’Âme et la danse. Yet Valéry claimed in Eupalinos that music and architecture share something that distinguishes them from the other arts, because the spectator or listener is enveloped by the work rather than outside it looking on. When inside a temple, we live the proportions its architect has chosen. Music has the same effect because sound is all around us. Valéry has Socrates assert that music transforms place into intelligible space built from time itself.46 The listener inhabits “a moving edifice, unceasingly renewed and reconstructed within itself.”47 Yet music also seems to exist separately from the listener, so that one can perceptually move away and then return to it: “All this mobility thus forms a sort of solid. It seems to exist in and of itself, like a temple built around your soul.”48 In the lengthy passage from Eupalinos that she quoted for her Houston audience in 1925, Boulanger presented Fauré’s masterworks as such temples, whose proportions could produce a feeling akin to love: Fauré is indeed an “Attic musician”, and one might very well think that these lines from “Eupalinos”, which describe with such penetrating subtlety the spirit of Greek architecture, were intended rather for [Fauré], so vividly do they suggest his idea of modulation, his sense of balance and proportion: “Like those orators and poets of whom you were thinking a moment ago, [Eupalinos] knew, O Socrates, the virtue of imperceptible modulations. Before his delicately lightened masses, in appearance, so simple, no one was conscious of the fact that, by these insensible curves, these minute but all powerful inflexions and by these profound combinations of the regular and irregular which had been introduced, hidden and rendered as imperious as they were indefinable, he was being led to a sort of happiness. They made the moving spectator docile to their invisible presence, caused him to pass from vision to vision, from absolute silence to murmurs of pleasure in proportion as he advanced, retreated, or approached again to wander, moved by its beauty, and the puppet of admiration, within the radius of the building. ‘It is necessary’, said this man of Megara, ‘that my temple move men as they are moved by the objects of their love’.”49

46

47 48 49

Ibid., Vol. II: 102. Socrates asks if, when hearing the orchestra, “Did it not seem as if the original space was replaced with an intelligible and mutable space; or rather, that time itself surrounded you from all sides?” (“Ne te semblait-il pas que l’espace primitif était substitué par une espace intelligible et changeant; ou plutôt, que le temps lui-même t’entourait de toutes parts?”) Ibid., Vol. II: 102: “un édifice mobile, et sans cesse renouvelé, et reconstruit en lui-même.” Ibid., Vol. II: 103: “Toute cette mobilité forme donc comme un solide. Elle semble exister en soi, comme un temple bâti autour de ton âme.” Boulanger, Lectures on Modern Music, 130. For the original French, see Valéry, Oeuvres, Vol. II: 86–7. Boulanger quoted this passage throughout her career: several manuscript copies exist in her papers preserved at CNLB, including a very early and especially worn example on the blackbordered paper she used in the years just after Lili’s death. Pincherle’s account of Boulanger’s lectures in “Les Cours,” May 1926, 201, describes how she urged students to expand their literary horizons as part of their musical training, concluding, “I know of no more insightful analysis of Fauré’s genius than the one she draws out, by analogy, from Paul Valéry’s marvellous Eupalinos” (“Et je ne connais pas d’analyse plus pénétrante du génie fauréen que celle qu’elle extrait, par analogie, du merveilleux Eupalinos de Paul Valéry”).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

65

A year later, Koechlin would similarly use Eupalinos as a tool in explaining the relationship between form and feeling in Bach. In his 1926 article “Le ‘retour à Bach’,” a significant intervention in contemporary polemics around neoclassicism, he claimed that the picture of Bach emerging from some critical camps as a composer of “pure,” abstract, and thus inexpressive, music was erroneous. If Bach did not engage in the type of emotionalism familiar from nineteenth-century harmony, a different kind of relation to human feeling arises from his music: “[his music is] in some sense, internally expressive, through the charm of the lines and the beauty of the proportions. Thus, in music, there are architectures that only speak . . . those of Bach sing, precisely because of their emotion.”50 For much of the late twentieth century Valéry was cast as an uncompromising formalist, whose beliefs on the autonomy of art placed him at the beginning of an ontological approach represented by the Russian formalists and French structuralists. René Wellek claimed that “In Valéry, we are confronted with a theory that asserts the discontinuity between author, work, and reader, emphasizes a most extreme regard for form and nothing but form divorced from emotion, and takes poetry completely out of history into a realm of the pure and absolute.”51 But others have argued that although many of the poet’s statements can be read as operating such a radical severing of the artwork from both creator and perceiver, passages such as those Boulanger cited in her appreciation of Fauré show Valéry’s concern with process and experience. In Eupalinos, human products are distinguished from objects found in nature by their objective preservation of a human trace, which is expressed as a system of relations.52 The aesthetic experience involves rules and laws that are ultimately derived from human sensibility, if not traceable to a specific individual experience. Valéry’s concept of the work shows an anti-Romantic resistance to explicit biographical or psychological origins for art, but without reducing it to a play of pattern devoid of human emotion or reference. Boulanger too regularly made claims that seem to argue for the complete autonomy of the artwork. Late in her career she told her students that once brought into the world, the musical masterpiece no longer needs the composer or anyone else to exist: “It is so beautiful, it has no need of a 50

51

52

Charles Koechlin, “Le ‘Retour à Bach’,” ReM 8 (1926): 4: “en quelque sorte, intérieurement expressive, par le charme des lignes et la beauté des proportions. Ainsi dans la musique: il y a des architectures qui ne font que parler . . . celles de Bach chantent, à cause précisément de leur sensibilité.” Koechlin cites Valéry as the source of this idea. René Wellek, Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukaćs and Ingarden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), vii, cited in Steven Cassedy, “Paul Valéry’s Modernist Aesthetic Object,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 77. Cassedy, “Paul Valéry’s Modernist Aesthetic Object,” 79. For an earlier critique of the usual account of Valéry’s formalism, see Roger Shattuck’s brilliant “Paul Valéry: Sportsman and Barbarian,” Delos 1 (1968): 96–116, reprinted in Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 149–68.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

66

performer, it has no need of a listener. It has no need of anything. It is in the air as if sparkling with light. And then . . . either you look at it or you don’t.”53 But her concert criticism and lectures of the 1920s reveal a concept of the masterwork and its effects more closely aligned with Valéry’s architectural ideal, as a dynamic form that preserves and communicates profoundly human values. For Valéry, music achieved most perfectly the aim of all art, in which, as Brian Stimpson has summarized, “the energetic forces and affective values that are the origins of artistic creation are materially realized in a form and source capable of generating identical responses.”54 Music touches us because it invites us to contribute our individual feelings to an abstracted universal emotion preserved in particular combinations of pitches and rhythms. Like Valéry’s concept of art, Boulanger’s presentation of the musical work insisted on form as the vehicle of this process; and thus the subordination of foreground events to structural goals is not only the means of achieving the formal integration that defines the masterwork, but is also essential to unlocking its meaning. In contrast to the agnostic Valéry, however, Boulanger also drew very strongly on visions of the artwork that emerged from French religious thought of the early twentieth century, when Catholic activists returned to scholastic philosophy in an effort to reconcile traditional religious faith and the rational demands of modernism. In the principal texts and debates that characterized this movement, Boulanger found models for the encounter between musicians and the masterwork that allowed full rein for her mystical religious sensibilities. sacred mysteries A strong spiritual orientation pervades Boulanger’s concert criticism. She often quoted directly from scripture or liturgy; even when she did not, she consistently relied on sacred imagery and a vocabulary derived from Christian religious traditions. She expressed her vision of the ideal musical experience most consistently through the notion of self-abandon in a collective rite. This merging figures as an active rather than passive experience: listeners as well as performers must be purposefully engaged, and the successful concert appears as a dynamic exchange between its participants, and a personified music whose power transcends normal boundaries of time and memory. Typically, she conveyed the transforming effects of this 53

54

Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Nadia Boulanger: “C’est tellement beau, il n’a plus besoin de l’exécutant, il n’a plus besoin de l’auditeur. Il n’a plus besoin de rien. Il est dans l’air comme resplendissant de lumière. Et puis . . . vous le regardez ou vous ne le regardez pas.” Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 266–7, cites similar comments to support her assessment of Boulanger as a die-hard formalist. Stimpson, “Nadia Boulanger et le monde littéraire,” 153: “les forces énergétiques et les valeurs affectives qui sont à l’origine de la création artistique se réalisent matériellement dans une forme et un fond capables d’occasionner des réponses identiques.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

67

exchange through metaphors of light. In her November 1921 column for Le Monde musical, she lamented that although audiences for concerts were polite and silent, they often seemed constrained rather than captivated: “what is lacking among those who listen is the link between great respect and the courage of enthusiasm, it is the conviction and the gift of oneself, which confer such grave beauty on this life where all may be illusion, but yet in which all, even in the greatest sorrow, can be so great. ‘The light was in the World and the World was made by the it; but the World did not know the light [St John]’.”55 Admitting that this biblical passage was perhaps a weighty analogy to apply to a concert hall, Boulanger nevertheless continued: [Music] requires us to be joyful or sad “with her,” not that we “look” at her as a show. And it’s this that one would like to feel in a concert hall: a communion in beauty, a forgetting of time and oneself, of each person and everyone, on contact with the magic of sound. [. . .] In short, a truly beautiful concert is nearly always the result of a close collaboration between those who play and those who listen . . . each profiting for an instant (of which the memory may remain indelible) from the animating spirit that brings light there where otherwise, all would remain in shadow.56

Boulanger’s conception of the concert as form of religious ritual is consistent with broader patterns in Western classical music culture. Scholars have used the term “sacralization” to describe how the increasingly ritualized behavior adopted by performers and audiences over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created an atmosphere of veneration that transformed the concert hall into a temple for the worship of great art. In some accounts the widespread establishment of these patterns in classical music consumption, particularly in the United States, has been interpreted as a mode of class consolidation, aimed at excluding non-elites and soldering connections between status and taste.57 Jann Pasler has argued, however, that in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, republicans as well as monarchists considered music an important tool in rebuilding 55

56

57

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 32, nos. 21–2 (November 1921): 347: “[C]e qui manque entre ceux qui écoutent, c’est le lien du grand respect et le courage de l’enthousiasme, c’est la conviction et ce don de soi-même qui confère une si grave beauté à cette vie où tout n’est peut-être qu’illusoire, mais où tout, même dans la plus profonde douleur, peut être si grand. ‘La lumière était dans le Monde et le Monde a été fait par elle; mais le Monde ne l’a pas connue’.” The passage is from the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, 1 John 1:10, on Christ as the Word. Ibid., 347: “[La musique] exige qu’on soit joyeux ou triste ‘avec elle’ et non qu’on la ‘regarde’ come un spectacle. Et c’est cela qu’on voudrait sentir dans une salle de concerts, une communion dans le beau, un oubli du temps et de soi, de chacun et de tous, au contact de la magie des sons . . . en résumé, un vrai beau concert est presque toujours le résultat d’une étroite collaboration entre ceux qui exécutent et ceux qui écoutent . . . chacun bénéficiant pour un instant (dont le souvenir peut rester ineffaçable) de ce génie qui met de la lumière là, où sans lui, tout serait resté dans l’ombre.” The term was used most influentially in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). For a thoughtprovoking critique of such claims about class status and concert culture, see Ralph Locke, “Music Lovers, Patrons, and the ‘Sacralization’ of Culture in America,” 19th-Century Music 17 (1993): 149–73.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

68

French culture and national pride: the period after 1870 thus saw the foundation of ambitious public concert series and extensive new programs of music education, often aimed at groups who had never before been beneficiaries of advanced musical instruction. The number of concerts took a vertiginous rise, and concert attendance increased among all levels of French society. Much of this new activity was motivated not only by political goals, but by strong aesthetic engagement and a crusading social ethic based on deeply held convictions about the spiritual and moral benefits of classical music.58 At the same time, patterns of both audience and performer behavior based on reverence for great works, and emphasizing elevation over entertainment, took much longer to coalesce than has often been claimed.59 In the decades after 1900, new media such as recordings, film and radio, and new popular styles such as jazz, provided further challenges to concert halls and opera houses that already had to compete for audiences with spoken theater and musical entertainments such as variety theater, music hall and café-concert. Difficult economic conditions after the war and especially in the 1930s meant that many audience members had little money to spend, and holes in operating expenses were less likely to be covered by public subvention. In such conditions, one response was to embrace the popular and the everyday, and to attempt to fuse classical music culture with styles and practices associated with entertainment genres.60 Another was instead to build on late nineteenth-century idealism, emphasizing even more the moral and spiritual benefits of classical music, and the sustained work required from listeners as well as performers to attain them. This position, which Boulanger championed throughout her career, posited a clear distinction between those musical activities which could be framed as pleasant but superficial and ephemeral, requiring no investment from listeners, and those which could be presented as both transformative and of enduring value. Such a position was also ideal for Boulanger’s own work as a pedagogue and musical activist, for it legitimated her musical advocacy as a contribution to a greater good. In his Listening in Paris, James Johnson cites descriptions of absorbed, attentive listening in accounts of French concerts from as early as the late eighteenth century, and shows how Romantic aesthetics created expectations that audiences would be moved, inspired or morally affected by musical content. Such attitudes were well established by the mid nineteenth century, allowing music to occupy the important role that Pasler describes in French 58 59 60

Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 189–202. Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 82–96. See also Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 36. For an overview of the widespread engagement of French composers and musicians with popular musical styles and venues from the turn of the century through the 1920s, see Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford University Press, 1991).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

69

public discourse throughout the Third Republic.61 Many nineteenth-century accounts describe concert experiences in religious terms, framing art as a surrogate for or complement to religion in ways similar to Boulanger’s descriptions. However, earlier accounts of both listeners’ reactions and performers’ behavior were much more likely to emphasize notions of possession or involuntary ecstasy than the kind of deliberate devotional act Boulanger imagines. Romantic accounts of self-loss in music often accord a prominent role to swoons, tears and other histrionics, in contrast to the solemnity Boulanger’s prose conveys, and place more emphasis on highly personal forms of subjectivity and on emotional expression. For example, in his 1904 essay “La Religion de l’orchestre,” Camille Mauclair, writing about the Sunday concerts by the Colonne, Lamoureux and Pasdeloup orchestras, depicted the faces of concert-goers “painted with the colors of joy, undone by ecstasy, or illuminated with tears.” In his account the orchestra figures as a “distilled image of the crowd,” whose role is to exteriorize emotions lodged deep within each listener’s soul: And this lyric cry that each individual hides inside and cannot or dares not push out in daily existence . . . he confides to the black workers who take it up in chorus, stoke its impalpable flame, mixing it with all the laments, all the hopes, all the shouts of revolt, of triumph, of hate and of love brought by all the others, to melt them into one single, homogeneous and majestic hymn, the song of humanity delivered from ordinary life.62

Mauclair’s emphasis on emotional display makes a striking contrast to Boulanger’s notion of “emotions that are transmitted without being expressed.” And instead of the self-realization that Mauclair’s essay promotes, Boulanger repeatedly stressed moral elevation and aspiration toward more impersonal, abstract goals; in the immediate aftermath of the war, she felt that the need to put selfish concerns aside was particularly acute. As she claimed in her second column for Le Monde musical in February 1919, “it is impossible that the memory of so many great men’s deaths should not change the atmosphere, that out of torment there should not be raised towards them a more elevated sense of Beauty, a more pressing need for moral dignity.”63 Later in the year her rejection of individual subjectivity was even more bald: “The individual passes and is lost in the mass. In reality, 61 62

63

James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 270–80. Camille Mauclair, Idées vivantes (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Ancien et Moderne, 1904), 138–9: “Et le cri lyrique que chaque individu recèle en soi et ne peut ou n’ose pousser . . . il le confie aux noirs ouvriers qui le reprennent en choeur, en attisent la flamme impalpable, le mêlant à toutes les plaintes, à tous les espoirs, à toutes les clameurs de révolte, de triomphe, de haine et d’amour apportées par les autres pour en refondre un seul hymne homogène et majestueux, le chant de l’humanité delivrée de la vie ordinaire.” NB, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” MM 30, no. 2 (February 1919): 42–3: “il est impossible que le souvenir de tant de morts si grands ne change pas l’atmosphère, que de la tourmente ne s’élève pas vers eux un sens plus élevé de la Beauté, un besoin plus effectif de dignité morale.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

70

he is nothing. All that counts are the events that make him in turn so much and so little. All that counts are the abstractions that rule the world.”64 A related difference between Boulanger’s understanding of concert experience and earlier approaches lies in her conception of how music achieves its effect of bonding listeners and performers in aesthetic and spiritual communion. Though Boulanger was personally close to Mauclair in the late teens, working on settings of his poetry and continuing to cite him with approval, the views expressed in her criticism began to diverge from those he had outlined in his pre-war essays. For Mauclair, musical emotion arises from human psychological energy freed from everyday bonds. The mystic significance of musical experience was the result of a communication between God and a divine core located in the center of each individual. Orchestral music’s “mysterious and religious meaning” consists in that: It is the direct hyphen between [human] thought and the divine. And it is so with complete power, because its language alone is sufficiently exempt from prejudices, from education and from social categories to be able to translate the dream of everyone, whether illiterate or connoisseur, to cut through the intellect and the mind, and to go straight to the soul to move and dissolve in tears the buried diamond that lays in the breast of the most obscure person, and which is the sign placed in each creature by God, that [the creature] recognizes thanks to Him.65

Boulanger did not dismiss the notion of a spontaneous musical emotion available to all, whatever their levels of education or musical literacy. In her Monde musical column of December 1919, she mused about her own tendency to write about technique rather than feeling, despite the passionate love of music that was the guiding sentiment for her every line.66 But if it is a mistake to shy away from heart, spirit and emotion in accounting for the effect of music, Boulanger claimed, it is equally wrong to deny the importance of intellect. In her reviews from late 1919, Boulanger repeatedly insisted that only the combination of emotional response with intellectual engagement – a combination she frames in terms of faith and reason – could lead to the kind of revelatory concert experience she conceived as ideal: music derives part of its beauty from its indefinable mystery, but the other part from its order. And we are incapable of all sensation before it if we have not given it our belief, if we do not give it our purest joys, our greatest enthusiasms, our deepest 64

65

66

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 11 (November 1919): 326: “L’individu passe et se perd dans la masse. A vrai dire, il n’est rien. Seuls comptent les événements faisant tour à tour de lui tant et si peu. Seules comptent les abstractions qui dominent le monde.” Mauclair, Idées vivantes, 139: “Il est le trait d’union direct entre la pensée et le divin. Et il l’est avec toute-puissance, car son langage seul est assez exonéré des préjugés, de l’instruction et des catégories sociales pour traduire le rêve de tous, illettrés ou dilettantes, traverser l’intelligence et l’esprit, et aller droit au fond de l’âme pour émouvoir et dissoudre dans les larmes le diamant enfoui qui gît au sein des plus obscurs, et qui est le signe mis dans la créature par Dieu qu’elle reconnaîtra grâce à lui.” NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 12 (December 1919): 350–3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

71

consolation. And we are still deprived of her highest expression, if constant study does not show the mind above its language; we are ignoramuses whose faith is useless, sacrificing sense to sensation.67

By “mind above the language,” Boulanger meant the principles of order underlying all musical expression, from which music derives its power. Paradoxically, “Art exists where definition stops – reason seems to be unable to analyze it – and, yet, art does not exist in its fullness except when it satisfies reason, when it corresponds to a logic of which we know only the results.” The discovery of this logic should be the object of “constant study,” listening an effort to make sense as well as to achieve emotional and spiritual experience: as she continued, “all is order; ‘chance’ is just a word created by our inability to understand.”68 The reason of art is the logic of the temple in Valéry’s Eupalinos, the architectural proportions that exist independently of the perceiving subject and which generate emotion through the operation of design. For Boulanger, music’s “mysterious and religious meaning” does not inhere in subjective expression, but in the transcendent qualities of form. The musical work is the location of the divine, which it is the task of both listeners and performers to seek out but whose splendor is independent of the human soul, existing whether or not it is perceived: as Boulanger expressed it, “the sun does not cease to illuminate because [the individual] ceases to see the light, no more than it shines for him only, just because he feels the warmth of its rays.”69 Boulanger’s writing not only catches here again the mood of selfabnegation and collective responsibility so prevalent in France during World War I and its aftermath. It also rehearses positions characteristic of the Catholic renouveau, a reconfiguration of French Catholicism within the avant-garde, which had roots in the pre-war period and became a central 67

68

69

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 11 (November 1919), 326: “. . . la musique trouve une part de sa beauté dans son indéfinissable mystère, mais l’autre part dans son ordonnance. Et nous sommes devant elle incapables de toute sensation si nous ne lui avons pas donné notre croyance, si nous ne lui donnons pas nos plus pures joies, nos plus grand enthousiasmes, nos plus profondes consolations. Et nous sommes pourtant privés de sa plus haute expression, si notre étude constante ne nous a pas montré son esprit au-dessus de son langage; nous sommes des ignorants auxquels la foi ne sert pas, sacrifiant le sens à la sensation.” Ibid.: “L’art commence où s’arrête la définition – la raison semble donc ne pas pouvoir l’analyser – et, pourtant, l’art n’existe dans sa plénitude que lorsqu’il satisfait à la raison, lorsqu’il satisfait à une logique dont nous ne connaissons que les résultats. . . . tout est ordre, et que ‘hasard’ n’est que le mot créé par notre impuissance à comprendre.” She repeated this claim in her column of the following month (MM 30, no. 12 (December 1919): 350): “Le concert doit nous être, en premier lieu une source d’émotion – mais en second lieu une source d’étude, de progrès – il faut s’y préparer, il faudrait en tirer un bénéfice. – Rien n’arrive sans raison, seules les raisons nous demeurent parfois inintelligibles, parce que nous ne voyons pas loin, parce que nous ne nous donnons pas la peine de regarder – mais elles existent certainement.” Boulanger was paraphrasing Bergson here, using a passage Koechlin also quotes in “D’une vain dispute – la musique plaisir d’esprit ou jouissance sensuelle” ReM March 1921 (edited in Duchesneau, 159–178, at p. 165). NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 11 (November 1919): 326: “le soleil ne cesse pas d’éclairer parce que [l’individu] cesse d’en percevoir la lumière, pas plus que le soleil ne brille pour lui seul, parce qu’il reçoit la chaleur de ses rayons.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

72

influence on the Parisian intellectual climate of the 1920s.70 Boulanger herself had increasingly turned to religion during the war years, especially after 1916 when Lili’s health began steadily to decline, and there is evidence that she was actively wrestling with questions of faith at the time she was writing the bulk of her reviews for Le Monde musical.71 This was also the moment when the renouveau’s most prominent spokesman, Jacques Maritain, produced his Art et scholastique, a highly influential Thomist treatment of aesthetic experience.72 Maritain’s reading of Aquinas and the scholastics led to a vision of art whose beauty resides in its relation to unchanging principles of order, unity and proportion, principles which are imprinted on the matter of the artwork and shine forth through it to delight the intelligence. As Maritain explains, “to say with the scholastics that beauty is ‘the splendor of form through the proportioned parts of matter’ is to say that it is a radiation of intelligence through matter that has been intelligently ordered.” Form appears as a fully realized, essential internal property rather than external shape, so that form as a carrier of meaning may present very different surface manifestations depending on the matter chosen to convey it. At the same time, echoing Bergson, Maritain insists that “this shining forth of form, however intelligible it may be in itself, is understood in sense and through sense, and not separately from it. In this the intuition of beauty is the extreme opposite of true scientific abstraction. For it is through the very understanding of sense that the light of being comes to pierce the intellect.”73 That is, the splendor formae, although a communication of intelligence rather than sensation, is not related to positivistic forms of scientific inquiry, but relies on an aesthetic intuition that provides an alternative mode of comprehending reality. Jacques and Raïssa Maritain were well connected in Parisian musical circles, and music receives considerable attention in Art et scholastique. In 70

71

72

73

See Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (University of Toronto Press, 2005). On musical manifestations of the renouveau see Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau, eds., Musique, art et religion dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Lyons: Symétrie, 2009). Jérôme Spycket, À la recherche de Lili Boulanger (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 327–9. In the summer of 1920 she experienced a particularly difficult crisis of faith whose traces are preserved in correspondence with Roger Ducasse (F-Pn NLa 294 (49–51); see [Jean] Roger-Ducasse, Lettres à Nadia Boulanger, edited by Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999), 47–9. Jacques Maritain, Art et scholastique (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Catholique, 1920). The work first appeared serially in Les Lettres, September 1, 1919: 485–522, and October 1, 1919: 579–620. Maritain had been a disciple of Bergson, and though he gradually grew away from his mentor after 1907, his work was heavily indebted to Bergsonian concepts: see Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 61–4; Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy, 139–74. Maritain, Art et scholastique, 34–5: “Et ainsi, dire avec les scolastiques que la beauté est le resplendissement de la forme sur les parties proportionnées de la matière, c’est dire qu’elle est une fulguration d’intelligence sur une matière intelligemment disposée . . . cet éclat de la forme, si purement intelligible qu’il puisse être en lui-même est saisi dans le sensible et par le sensible, et non pas séparément de lui. L’intuition du beau artistique se tient ainsi à l’extrême opposé de l’abstraction du vrai scientifique. Car c’est par l’appréhension même du sens que la lumière de l’être vient ici pénétrer l’intelligence.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

73

support of his claims, Maritain cited not only Aquinas and the scholastics, but also, and more unexpectedly, Jean Cocteau’s tendentious musical manifesto Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918), whose promotion of modernist art as a mode of access to deeper realities was attractive to Maritain. And Art et scholastique in turn had rapid echoes in the musical press. Particularly significant was Ernest Ansermet’s 1921 article for La Revue musicale, in which he used Maritain’s work as a tool to explain the work of Stravinsky. But equally importantly, Ansermet claimed that neoscholastic formal ideals could apply to historical masterworks as well. Before proceeding to an analysis of Stravinsky’s music, Ansermet claimed that the “shining forth of form through proportioned matter” central to Maritain’s concept of the artwork was exactly what was achieved in a Bach fugue, or a symphony by Mozart or Haydn: With these musicians, the course of the work is made up of successive leaps of relentless imagination . . . that make the splendor of form shine forth through useful repetition, through development, through the radiance that the form makes spring out: imagination alone, and free, submitting only to its object, in such a way that the things it brings us are as if suspended in air, and we go from one to the other in perpetual surprise at the same time as the form clarifies itself in our minds, arriving at the last note at the fullness of its meaning. And this form is nothing other than the musical content of a certain element of melody, rhythm or harmony.74

Stravinsky found Ansermet’s analysis compelling, and similar positions were rapidly taken up by the composer himself, as well as by others in his circle.75 Boulanger was among the earliest promulgators of this approach to his work – and among the most enthusiastic – using the Ansermet article to prepare her own presentation of Stravinsky’s music during her American tour in 1925.76 The concept of form that emerges from Boulanger’s letters to Manziarly that year is very similar to Ansermet’s application of Maritain. And her review of the premiere of Stravinsky’s Octet in November 1923 has distinct Maritainian echoes, if no direct citations: 74

75 76

Ernest Ansermet, “L’Oeuvre d’Igor Stravinsky,” ReM 2, no. 9 (1921): 3. “Chez ces musiciens, le cours de l’oeuvre est fait des élans successifs de l’imagination acharnée . . . à faire éclater la splendeur d’une forme, par des redites utiles, par l’amplification, par le rayonnement qu’elle en fera surgir: l’imagination seule, et libre, uniquement soumise à son objet, de telle sorte que les choses qu’elle nous apporte sont comme suspendues dans le vide et qu’on va de l’une à l’autre avec une perpétuelle surprise, en même temps que la forme s’éclaire dans notre esprit, arrivant avec la dernière note à la plénitude de son sens. Et cette forme n’est autre chose que le contenu musical d’un certain élément mélodique, rythmique, ou harmonique.” Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882–1934 (London: Pimlico, 2002), 375–9. Published as Boulanger, Lectures on Modern Music, 178–95. She characterizes Ansermet’s article as an essential starting point for understanding Stravinsky’s music on p. 188. Boulanger’s 1924 preparatory notes (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 198) include a synoptic table aligning citations from Ansermet, as well as from articles by Boris de Schloezer, Arthur Lourié (a Catholic convert and friend of Maritain) and others, with her own observations on Stravinsky’s work.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

74

In this work, Stravinsky appears in the light of a constructor, a geometer: all of his thought is translated into precise, simple, classic lines, and the sovereign certainty of his writing, always renewed, here assumes in its dryness, its concision, an authority without artifice. No transposition, everything is music, purely, and if a thought emerges from the work, it is through the unfolding of lines and their design that it is born. . . . And it gives food for thought that the man who wrote the moving, wonderful Rite of Spring, those Noces which synthesize another profound moment of the human soul, could be the architect of these forms, where everything lives by Intelligence.77

In this review and elsewhere, Boulanger applied the same vocabulary and concepts to a whole range of historical works, as Ansermet had done in his introduction. And they would prove useful in elaborating a framework for performance and listening, as well as for composition and analysis. Jean Krasinski, who studied with both Boulanger and Maritain in Paris, wrote to her shortly after leaving the city in 1931: [E]very time that I saw you and heard you speak – whether about the performance of the Requiem of Fauré, or a page of Bach or Mozart – I left not only richer in ideas and filled with a new enthusiasm, but also – better! . . . I now understand that a Bach invention can be grander than all the hysteria of an Isolde, who has too much to tell us to be able to take us to the Eternal. “First live and die and then philosophize,” M. J. Maritain reminded us; having been his pupil and disciple – alas, for too short a time – will always count as an honor for me. This stay in Paris will weigh heavily on the scale of my life. Before then music succeeded only in arousing a thousand desires in me, and it has been only there – and at Chartres and Solesmes – that I glimpsed at times that it can also satisfy them, and give us the joy of fullness and balance. Ravenous slave of color, it was the immaterial beauty of line that appeased me in the end.78

Neoscholastic aesthetics provided a model for integration of the spiritual meaning and emotional impact Boulanger attached to the ideal concert 77

78

NB, “Concerts Koussevitzsky,” MM 34, nos. 21–2 (November 1923): 365: “Dans cette oeuvre, Stravinsky apparaît sous son jour de constructeur, de géomètre: toute sa pensée se traduit en lignes précises, simples, classiques, et la souveraine certitude de son écriture, toujours renouvelée, prend ici, dans sa sécheresse, dans sa concision, une autorité sans artifices. Nulle transposition, tout est musique, purement, et s’il se dégage de l’oeuvre une pensée, c’est par le déroulement des lignes et de leur dessin qu’elle naît. . . . Et il n’est pas indifférent de penser que l’homme qui écrit ce pathétique, formidable Sacre du printemps, ces Noces qui synthétisent un autre profond moment de l’âme, peut être l’architecte de ces formes, où tout vit par l’Intelligence.” Jean Krasinsky to NB, F-Pn NLa 78 (194), September 27, 1931: “[C]haque fois que je Vous voyais et entendais parler – était-ce à propos de l’exécution du Requiem de Fauré, ou de telle page de Bach ou de Mozart – j’en sortais non seulement plus riche d’idées et rempli d’une nouvelle ferveur, mais aussi – meilleur! . . . Je comprends maintenant qu’une Invention de Bach peut être plus grande que toute l’hystérie d’une Isolde, qui a trop à nous dire pour pouvoir nous atteindre l’Eternel. ‘D’abord vivre et mourir et ensuite philosopher’ – nous rappelait M. J. Maritain, dont je m’honorerai toujours d’avoir été – pendant un temps trop court hélas! – l’élève et le disciple. Ce séjour à Paris pèsera lourdement sur la balance de ma vie. Jusqu’alors la musique ne parvenait qu’à exaspérer en moi milles désirs, ce n’est que là – et aussi à Chartres et Solesmes – que j’entrevis par moments qu’elle peut les combler et nous donner la joie de la plénitude et de l’équilibre. Esclave affamé de la couleur, c’est la beauté immatérielle de la ligne qui me rassasia enfin.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

Nadia Boulanger’s musical work

75

experience, and a formalist approach to musical works. It was a specifically Catholic vision of the architectural ideal that pervaded contemporary French aesthetics, and which appealed to her strong religious beliefs and her love of tradition as well as her commitment to the new. Such a synthesis permitted the recovery of notions on the elevating qualities of music, already well established in earlier concert culture, without relying on tropes of emotional expression or self-realization; instead, it located spirituality in a framework that affirmed values such as proportion, order, rigor and grace, which were represented in the post-war retour à l’ordre as characteristically or essentially French. It provided room for strong emphasis on reason and technique, while reserving a mysterious core of musical meaning accessible only to an artistic intuition conceived as a leap of faith. Such views on the masterwork would remain among the most consistent parts of Boulanger’s statements on musical experience for the rest of her career. As she would explain to Bruno Monsaingeon near the end of her life, “Faced with a masterwork . . . I have a certainty that is not based on the certainty of reason. It is based on a certitude that is made partially of reason in that I note when a piece is well written, well orchestrated, well constructed. But the moment that something else happens, we enter into mystery. And, since I am a believer, all for me is mystery.” Her credo, as summed up for Monsaingeon: “For me it always comes back to a question of belief. As I accept God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion, so I accept the masterpiece.”79 Boulanger’s concept of the musical work as an enduring manifestation of divine grace encouraged a vision of performance as an act of intercession: the revelation of mystery, as Boulanger regularly presented it in her concert reviews. For example, although she would not always see eye to eye with Alfred Cortot, in April 1919 she was full of praise for the man who would, later in the year, become her new boss at the École Normale de Musique. She described his Good Friday rendition of the Beethoven concerto with the Concerts Colonne as an illumination, and continued: [Cortot] is like a épopte before the great mysteries, his visage witnessing the separation he wishes between reality and his dream, and thus a revelation is accomplished . . . The beloved pages, so often read and reread, take on the profound meaning that one hardly dares attribute to them, and their hermeticism is clarified by a light that gives them a life that is always the same and always new, because the artist communicates something of his soul to them each time.80 79

80

Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Nadia Boulanger; see Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, for his transcriptions of these passages: “[J]’ai une certitude qui ne repose pas sur une certitude de la raison. Elle repose sur une certitude qui est faite en partie de raison tant que je constate qu’une musique est bien écrite, bien orchestrée, bien construite. Mais au moment où il se passe quelque chose d’autre, on entre dans le mystère. Alors, comme je suis croyante, tout me paraît mystère” (p. 72); “Cela revient toujours pour moi à la croyance. Comme j’accepte Dieu, j’accepte la beauté, j’accepte l’émotion, j’accepte aussi bien le chef-d’oeuvre” (p. 30). NB, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” MM 30, no. 5 (May 1919): 137: “[Cortot] est comme un épopte [an ancient Greek term for those who attained the final degree of initiation to the Eleusinian

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

The work in performance

76

During the interwar period, similar notions became the principal means through which Boulanger’s own activity was understood: in accounts of her performances, she figured as apostle, priestess, and saint.81 And Boulanger’s advocacy for musical works, particularly but not exclusively for religious music, could be presented through spiritual vocabulary resonant of the Catholic renouveau, using terms similar to those she herself used to describe the ideal concert experience. As one review of her 1936 Schütz concert claimed, She is like the celebrant of a Mass, invested with the divine Spirit in the manner of an apostle on a mission to the Gentiles. She carries us along with her, with her broad and persuasive gesture, and no one resists. The union of hearts is accomplished.82

Roger Crosti – who had written a glowing review of Boulanger’s performance of Christ lag in Todesbanden for Le Ménestrel in 1934 – wrote privately to Boulanger, “I didn’t know Schütz’s work on the Resurrection and am not likely to forget it. It is completely sublime . . . You seemed to be the messenger of that new day which we all await: ‘may I, myself, be resurrected and rise up from the tomb.’”83 In Boulanger’s own thinking, the aim of performance was the removal of obstacles to understanding and the creation of conditions in which the splendor of form could shine forth to absorb, move and delight. If the work does not need performers or listeners, they in turn are in need of the work, and the redemption and salvation the work promises for those who are able to see it. The job of the performer was to bring into sound the architectural forms that surround the soul of the listener like a moving temple. In chapter 3, I explore how Boulanger’s own performances and teaching of performance in the interwar period were characterized by a style that could be presented as a realization of this ideal.

81 82

83

Mysteries] devant les grand mystères, son visage témoigne de l’isolement qu’il veut entre la réalité et son rêve, et voici que la révélation se fait. Les pages aimées, tant de fois lues et relues, prennent le sens profond que l’on ose à peine leur assigner et leur hermétisme s’éclaire d’une lueur qui leur donne une vie toujours elle-même et toujours nouvelle, car l’artiste leur communique chaque fois quelque chose de son âme.” I treat this in more detail in Jeanice Brooks, “‘Noble et grande servante de la musique’: Telling the Story of Nadia Boulanger’s Conducting Career,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 92–116. Le Ménestrel 5213 (March 27, 1936): 105: “Elle est comme la célébrante d’un culte, investie de l’Esprit divin à l’instar d’un apôtre en mission chez les Gentils. Elle nous entraîne avec elle, de son geste large et persuasif, et il n’y a pas une résistance. L’union des coeurs s’accomplit.” The article is signed Roger Vinteuil; the reference to Proust suggests a pseudonym, possibly for Roger Crosti, though I have been unable to establish this. Roger Crosti to NB, F-Pn NLa 64 (34), March 22, 1936: “Je ne connaissais pas l’oeuvre de Schütz sur la Resurrection et ne suis pas prêt de l’oublier. C’est d’une intégrale sublimité. . . . Vous sembliez la messagère de ce jour neuf que nous attendons tous: ‘que moi aussi je ressuscite et me lève du tombeau.’”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:51:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.004

chapter 3

Performing the work

Among the attractions of the École Normale de Musique in the interwar years was not just the chance to join the increasingly famous classes of Nadia Boulanger. For aspiring concert artists, the school could offer contact with internationally celebrated performers, most notably its founder, Alfred Cortot. Cortot’s masterclasses were significant events in the Parisian musical calendar, attracting audiences of up to 500 auditors as well as students. His Cours d’interprétation, edited transcripts of his masterclasses of 1934, provide an idea of what he taught. For Cortot, interpretation was above all a poetic matter. Any distinction drawn between “pure music,” on the one hand, and music based on emotion or description, on the other, was false: emotion was the basis for all music, even that claimed to be concerned only with formal relationships and sonic patterns. Poetic interpretation trumped concerns of both instrumental prowess and analytical understanding: Cortot dismissed “cold dissections” and “chemical analyses” that could communicate nothing about the performer’s individual relationship to the work.1 He advised students to learn about the composer’s personality and the historical origins of the piece, if this information could help to illuminate a work’s emotional core, but apocryphal legends or newly created fictions could be just as legitimately employed in the service of poetic interpretation. He showed the students his own annotated scores, full of colorfully evocative prose (infused with “the charm of an excellent poem” according to his editor), to illustrate his point.2 Cortot’s reccommendations were consistent with his performing persona: dubbed the “poet of the piano,” he was renowned for his compellingly personal renditions of keyboard masterworks.3 In a review for Le Ménestrel, critic and musicologist Paul Landormy heartily endorsed the poetic approach, but remarked that it might be inappropriate 1

2 3

Alfred Cortot, Cours d’interprétation, edited by Jeanne Thieffry (Paris: Librairie musicale R. Legouix, 1934), 20. The book was based on stenographer’s transcripts, and includes material presented as Cortot’s own words (in quotes), with connecting descriptive passages by Thieffry. Ibid., 17. See, for example, Yvonne Lefébure, “Cortot, le poète du clavier,” Revue internationale de musique 1, nos. 5–6, special number on the piano (1938): 903–5. Boulanger herself called Cortot a poet in her review in MM 30, no. 5 (May 1919): 137.

77

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

78

for some repertories. Mozart, for instance, makes few appearances in the Cours. Cortot was “no doubt not made to love Mozart. He seeks too much for the picturesque, the romantic, and the pathetic in music.”4 This gap – and the aesthetic issues underlying it – may have prompted Boulanger to focus on Mozart when she substituted for Cortot in one of his piano masterclasses in June 1936. Cortot’s students might well have been bemused by Boulanger’s recommendations, aimed above all at rendering audible the music’s form and structure. On the first player’s rendition of a Mozart sonata, she remarked: What is usually missing in performance is the establishment of the grandes lignes and yet that is the essential thing, it’s that which should be most perfect. So find the great elements of the architecture, give them all their value, and pay attention to the harmonic movement.5

Her opening comment to the second student similarly stressed the notion of architecture, and the final player was told, “The essential thing in the line of this concerto is to proceed in large blocks, and above all not to proceed by short phrases.”6 The contrast between Cortot’s emphasis on poetry and Boulanger’s on structure illustrates major differences in performance ideology, differences that map onto important trends in performance practice. Early recordings show that the most admired musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cultivated a style defined by emphatic expressive contrast and attention to local nuance, manifested in a flexible approach to tempo, frequent dynamic changes, and continuous use of shaping devices such as portamento, rubato and melodic dislocation. Cortot’s playing has been seen as an example of the late flowering of this tendency, in which attention to every emotional flicker of the music is pushed to lavish extremes.7 After World War II, a more restrained approach to expression became the norm. Some techniques (such as portamento) almost entirely disappeared, others (such as melodic dislocation) were used more sparingly, and there was increasing emphasis on clarity, precision and large-scale structure. Most notably, the late Romantic approach to tempo and rhythm 4

5

6

7

Paul Landormy, “Les Cours d’interprétation d’Alfred Cortot,” Le Ménestrel (June 15, 1934): 221: “Mais Cortot n’est sans doute point fait pour aimer Mozart. Il cherche trop le pittoresque, le Romanesque et le pathéthique dans la musique.” Anon., “Cours d’interprétation de Mlle Nadia Boulanger – Mozart,”MM 47, no. 7 (July 1936): 211– 12: “Ce qui manque en général dans l’exécution, c’est l’établissement des grandes lignes et pourtant cela est la chose essentielle, c’est ce qui devrait être le plus parfait. Trouvez donc les grandes phrases d’architecture, donnez-leur toute la valeur et prenez garde aux marches harmoniques.” “L’essentiel dans la ligne de ce concerto est de procéder par gros plans, surtout ne pas procéder par petites phrases.” About the previous sonata, she had said: “Il est à recommander dans toutes les oeuvres, mais surtout dans celles de Mozart de ne pas faire de mélange de pédale. La musique mozartienne est entièrement construite sur ce qu’il y a à la basse . . . Dans cet allegro la marche de la basse détermine toute l’architecture et la mélodie délicieuse qui coule par-dessus.” Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “Recordings and Histories of Musical Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 252.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

79

was largely abandoned in favor of a steady beat and increasingly literal attention to rhythmic notation.8 Yet any era features performers of different ages and training acting at the same time, and accounts of general trends can mask both the variety of practice and the intensity of debate that marked a particular historical moment. John Potter’s work on the disappearance of vocal portamento, for example, shows that the use of this technique reached its greatest height in recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, just as calls for its restriction became more frequently heard.9 Interwar Paris saw conflicts that opposed interpreters from different camps, and set composers and performers at odds. When to the inevitable generational, professional and temperamental differences was added the notion – seen in Landormy’s review – that different repertories require different performance styles, the scene was set for some especially lively clashes. Students at the École Normale could experience contrasting approaches first hand: that Boulanger and Cortot not only taught in the same building but even occasionally shared a concert platform underlines the simultaneous existence of competing positions, as well as the aesthetic and sonic issues at stake.10 The key point is that there were not suddenly new ways of performing – or that the mainstream consensus changed overnight – but that existing performance gestures were constantly reinterpreted in light of larger concerns. And there was then an impulse within dissemination to continue emphasizing those performance traits that were newly admired and valued. Stravinsky’s famously polemical proclamations have often served as a starting point for analysis of the increasing prominence of what Richard Taruskin has called “geometric” performance styles (in contrast to late nineteenth-century “vitalist” approaches).11 Brief remarks in the composer’s 1923 essay “Some ideas about my Octuor” were expanded in his Chroniques de ma vie (1935) and Poétique musicale (based on lectures in 8

9 10

11

There is now a large literature on these changes. Major studies include Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). See also Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 142–98; Leech-Wilkinson, “Recordings and Histories of Musical Style,” 250–4; Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances (London: CHARM, 2009). John Potter, “Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing,” Music and Letters 87, no. 4 (2006): 541–3. For example, on July 14, 1918 – the final French national holiday before the end of the war – Boulanger and Cortot shared the stage for a Red Cross benefit conducted by Walter Damrosch, with Boulanger as organ soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Symphony no. 3, and Cortot as pianist for Franck’s Variations symphoniques (Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924 (first US edn. 1923)), 237–8. Richard Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, edited by Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford University Press, 1988; reprint, with commentary, in Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford University Press, 1995), 90–154), 309–12. The geometric/vitalist opposition (pp. 108–14) is adapted from the work of T. E. Hulme.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

80

1939–40, published in 1942) to promote a performance vision closely allied with his compositional aesthetic. These texts emphasized a “purely musical” objectivity that explicitly excluded the literary associations and performer subjectivity Cortot’s remarks defend.12 Stravinsky’s music, he claimed, did not require poetic interpretation: what he wanted from performers was precise execution above all and not creative pretensions of their own. He condemned the reliance on local nuance that characterized the poetic expressive world, and was particularly scathing about tempo fluctuation and continuous use of expressive dynamic shading. When Cortot vehemently dismissed the notions of pure music and mathematics in time in his masterclasses, and proudly proclaimed himself an interpreter, not an executant, he was partly aiming in Stravinsky’s direction. (After Stravinsky himself joined the École Normale staff in 1935 as “co-professor” for Boulanger’s composition classes, the students’ situation must have become particularly interesting.) In a 1939 article on Stravinsky’s music for piano, Cortot would more directly challenge the composer’s views, and Stravinsky’s comments in the Poétique musicale about virtuosi who make musical careers out of fantastically exaggerated interpretation could easily be read as a blast against Cortot or his less gifted imitators.13 Stravinsky was notably inconsistent in following his own dicta, however. Although his writings of the interwar period proclaim a commitment to the “geometric” style, his performance practice was formed in the late Romantic tradition, traces of which persisted in his interpretations, even of his own works, well after World War II.14 The evidence of his recorded performances suggests a more complex situation than the sharply polemical tone of interwar verbal exchanges might suggest. This situation is typical of the period: for example, recordings by Arturo Toscanini and Felix Weingartner – who both emphatically rejected the style of what Weingartner scornfully called “rubato conductors” – show more tempo variation than was usually described or that they themselves claimed.15 By pointing out the disparity between performance and rhetoric, I do not mean to discredit Stravinsky’s pronouncements or underemphasize their impact; rather, I argue that an examination of Boulanger’s work can illuminate their context, and expose some of the mechanisms through which Stravinsky’s dicta achieved their considerable 12

13 14

15

Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about My Octuor,” The Arts [Brooklyn, NY], January 4–6, 1924 in Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, edited by Eric Walter White (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 528–31; Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie, 2 vols. (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935); Stravinsky, Poétique musicale: Sous forme de six leçons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). Alfred Cortot, “Igor Strawinsky, le piano et les pianistes,” ReM 191, special number on Igor Stravinsky (1939): 24/264–68/308; Stravinsky, Poétique musicale, 84–5. Robert Fink, “‘Rigoroso (♪ = 126)’: ‘The Rite of Spring’ and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 299–362. See also Nicholas Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 181–91. Philip, Early Recordings, 13–26.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

81

force. Though Boulanger’s use of la grande ligne and related concepts for teaching composition has received some attention, her extension of the idea to performance has been completely ignored. Yet her activities of the 1920s and 1930s were influential in the promotion of a performance approach closely tied to both compositional neoclassicism and structural music analysis. One way of describing Boulanger’s work of the interwar period is as the systematic assimilation of a contemporary performance style – many elements of which were pre-existent, and many understood as characteristically French – into the broader architectural aesthetic as it coalesced after 1918. And while promoting structural performance styles in relation to the new, she was equally active in advocating their application to music of the distant past. making music with nadia boulanger To illustrate differences between modernist performance styles and approaches more characteristic of late Romanticism, Taruskin compared a 1938 recording by Igor and Soulima Stravinsky of Mozart’s Fugue in C minor for two pianos, K 426, with a 1939 radio broadcast by Béla Bartók and Ditta Pásztory Bartók of Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448.16 Even more revealing, perhaps, is a comparison of the Bartók performance with a previously unknown off-air recording of the same Mozart sonata played by Nadia Boulanger and the young Clifford Curzon in 1936. Curzon had been a student at the École Normale in 1930–31; in 1932 he returned to England after marrying a fellow pupil, the harpsichordist Lucille Wallace. Within a few years, his career had blossomed and he was increasingly in demand as a concerto soloist and recitalist throughout Europe, particularly as an interpreter of Mozart. As Curzon’s star was on the rise, he regularly asked Boulanger for lessons on pieces he was preparing and requested her participation in his projects.17 In February and December 1935 he was soloist under Boulanger’s direction for performances of Mozart concerti at the Interallié, and in the spring of 1936 they gave their first two-piano recital there. Like the 1935 concerts, the recital was broadcast on Radio-Paris, but this time the wireless signal also served to record the performance onto lacquer discs.18 The program included 16

17

18

Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present,” 131. The Bartóks’ performance was broadcast from a Radio Budapest studio on April 23, 1939, and preserved on a private recording in the Babits/Makai collection; see László Somfai, liner notes to Bartók: Recordings From Private Collections 1, Hungaroton Classic HCD 12334–35, CD, 1995. F-Pn NLa 64 (298–314), correspondence 1935–8; Curzon’s notes on the sessions are in GB-Lbl 65073–65083. Curzon was eager to record with Boulanger (see his letter of December 21, 1937) and requested her as conductor for several concerto performances, including for his American début in early 1939 (Boulanger agreed, but logistical problems foiled the plan). Seven Pyral discs, F-Pn B 2813–2819 (for digital transfers, see SDCR 14992–14993) mentioned in Boulanger’s correspondence with Curzon (F-Pn NLa 64 (301), August 16, 1937). They include only the keyboard works from the concert. On early off-air recordings, see George Brock-Nannestad,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

82

new pieces by another English Boulanger pupil, Lennox Berkeley, and works by Schumann, Schubert, Bach and Brahms as well as Mozart (figure 3.1) Boulanger and Curzon would play K 446 again in November at a private concert given by the princesse de Polignac in a London salon; the sonata also featured on repeats of their two-piano program in Paris in 1938, and on Boulanger’s recitals with Jean Françaix in the United States in 1939.19 Boulanger’s commercially distributed recordings of the 1930s were made in makeshift recording studios in difficult conditions, and often involved cuts and tempo changes dictated by the limited duration of a single 78rpm record side.20 The Interallié discs, in contrast, document a continuously recorded live performance complete with audience noise and applause. Furthermore, in music for piano – even that including a second performer in addition to Boulanger – the mediating effect of Boulanger’s singers and their own training and performance habits is not at issue. This is the only recording of a Boulanger piano recital that has yet come to light, and, despite its inevitable limitations, it provides a precious glimpse into her performance style as experienced by international concert audiences and radio listeners between the wars. Differences between the performances of K 448 are immediately apparent: for example, in Boulanger and Curzon’s even rendition of the sixteenth-note scales beginning at measure 9, which contrasts with the Bartóks’ sweeping dash through this passage (example 3.1). The contrast becomes even more evident in the A major second theme, stated first mainly in piano 2 and repeated as a variation in canon between the two right- and left-hand parts in octaves (example 3.2). Boulanger and Curzon do not pause before launching the section and take the entire passage in the same tempo as the first theme. There is no melodic dislocation – a technique in which the bass note sounds before the entry of the right-hand melody – in the first statement, and the counterpoint of the second is particularly audible. This is a good example of avoidance both of what Robert Fink has called “expressive rubato” techniques – continuous local shifts in tempo

19

20

“The Development of Recording Technologies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162–3; and Lewis Foreman, “Revisiting Concert Life in the MidCentury: The Survival of Acetate Discs,” in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook et al., 140–8. The Polignac concert was held in Lady Emerald Cunard’s salon (Le Figaro, November 27, 1936, 2; see also the program in the “Londres 1936” manuscript notebook (CNLB)). Boulanger and Curzon gave a near-identical program at the École Normale (January 11, 1938) and the Hôtel George V (November 23, 1938); most of the pieces figured on concerts with Françaix for the Arts Club of Chicago (April 2, 1939) and the French Embassy in New York (February 25, 1939). Boulanger’s 1937 Monteverdi and Brahms recordings were made in a freezing former garage with mattresses hung on the walls, whose uninspiring ambience is described in Doda Conrad, Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe: 44 ans d’amitié avec Nadia Boulanger (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1995), 93–4. On the changes to tempo in Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa caused by recording constraints, see Cédric Segond-Genovesi, “Une génétique de l’interprétation chez Nadia Boulanger: Enjeux méthodologiques et bibliothéconomiques,” Fontes Artis Musicae 54 (2007): 102–9.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

83

Figure 3.1. Program, duo recital by Nadia Boulanger and Clifford Curzon at the Union Interalliée, May 19, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

84

The work in performance Example 3.1. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 1, mm. 9–17.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

85

Example 3.2. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 1, mm. 34–49.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

86

and dynamic – and of what he has termed “structural rubato,” the use of tempo change to articulate formal divisions.21 In contrast, the Bartóks (with the composer occupying the analogous position to Boulanger at piano 2) slow perceptibly for the second theme and emphasize melody over counterpoint; “poetic” elements include the slight dislocation of the melody at measure 40 (more pronounced on the repetition) and their lingering treatment of the grace notes at measures 35, 37 and 39. Differences in the slow movement are even more striking. The Bartóks’ performance is marked by constant shifts in speed: in the first twelve measures alone they slow from measure 5, delaying the downbeat of measure 7, then speed up considerably through measures 9–10 before slowing again into the cadence at measure 12 (example 3.3). The emphasis is on a “singing” upper voice and there is little sense of a grounding temporal frame. The movement continues with noticeable local tempo changes throughout, including momentary delays and Luftpausen as well as larger accelerandi and ritardandi. This combines with other expressive shaping effects, including frequent dynamic changes, melodic dislocation, arpeggiated chords and overdotting, to create a free, lyrical effect. Boulanger and Curzon instead render the lightly rocking accompaniment figure in an even triple meter (established through strong emphasis on the bass line in octaves), and a sense of continuous pulse informs the entire movement. Although their tempi are not completely rigid, Boulanger and Curzon never accelerate, and their ritardandi are both more discreet and much less numerous than the Bartóks’. The ensemble is tight and the playing noticeably straighter, with clean attacks and minimal pedal: there is no dislocation or spreading, and dotted rhythms are treated strictly. Boulanger and Curzon’s performance, and especially their management of tempo, meshes clearly with the tendencies that have emerged from study of early recordings. Differences are particularly noticeable in lyric passages – second themes and slow movements – which were a principal locus for conventional shaping effects. Boulanger was not the only interwar figure pushing Curzon toward a cleaner style, as the pianist’s extensive notes on his performance training in the late 1920s and early 1930s demonstrate. In lessons with Artur Schnabel and Wanda Landowska, as in his sessions with Boulanger, he was repeatedly urged to eliminate rubato, to concentrate on rhythm and never to let efforts to create a “singing” melody weaken the forward impulse of the music or spoil the counterpoint. Curzon’s trajectory is in some ways the story of modernist performance encapsulated, a narrative of increasing restriction of local nuance and tempo variation – producing what the pianist himself saw in 1932 as the difference between

21

Fink, “‘Rigoroso (♪ = 126)’,” 309–12.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

87

Example 3.3. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 2, mm. 1–12.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

88

“the old and new Curzon” – in ways that sounded fresh to ears accustomed to late Romantic styles.22 Boulanger’s recorded performances are not as clear or as strict as would become common in post-World War II musical culture, particularly in early music and contemporary music circles. Her singers used some portamento in a way that would soon sound outdated. Rhetorical pauses are not unusual, and structural rubato does sometimes appear. The Schumann on her 1936 live concert recording with Curzon is notably more elastic than the Mozart and Bach (as well as the Schubert; Boulanger apparently saw both Schubert and Beethoven as classics and Schumann as a romantic). It is worth noting as well that though Boulanger felt that theatrical styles of late Romantic performance were unsuited to earlier works as well as to modern ones, she cautioned against an overreaction that would strip all interpretation and freedom from performances of Bach and Debussy.23 She argued not for the elimination of expressive gesture, but instead for harnessing interpretive elements such as tempo and dynamic change to a structural conception of the work, so that elements such as counterpoint, composed phrasing and musical form seemed to be in control rather than performer subjectivity.24 Thus her playing sounds rigorous in comparison with many other contemporary recordings, an effect that is strengthened by her avoidance of extreme tempo fluctuations, from the slowing for lyric passages to the acceleration through fast loud sections that she presented (and many listeners subsequently heard) as loss of control. In other words, like players such as Schnabel and Landowska, or conductors such as Weingartner and Toscanini, Boulanger promoted an approach whose salient elements would become privileged and thus increasingly emphasized in later modernist performance.25 That Boulanger’s handling of tempo and rhythm struck listeners as especially noteworthy emerges from many accounts. After her first cantata 22

23 24

25

GB-Lbl Add. ms. 65072, fol. 102, notes on a lesson with Artur Schnabel, September 26, 1932, on the Brahms Concerto in D minor, Op. 15, which Curzon would later play under Boulanger’s direction. Schnabel urged Curzon to avoid rubato, not to think of maestoso as heavy, to maintain the tempo at the piano entry, to stop trying for a “singing” upper line and instead to pay more attention to rhythm. Curzon notes that the way he currently renders the piece is a mix of the “old and new Curzon” which needs further work. On a session with Schnabel on the Brahms Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, in May 1936, Curzon wrote about the scherzo, “My tempo changes too often!! One consistent tempo throughout!” (Add. ms. 65076, fol. 4). In a session on the Mozart C minor Sonata, K 457 (undated, c. 1930–1), Wanda Landowska told him to beware of relaxing the tempo in soft passages, and to keep hands strictly together in the slow movement even when playing relatively freely (Add. ms. 65077, fol. 36). On Curzon’s archive see O. W. Neighbour, “The Curzon Collection,” The British Library Journal 11 (1985): 60–6. NB, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” MM 30, no. 4 (April 1919): 104. On how similar trends can be heard in recordings even of Romantic keyboard works in the twentieth century, see Nicholas Cook, “Squaring the Circle: Phrase Arching in Recordings of Chopin’s Mazurkas,” Musica Humana 1 (2009): 5–28. As Philip points out, though Schnabel’s playing can sound undisciplined to today’s ears, it was far stricter than that of contemporaries such as Paderewski; similarly, Landowska used markedly less tempo variation and fewer spread chords than other players of the time (Philip, Early Recordings, 49– 50, 89–90 and 59–60).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

89

sessions at the rue Ballu in 1933, Marie-Blanche de Polignac confided her admiration of Boulanger’s “rythme implacable” to her diary; Lennox Berkeley was particularly impressed with her ability to maintain forward impulse in slow tempi.26 Other prominent factors included a preference for light, clear tone colors, notable in her regular singers: the bright sopranos Marie-Blanche de Polignac and Maria Modrakowska, and reedy tenors Hugues Cuénod and Paul Derenne are good examples. Some such timbral qualities relate to national differences in instrumental design: in the Mozart K 448 performances, for example, despite the difficulties in judging from such early recordings, the silvery sound of the Pleyel pianos used at the Interallié contrasts with the richer quality of the Bartóks’ instruments, a difference exaggerated by the much greater use of pedal in the Hungarian performance. Other differences seem more clearly matters of interpretive choice. For example, although technological limitations also complicate assessment of dynamic range in her early recordings, the impression that Boulanger was sparing with loud passages is confirmed by contemporary comments such as that by Auguste Mangeot, who remarked in a 1938 review of a Boulanger-Curzon recital that Boulanger could have founded a “League Against Noise in Concert Halls,” her performances never rising above mezzo forte.27 The light tone colors and nuanced soft dynamics do not create a fuzzy or dreamy impression, however, because of the tensile momentum created by her approach to tempo and rhythm. This combination of lightness and drive would become the hallmark of styles promoted in modernist performance discourse generally; in the interwar period, they were often interpreted in pronounced national terms. performing france? Though the recordings that document Boulanger’s performances all date from 1930 and after, characteristic elements of her style were developed in her training and early career. Some aspects of her playing seem to have grown out of a school of French pianism that included some of her most influential 26

27

Marie-Blanche de Polignac, private diary, cited in Sylvia Kahan, “La Collaboration entre Nadia Boulanger et Marie-Blanche de Polignac,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 90; Berkeley’s comments were made in a 1981 lecture (of which a recording exists at GB-Lbl T4207-T4208BW C1). The a cappella madrigals on Boulanger’s 1937 Monteverdi recording are soggier than those in which she played the continuo, suggesting that there was a difference between her approach to tempo and the habits some of her singers brought to their work. Auguste Mangeot, “Concerts: Nadia Boulanger et C. Curzon,” MM 49, no. 1 (January 1938): 18: “Il faut dire qu’avec Mlle Nadia Boulanger nous sortons des interprétations habituelles. Il semble qu’elle ait fondé la Ligue contre le bruit dans les salles de concerts. Elle ne dépasse jamais le mezzo forte et elle se complaît dans les sonorités voilées, murmurantes, dont elle obtient cependant une grande puissance d’expression.” Mangeot was commenting on a 1938 performance at the École Normale of nearly all the program Boulanger and Curzon had given at the Interallié in 1936, including the Mozart sonata K 448 and the Brahms Liebeslieder.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

90

mentors. Gabriel Fauré, for example – a product of the École Niedermayer and, like Boulanger, principally an organist – was often described as advocating particularly strict tempi and a generally restrained approach to expressive gesture.28 Some pianists associated with the Paris Conservatoire, where Boulanger herself was mainly educated, resisted the tempo fluctuation that characterized most contemporary performances; other Conservatoire figures avoided techniques commonly used to produce the prized “singing” line, such as chordal arpeggiation and asynchronization of hands.29 Still more important for Boulanger’s development was her work as a young concert artist with Raoul Pugno, whose education at the École Niedermayer and activity as an organist matched Fauré’s trajectory, and who taught harmony and piano at the Conservatoire in the 1890s. Pugno was famed for the lightness and clarity of his playing, particularly in his Mozart interpretations. His 1903 recordings of Handel and Scarlatti are notably clean for the period: tempo manipulation operates within relatively narrow boundaries, asynchronization and spreading feature sparingly, and counterpoint is clear.30 Thus there is some evidence that styles similar to Boulanger’s were already being cultivated in France, particularly in Conservatoire circles, as an important strand of performance practice around 1900. But whether or not clarity of counterpoint, dynamic restraint and particularly the avoidance of tempo fluctuation were, or were thought to be, part of a characteristically French performance style before the turn of the century, after World War I such nationalist associations were strongly in evidence. Walter Damrosch, taking the New York Symphony on a post-war tour of France, came up against this phenomenon. As he explained in My Musical Life (1923), “My interpretation of the Beethoven ‘Eroica’symphony puzzled some of the newspaper critics, as it did not conform to their French traditions. These do not permit such slight occasional modifications of tempo as modern conductors brought up in the German traditions of Beethoven believe essential to a proper interpretation of this master.”31 Boulanger was in a difficult position when reviewing the concert, for Damrosch was among her 28 29

30

31

Roy Howat, Preface to Gabriel Fauré, 13 Nocturnes for Piano (London: Peters, 2006). Marmontel claimed that Valentin Alkan played strictly in time (Antoine-François Marmontel, Les Pianistes célèbres, 2nd edn. (Paris: Heugel, 1888), 133), and Isidor Philipp remembered an early lesson when Camille Saint-Saëns condemned the use of asynchronous hands (Isidore Philipp, “Souvenirs sur Anton Rubinstein, Camille Saint-Saëns et Busoni,” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 910. On techniques used to create the “singing tone” see Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 139–78; on “French” pianism, see pp. 11–12. Pugno’s 1903 recordings for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company also included works by Chopin, Mendelssohn, Massenet and Pugno himself; most (though not all, despite the title) are currently available on Legendary Piano Recordings: Complete Recordings of Grieg, Saint-Saëns, and Pugno, Marston 52504 (2006). Damrosch, My Musical Life, 280. According to Damrosch, Vincent D’Indy’s review of the concert remarked that “[Damrosch] is not afraid – even in Beethoven’s works and in spite of the surprise this caused to our [French] public – to accelerate or slacken the movement when the necessities of expression demand it.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

91

staunchest supporters. Yet it seems clear that his performance was marked by the use of structural rubato, with major themes distinguished through manipulation of tempo; and her review reveals the struggle to praise his Eroica without compromising her own performing allegiances: Our [French] taste for measure . . . renders us a little distrustful of changes in tempo, of intentions that overemphasize sentiment. Yet, expressive contrasts, translated as a special rhythmic character for each theme in the first movement of the Eroica, clarify them all without rupturing the harmony – the movement of the Scherzo, marvellously played by the horns, so intrepid and carefree, is excellent – the nervous, varied life of the finale played in this way, with so much precision and joy, is truly in the Beethovenian spirit. In contrast, the march seemed to me, played thus, to lack a little grandeur, the implacable rhythm yielding too much to expressive aims. One might wonder if, in such cases, it is not advisable, almost systematically, to subordinate everything to the principal idea.32

Similar comments provide a telling backdrop to Boulanger’s approach to Brahms. Her 1923 review of the D major violin concerto performed by Josef Szigeti and the Colonne orchestra was largely cast in nationalist terms: although declaring her own deep love of his music, she described Brahms as “profoundly German” in his dreaminess and taste for legend, qualities she presented as offensive to the French desire for clarity, measure and precision. At the same time, she praised Szigeti’s Brahms using vocabulary associated with precisely these “French” (and “neoclassical”) attributes. According to Boulanger, Szigeti did not play like a virtuoso but with great simplicity, sobriety, purity and clarity. She concluded that it was a “truly noble performance, placing the work and its architecture above the interpreter and the caprices of his instrument.”33 32

33

NB, “Walter Damrosch et le New-York Symphony Orchestra à Paris,” MM 31, nos. 9–10 (May 1920): 156: “Notre goût pour la mesure . . . nous rend un peu défiants devant les changements de temps, devant les intentions qui soulignent trop le sentiment. Pourtant, les oppositions expressives, traduites par une vie rythmique spéciale pour chaque thème dans le premier morceau de l’Héroïque, éclairent l’ensemble sans rompre l’harmonie – le mouvement du Scherzo, merveilleusement joué par les cors, si intrépides et si libres de souci, est excellent – la vie nerveuse, multiple du final ainsi rendue, avec tant de précision et de joie, est vraiment bien dans l’esprit beethovenien. Par contre, la marche me paraît ainsi manquer un peu de grandeur, le rythme implacable s’effaçant trop devant les intentions expressives. On peut se demander si, dans de pareils cas, il ne convient pas, presque systématiquement, de tout subordonner à l’idée principale.” NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 34, nos. 19–20 (October 1923): 326. Boulanger’s view of Brahms as brilliantly constructed if sometimes over-profound emerges from a 1930 letter: “Ici hier, concert genre mélancolique – genre bal costumé d’adultes en bébés – Roland Manuel trop spirituel, Poulenc trop niais – celui-là avec un don merveilleux, atteignant zéro – l’autre avec une affreuse habilité marquant à zéro – et tout-à-coup la symphonie en ré de Brahms – je sais bien que parfois il est un peu long, un peu ‘profond’ mais dans ce concert seules ses qualités géniales demeurent – et quelle musique – et quel homme.” [Here, yesterday, a melancholy sort of concert – a costume ball with adults dressed as babies kind of thing – Roland-Manuel too witty, Poulenc too silly – the former with a marvellous gift, but achieving zero – the other with a frightful facility, achieving zero – and all at once the Brahms symphony in D. I know that at times he is a little long, a little ‘deep,’ but in this concert only his wonderful qualities appeared – what music – and what a man.] NB to Marcelle de Manziarly, F-Pn NLa 289 (178), [October 13, 1930].

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

92

Whatever Szigeti’s performance actually sounded like, the review speaks volumes about how Boulanger thought Brahms should be played. And a decade later, she was able to promote her vision of Brahms in concerts and eventually in recording. In 1937, a month after recording their pioneering Monteverdi discs, Boulanger’s vocal ensemble went back to the Studio Albert to produce the first commercial recording – predating any German efforts – of Brahms’s Liebeslieder-Walzer, Op. 52, for four voices and piano duet. Another brilliant young pupil, twenty-year-old Dinu Lipatti, joined Boulanger at the pianos, and the recording was filled out with further Brahms vocal ensemble works and a selection from his Op. 39 waltzes in the piano four-hand version. For the waltzes, Boulanger applied the principle of the eighteenth-century French ordre, from which selections may be drawn to make a suite, to construct a tonally and formally coherent cycle. She organized a selection of seven (out of the sixteen) waltzes into a palindromic sharp-key sequence beginning with number 6 (C♯ major), and continuing with numbers 15 (A major), 2 (E major), 1 (B major), 14 (A minor), 10 (G major) and 5 (E major), before concluding with a repeat of waltz 6 in C♯.34 Boulanger’s inclusion of a second performance of waltz 6 – sacrificing time that could have been used to record an eighth selection – indicates the importance of the symmetrical design to her thinking, and shows how her commitment to the idea of unified forms stretched into creating them through selection even where they do not a priori exist. Like the Mozart sonata with Curzon, Boulanger’s rendition of the waltzes with Lipatti derives its energy from rhythmic direction and tempo control. Their crisp attacks and literal rhythmic readings bring into relief the complex interactions of phrase and meter that characterize Brahms’s music, for example, in the hemiola patterns at the beginning of waltz 6. Although there is more bending than in the Mozart sonata – including some rare instances of acceleration – nuances of tempo are slight rather than dramatic, and opportunities for more sentimental treatment are ignored. For example, the arch-famous waltz 15 (in A♭ in the solo version, here in the A major duo version) is taken at an unusually brisk tempo for the period; there is relatively little relaxation into cadences and almost none at all within the phrase. Waltz 2, whose p dynamic and dolce marking often led to hushed and lingering treatments, is instead smoothly lilting in their performance. Particularly notable is the highly choreographed counterpoint in the second section, where emphasis moves first to the bass line of piano 2 in measures 9–10, then to the middle of the texture as the upper voice emerges in piano 34

NB, Sélection d’oeuvres de Johannes Brahms (Gramophone/ La Voix de Son Maître, DB 5057–5061, 1938). Boulanger’s choice and sequence caused confusion among some critics, who believed Op. 39 to be a cycle rather than a collection, and thought the piano duet version was an unauthorized arrangement rather than the work of the composer himself; see Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 297. Some recent reissues of the recording perpetuate the misunderstanding by reorganizing the waltzes into numerical order and omitting the repeat of no. 6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

93

2 in measures 13–16 (example 3.4). Waltzes 5 and 6 are similarly marked by strong attention to inner voices, especially where melodic material emerges in the alto range. Boulanger and Lipatti’s readings of the waltzes were worlds away from how Brahms himself apparently played them. Contemporaries describe his performances as extremely elastic, almost improvisatory, and particularly notable for his use of tempo change to characterize thematic material. According to Fanny Davies, “He would linger not only on one note alone, but on a whole idea, as if unable to tear himself away from its beauty. He would prefer to lengthen a bar or phrase rather than spoil it by making up the time into a metronomic bar . . .”.35 Although early recordings of the solo versions of waltzes 2 and 15 by Ilona Eibenschütz (1903) and Alfred Grünfeld (1910) do not take extreme liberties with tempo – perhaps a reflection of the dance character of the pieces – both players use acceleration to distinguish new phrases, and dramatize cadences far more obviously than Boulanger and Lipatti. Although Eibenschütz’s vigorous opening tempo for waltz 15 is as fast as Boulanger’s, in contrast to Grünfeld’s more sedate pace, both earlier pianists also exhibit considerable freedom in spreading chords and asynchronous hands.36 Tempo fluctuation and at least some of these expressive techniques remained a common feature of Brahms performance until after World War II, contributing for example to the lyricism of Wilhelm Backhaus’s 1936 solo recordings of the waltzes. Similarly, in a 1947 Viennese recording of the four-hand waltzes by Friedrich Wührer and Hermann von Nordberg, not only is the overall tempo for waltz 15 significantly slower (1:26 for the entire piece as against Boulanger and Lipatti’s 1:06), but there are also still many small variations within sections – particularly noticeable in the delayed downbeats for moments of climax. The differences between Boulanger’s Brahms and more expansive styles that regularly characterized others’ approaches to his work also leap out from comparison of her reading of the Liebeslieder with the 1947 Viennese recording, in which a vocal ensemble of leading opera stars, including Hans Hotter and Irmgard Seefried, joined Wührer and von Nordberg.37 The warmth and richness of vocal quality, the outgoing aspects of the piano duet, more relaxed tempi and above all the flexible approach to waltz rhythm contrasts sharply with the smoothness and drive of the Boulanger rendition. Thus although Brahms performance generally was becoming cleaner and less elastic in the early twentieth century, Boulanger’s readings seem on the 35

36 37

Fannie Davies, “Some Personal Recollections of Brahms as Pianist and Interpreter,” in Cobbet’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (London, 1929), Vol. I: 182, cited in Michael Musgrave, “Early Trends in the Performance of Brahms’s Piano Music,” in Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, edited by Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 304. Ibid., 320–3. The recordings are included on the CD furnished with the book. Brahms Walzer and Liebeslieder Walzer, EMI Classics Références, 5664252 (1997).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

94

The work in performance Example 3.4. Johannes Brahms, Op. 39, no. 2, mm. 9–16, after Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XII, Werke für Klavier zu vier Händen, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, n.d.), pp. 26– 7. Boxes indicate lines emphasized in Boulanger’s performance.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

95

forward edge of the curve. The Brahms that emerges from her recordings is not the dreamy lover of legend she had described in her Monde musical review; her emphasis instead is on Brahms the cerebral contrapuntist. This is partially a function of her choice of repertory – as miniatures in dance meter, the waltzes do not display extended tonal structures or extensive development – and partly the result of a performance style that promotes rhythmic and linear considerations over expressive effects. It seems likely that a similar approach informed her work as conductor for Brahms’s Piano Concerto in D minor, Op. 15, when she performed with Curzon and the Orchestre de la Société Philharmonique de Paris at the Salle Gaveau in 1937. Curzon’s effort to describe his admiration within the boundaries of conventional gender associations marks his letter to Boulanger after the performance: Where to begin? Every way in which I try to express my gratitude to you seems quite hopelessly inadequate, and in the end I know that I cannot express it. I can tell you musically what I feel: that the Brahms Concerto astonished me beyond anything, because with all your great musical understanding (deeper than any contemporary musician’s) there was a force and power (that opening tutti, the way you did it!) that we quite wrongly label “masculine.” I was so absorbed as never before that I did not think of the piano until the moment arrived for me to join the orchestra at the [end] of that long tutti! In fact, the orchestra responded superbly to you in a glow of admiration. All my friends were quite thrilled with the concert, and I hope perhaps that you felt it a little. For me it was a landmark, and I shall always remember when I am very, very old, that when I was just thirty and in Paris in December, you did me one of the greatest services that a great musician can do a lesser.38

The orchestral tutti that opens Op. 15 revolves around the contrast between the emphatic, angular opening and a lyric second theme that was given considerable expressive shaping in the hands of other conductors. The evidence of Boulanger’s recorded performances suggests that whatever attention she paid to its melodic line, she would not have allowed the tempo of the lyric section to relax, the resulting tautness perhaps contributing to the unremitting “force” and “power” that Curzon heard in her performance.39 In the notes to a 1997 reissue of Boulanger’s Brahms waltzes alongside the 1947 Brahmssaal recording, Alan Blyth describes the two recordings as representative of contrasting French and Viennese styles.40 And indeed many qualities of Boulanger’s performance could be portrayed in ways that the interwar French retour à l’ordre identified with Gallic tradition. Performance attributes such as clarity, restraint, or attention to the 38 39

40

Clifford Curzon to Nadia Boulanger, F-Pn NLa 64 (305), December 20, 1937. See for example Backhaus’s 1932 recording with Adrian Boult and the BBC symphony orchestra, generally considered quite “modern” players; but there is still considerable slowing for the second theme. Blyth, notes to Brahms Walzer and Liebeslieder Walzer, EMI Classics Références, 5664252 (1997). Rémy Stricker recently called Boulanger’s version “Parisian waltzes” as opposed to “Viennese waltzes” (broadcast, France Musique, September 12, 2011).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

96

intricacies of counterpoint that could be attached to “French” values of order and reason, and counterpoised against “German” emotionalism or excess, were easily subsumed in nationalist rhetoric. It is against this backdrop that we can read Boulanger’s pupil Virgil Thomson’s essays on French performance traditions, published in 1942 and 1943 at the height of World War II.41 Thomson claimed that the superiority of French music was in the approach to rhythm, which he termed “modern quantitative scansion,” and which involved rigorous control over tempo, conceived as an even flow of the smallest rhythmic values, and refusal to accentuate downbeats; he presented the German tradition, in contrast, as characterized by a “great thwacking downbeat” which could be advanced or held back for expressive purposes. He insisted that clean attacks were essential to the French style, and should thus never be sacrificed for beautiful tone or even for tuning. And, according to Thomson, adherence to French performance practice produced not only the best readings of French and American music, which were composed with this sound in mind, but of German music as well: [D]iscerning Germans have frequently pointed out the superiority of French renderings of their own classics. Wagner found the Beethoven symphonies far better played by the Paris Conservatory Orchestra than anywhere in Germany, and he based his own later readings on those of the French conductor Habeneck. Alfred Einstein, German Mozart specialist of our own day, has avowed in his book, Greatness in Music, his preference for French renditions of that composer. And certainly German organists have not in our century played Bach with any authority comparable to that of Saint-Saëns, Widor, Vierne, Guilmant, and Schweitzer. This acknowledged superiority of French approach to classical German music is due, I believe, to the survival in French musical practice of observances about rhythm that have elsewhere fallen into disuse.42

Thomson did not mention his former teacher as a promoter of what he called “French rhythm” (though he did stress the contribution of her organ teachers Vierne and Guilmant). But he presents this style as shared by American performance; as producing the best readings of virtually the entire historical repertory, including large swathes of German music; and as utterly essential for the performance of contemporary compositions by composers such as Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and himself. That is, while Thomson considers it to be in some sense particularly French, it was historically, and has again become, the best performance style for all music.

41

42

See especially “Conducting Modern Music,” first published January 25, 1942, and “French Rhythm” first published November 14, 1943, both reprinted in Virgil Thomson, Music Reviewed, 1940–1954 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 53–7 and 101–3 respectively. Ibid., 101.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

97

singing architecture and sounding form Aside from Boulanger, only one of the performers on her Brahms disc was actually French,43 underlining how Paris served as a center for the promulgation of international modernist performing styles, whether or not these were perceived or labelled as especially “French” in origin or orientation. Curzon, for example, attributed the success of her Brahms concerto performance to musical understanding: in other words, it did not rely on choice or sensibility (whether conditioned by gender or nation), but a deep knowledge of the musical work. As Curzon’s letter presents it, the style was not a “French” or “German” way, or – despite its force – a “masculine” way of playing the music, but the music’s way; not just how Boulanger chose to play the music but how the music was made to be played. Similar rhetoric, in which performance was dissolved into the work, was typical of the universalizing moves that characterized Boulanger’s own championship of the architectural approach to performance style. In a 1938 portrait of Boulanger for a newly founded (and explicitly international) music journal, Paul Valéry described Boulanger’s performance style. Glossing for his readers a phrase he had inscribed for Boulanger herself on a photograph prominently displayed in her salon (“To the one who dictates Enthusiasm and Rigor”), Valéry wrote: The joy of understanding, the wish to make others understand, blends in her with a firmness careful never to sacrifice the structure of a work to local effects, precision to the advantages of the “more or less,” or purity to the personal intentions of the interpreter. Ingres, in his energetic and bizarre language, said, speaking of drawing: “One should be prepared to mount the scaffold for designs.” Nadia Boulanger would say the same for the beat, I think.44

Valéry’s connection of Boulanger’s tempo management to the notion of design raises the question of how her performance style reflected her structural understanding of the musical work. Virtually all players of the first half of the twentieth century, including those who adopted late Romantic expressive styles, performed “structurally” to some extent. Wilhelm Furtwängler, for example, whose performances 43

44

Marie-Blanche de Polignac; the others were Romanian (Lipatti), Russian (Kédroff), Swiss (Cuénod) and Polish (Conrad), and had spent varying amounts of time in France in their earlier careers. And though Boulanger herself was entirely trained in France, her tastes were no doubt shaped to some extent by those of her Russian mother. Paul Valéry, “Nadia Boulanger,” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 607: “La joie de comprendre, la volonté de faire comprendre se composent en elle avec une fermeté soucieuse de ne sacrifier jamais la structure d’une oeuvre aux effets locaux, la précision aux avantages de l’à peu près, la pureté aux intentions particulières de l’interprète. Ingres dans son langage énergique et bizarre, disait, parlant dessin: ‘Il faut monter sur l’échafaud pour les plans.’ Nadia Boulanger en dirait tout autant pour la mesure, je pense.” The photograph of Valéry signed “A Nadia Boulanger / à Celle qui dicte / l’Enthousiasme et / la Rigueur // son ami // Paul Valéry” is reproduced on p. 135 of Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens; Spycket, Nadia Boulanger, p. 137, includes an image of it in its spot on the bookshelf in the salon.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

98

were notoriously volatile, made many performance choices on structural grounds.45 Fink’s notion of “structural rubato” recognizes that even players who did not engage in continuous tempo fluctuation within sections frequently used tempo alteration between them to distinguish major formal divisions; and there are many other ways in which musicians can convey their understanding of form. Structural divisions are most frequently marked by slowing at major cadences. How the placement and context of even such basic techniques might create different perceptions of form can be illustrated by returning to the second movement of Mozart’s piano sonata K 448, just before the return of the main theme in measure 71 (example 3.5). Boulanger and Curzon keep the tempo fairly steady between measures 66 and 68 (unlike the Bartóks, who shift constantly at this point), then slow from measure 69, with a perceptible delay on measure 70, all the more striking given the relative paucity of ritardandi in the movement as a whole. Further slowing on the melodic arpeggio descent to D and a full stop on the D major seventh at beat 3, followed by a long pause, act to prepare the return of the main theme, G major tonic and tempo primo in the following measure. The Bartóks too delay the arrival of measure 70 and slow even more strongly before the return of the main melody, but there is no real break between the sections. They treat the final d2 in measure 70, piano 1, as an upbeat to the theme (creating a variation on the beginning of the movement, where the theme begins on the downbeat), and the chord on the first beat of measure 71 is spread. Not only does this vary the theme and thus the symmetry of the return, it creates a dramatic push through the structural division rather than the stricter sectional separation that Boulanger and Curzon’s treatment suggests. This tendency to think in distinct formal blocks (as she recommended to Cortot’s students a month later when coaching their Mozart performances) and to emphasize symmetry rather than continuous narrative was a distinctive marker of Boulanger’s performances. At the same time, continuity at a structural level was a major concern. In one of her early Monde musical reviews, Boulanger declared that, “For a performance to be completely beautiful, the foundation must enhance the surface,”46 and she regularly urged musicians to concentrate on the same two aspects of the work that she highlighted in her analyses, the grande ligne and formal proportion. Often employing a similar surface/structure (or foreground/background) vocabulary, she criticized performers whose “fragmentation” (morcellement) of the music resulted in an incoherent image of the work’s overall form. Writing in 1922 on José Iturbi’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in 45

46

Nicholas Cook, “The Conductor and the Theorist: Furtwängler, Schenker and the First Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, edited by John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 105–25. Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 11 (November 1919): 327: “Pour qu’une exécution soit entièrement belle, il faut que le fond mette en valeur la surface.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

99

Example 3.5. Mozart, Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448, after Sonate und Fuge für 2 Klaviere, ed. Adolf Ruthardt (Leipzig: Peters [c. 1890]), mvt. 2, mm. 66–72.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

100

C minor, for example, she argued that the performance lacked grandeur because ornaments received too much weight. After explaining the importance of determining which notes are “real” and which subordinate, and adjusting their emphasis accordingly, she concluded, “It seemed to me that in his desire not to neglect the smallest detail, M. Iturbi put too many elements in the foreground.”47 In contrast, in a review of Blanche Selva’s 1920 performance as soloist in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 and Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard, Boulanger praised the pianist for “her sensitivity which is higher than the sentimentality translated into little details, sometimes ravishing, but destructive of overall harmony”; she presented Selva’s approach through longer units as an aspect of the performer’s faithful service to the work.48 Attention to the grande ligne is the route to coherence, in contrast to the fragmentation produced by focus on local narratives. As Boulanger explained in 1919: The work, long or short, unfolds between two fixed points; through analysis, through intuition, the performer should choose the general curve according to the overall proportions fixed by these two points – and even in sight-reading, should not forget that showing partial images of a whole does not permit comprehension of that whole, while a poor but faithful reproduction of a work of art allows us to understand the work better than would the original displayed in fragments. I am sorry to insist, but the fragmentation of rhythm and melody caused by the exaggerated emphasis given to the bar line, the multiplicity of expressive gestures and the tyranny of technical prowess, causes too many deep disruptions for the danger not to be noted. In contrast, one only has to make clear [the work’s] large outlines and pursue the linear development, underlining it with harmonic or instrumental intentions, for clarity to spread everywhere – and as everyone then understands.49

Boulanger’s recommendations to concentrate on the work’s “large outlines” and “linear development” as an antidote to fragmentation resonates particularly strongly with her 1925 letter to Marcelle de Manziarly about the 47 48

49

Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 33, nos. 1–2 (January 1922): 24: “Il m’a semblé que dans son souci de ne négliger aucun détail, M. Iturbi mettait trop de valeurs au premier plan.” Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 31, nos. 19–20 (October 1920): 304: “sa sensibilité s’avère au-dessus de la sensiblerie qui se traduit en petits détails, ravissants parfois, mais destructeurs de l’harmonie.” Boulanger also praised Selva’s synthetic conception of rhythm, which created a sense of long periods, and her technical fluency, which she presented as in service of the work rather than of virtuosity. Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 12 (December 1919): 350: “L’oeuvre, courte ou longue, se déroule entre deux points déterminés; l’interprète doit par analyse, par intuition, choisir la courbe générale d’après la proportion d’ensemble fixée par ces deux points – et même en déchiffrant, ne pas oublier que de montrer les images partielles d’un ensemble ne permet pas de concevoir comment est cet ensemble, tandis que la pauvre reproduction fidèle d’une oeuvre d’art nous la fait mieux comprendre que l’original exposé en morceaux. Je m’excuse d’insister ainsi, mais le morcellement du rythme et de la mélodie causé par l’importance exagérée donnée à la barre de mesure, par la multiplicité des nuances, par la tyrannie de la technique, cause trop de perturbations profondes pour que le danger ne soit pas signalé. Par contre, il suffit de dégager les grand plans, de poursuivre le développement linéaire, en le soulignant par les intentions harmoniques ou instrumentales, pour que la clarté se répande partout – et comme chacun alors comprend.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

101

qualities of great masterworks, which are characterized above all by the integration of form and line, showing how her composition teaching, analytical thinking and performance recommendations coincide. Boulanger’s critique of fragmentation in her concert criticism was regularly accompanied by tirades against the tyranny of the measure. In some of these reviews she made it clear that she was advocating the use of rhythm to support concepts of line, in the way that Thomson would later describe. Writing in 1922 on a Colonne performance of Schumann, she explained: [I]f the performance does not forget about bar lines in favor of the construction of phrases, everything is thrown off-kilter, and fragmented. It goes without saying that this concept of rhythm has nothing to do with rubato, which is an offense against taste, but if the rhythmic momentum is broader, if the breath is longer, if the inflections are aimed broadly instead of stopping in depth, the phrases suddenly appear clearly, and the construction of the work emerges.50

In other cases, she complained about local manipulations of tempo that detracted from the rhythmic coherence of longer sections. A stricter approach, in contrast, allows the continuity of the grande ligne to be heard. Her valiant attempt to praise Damrosch’s Beethoven despite his elastic approach to tempo makes an interesting contrast with her wholeheartedly enthusiastic review of Serge Koussevitzky’s direction of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. She enthused about the “iron” tempo of his allegro, which rendered the entire movement as a single “grand, shivering block”: “No yielding, no repose, but such force of momentum that the line is projected from the first note to the last chord with no concession.”51 Koussevitsky took the second movement slowly but with “nobility and calm grandeur” rather than decorative grace, creating a “tranquil curve of a great idea”; the scherzo and trio were linked by the same tight tempo, and the final movement was like a marching crowd that refuses to stop, carrying the listener along with its irresistible movement. The performance as a whole was “dominated by a rhythmic conception that creates a profound connectivity and homogeneity between the different movements” so that “the four movements are only four aspects of a single visage, a single heart and a single soul.”52 Though her account does not entirely gel with evidence from Koussevitzky’s recorded 50

51

52

Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 33, nos. 7–8 (April 1922): 139: “si l’exécution n’oublie pas les barres de mesure au bénéfice de la construction des phrases, tout est désaxé, et morcelé. Il va sans dire que le rythme ainsi considéré n’a rien à voir avec un rubato qui est une offense au goût, mais si l’élan rythmique est plus large, si la respiration est plus longue, si les inflexions se dirigent en largeur au lieu de s’arrêter en profondeur, les phrases apparaissent aussitôt, claires, et la construction de l’oeuvre se dégage.” Nadia Boulanger, “Concerts Koussevitzky,” MM 32, nos. 23–24 (December 1921): 400–1: “Nul fléchissement, nul repos, mais une telle force d’élan que la ligne se projette de la 1ère note au dernier accord sans une concession.” Ibid.: “L’interprétation . . . est dominée par une conception rythmique qui crée une connexité et une homogénéité profondes entre les différents mouvements. . . . l’on dirait que les quatre mouvements ne sont que quatre aspects d’un même visage, d’un même coeur, et d’une même âme.” On the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

102

performances, Boulanger’s praise shows how she thought of tempo as a structural and unifying element rather than a narrative tool. For Fauré’s Requiem, an unusually rich set of materials, including four recordings as well as her annotated score, allows a detailed investigation of how Boulanger’s own performances projected the structural approach she admired. The earliest recording is a recently discovered archive disc of a 1939 concert with the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra and Choir, recorded for national broadcast by NBC. The descriptive voiceover (somewhat disconcertingly delivered over part of the Requiem’s first movement) specifies that the chorus and orchestra included 275 student musicians, who performed for an audience of 1,500 in the college’s Finney Chapel.53 Boulanger’s second recording was made with a much smaller group in 1948 at the Salle Gaveau, and features many musicians, including soloists Gisèle Peyron and Doda Conrad, who had performed the piece with her before World War II. For reasons that are unclear this recording was never released in Boulanger’s lifetime.54 The two later recordings include a 1962 broadcast with the New York Philharmonic and Choral Art Society, and a 1968 performance with the BBC Chorus and Symphony Orchestra.55 Though the recordings span three countries, thirty years, and radically different performing forces as well as differences in the technologies of preservation, the relationship of Boulanger’s performance decisions to musical structure is notably consistent through all four. As we saw in chapter 2, Boulanger’s analytical diagram in her copy of the Requiem presents the first movement as an introduction (the Introit), followed by an ABCA main block for the Kyrie, and a coda. The Kyrie section is

53

54

55

Concerts Koussevitzky, see Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 49–51; Milhaud made similar comments about the conductor’s rigor in his reviews. On Koussevitzky and tempo fluctuation see Philip, Early Recordings, 34–5. Until now this recording has been completely unknown to scholars. The original discs produced by NBC’s WJZ studio in New York surfaced in an antiques barn in Massachusetts, and their provenance is unknown. I am very grateful to Allen Combs for sharing his discovery with me. The Oberlin groups were exceptionally good by American university standards, and Boulanger was one of several eminent musical figures invited to work with them in the 1930s. Brief film footage from her visit is preserved in the Oberlin College Archives in the William Edwards Stevenson papers, RG 30/219, Series 12, Box 1, and correspondence about the program with the Oberlin Conservatory director Frank Shaw is in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 144. The program (preserved in Rés. Vm dos. 195, January 20, 1939) included a Mozart symphony and works by Haydn, Tallis, Leo Préger and Lili Boulanger, although only the Fauré was broadcast. NBC had been trying to program Boulanger conducting the Requiem since the previous year; see F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143, liasse 8. Boulanger may have been unhappy with the quality of the performance. Choirs in France took decades to recover from wartime losses, particularly of young male singers, and the chorus on this recording is notably weak. The recording is currently available in the EMI Références label, CDH 761025 2. The New York performance took place during Boulanger’s 75th birthday tour of the United States; it was the orchestra’s first full program to be directed by a woman. The recording features on New York Philharmonic: The Historic Broadcasts, 1923–1987, Vol. IV, New York Philharmonic Special Editions 9708/09 (1997). The BBC recording was made at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, October 30, 1968, and is currently available in the BBC Legends series, BBCL 4026–2 (1999). For details see Giuliani, “Discographie,” 431–2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

103

subdivided, with indications of long-range harmonic movement for each segment. Her musical annotations to the score highlight linear and contrapuntal elements, particularly where they conflict with regular metric divisions and often in defiance of the original notation. In the Introit, for example, she transferred the marcato from the bassoon line at measure 9 into the strings, replaced the diminuendo at the end of measure 10 with a crescendo, crossed out the p in measure 11, marking mf in its place, and added a slash after the first beat of measure 11 to separate the resulting phrases (figure 3.2). Her annotations rewrite the instrumental line between A and B as three identical curves, asymmetrically placed in terms of the bar. Her handling – audible on both the 1939 and 1948 recordings – allows her to direct the passage toward the arrival of the sff E♭ at measure 12, where the descending long-note motif of the movement’s opening bars returns, and renders the entire Introit as an ABA1 structure. Throughout this section, the phrasing of the orchestral line counterpoints rhythmically with choral statements on largely static chords. For these, Boulanger apparently aimed at even, intense delivery that would produce a monumental effect: her added tenuti over the eighth notes of the dotted rhythms in the vocal lines seem designed to ensure the chorus did not drop back in dynamic or short-change the rhythmic values. The Kyrie is similarly marked by concern for line and counterpoint, within a broader project of clear characterization of main formal blocks. The A section, for example (pp. 4–10 in the 1901 orchestral score),56 emphasizes the rhythmic interplay between the lyric string phrases sweeping over the bar lines, the steady quarter-note march of the bass, and the two tenor chorus statements of the main vocal theme. Boulanger’s markings (for example, “La croche un peu sostenuto” before the first string entry) affirm the rhythmic identity of each of these elements, and her treatment of dynamic avoids variations that might have distracted attention from their interaction. Some dynamics are crossed out in the score, while others that remain unchanged seem to have been largely ignored in performance: in the 1939 and 1948 recordings, Boulanger hardly notices the crescendo at C (p. 6), and completely omits the crescendo at D (p. 8) and the sempre f that follows. In fact, there is little change to the dynamic until the ff chords before E (example 3.6). In addition to the stepped dynamic, Boulanger makes these two sets of three chords – marked “accolades” in the organ registration she used for her 1937 performance in London – emerge as a discrete entity by crossing out the diminuendo on the second “accolade” in the strings, increasing the symmetry of the two three-note patterns.57 She further marks out the “accolades” by rewriting the final quarter note of the 56 57

Fauré, Requiem, annotated copy, F-Pn Rés. Vma 1938a. The diminuendo is crossed out only in the bass line; she also crosses out the divisi in the celli so that all are at the lower octave. Some distinctions in dynamic and quality are still operated by changes in organ registration, but these changes mean that contrast between the accolades is less evident than the original score directs. The organ registration is held at F-Pn Département de Musique, ms. 24369.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

104

The work in performance

Figure 3.2. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 2–3. F-Pn Vma 1938a. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

preceding section as an eighth and inserting a rest, which provides a distinct break without disturbing the tempo (figure 3.3). The result is that the fourmeasure passage labelled “Transition” in her diagram has a distinct identity that does not depend on tempo alteration.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

105

Figure 3.2. (cont.)

Similar patterns inform Boulanger’s approach to the rest of the piece. Many of her markings seem aimed at maintaining tempo and especially ensuring that quiet sections and slow tempi did not drag.58 As in the Kyrie, 58

Examples include her “sans ralentir” at the Amen of the Kyrie, her “allégé, allant” at the Andante moderato of the Offertoire (p. 31) and the “sans traîner” and “léger sans ralentir” in the Agnus Dei.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

106

The work in performance

Example 3.6. Gabriel Fauré, Kyrie, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (after the orchestral score, Paris: Hamelle, [1901]), pp. 8–10.

she frequently shortened the concluding rhythmic values of phrases or sections to allow insertion of a rest, so that cadences or breaks could occur without disturbing the pulse. Other markings underline rhythmic values and relationships, particularly where experience showed that singers and players might render them imprecisely: as at the beginning of the Agnus Dei, where she noted that the strings should not elongate the first four eighth notes of the bar or short-change the fifth and sixth; or in the Offertoire, where her added marcatos and aspirated vowels in the vocal

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

107

Example 3.6. (cont.)

lines help to articulate the canonic interaction between alto and tenor. Most movements feature markings aimed at emphasizing contrapuntal and linear elements, such as the long pencilled arcs in the Offertoire and Sanctus, which ensure that the return of the Kyrie’s “Te decet hymnus” theme is shaped independently from the regular metric emphases of the bar and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

108

The work in performance

Figure 3.3. Nadia Boulanger, annotated copy of Gabriel Fauré, Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre (Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]), p. 10. F-Pn Vma 1938a. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

109

lifted away from the rest of the texture. Such interventions, aimed at producing long lines and clarifying counterpoint, are complemented with others directed toward evening out surfaces and polishing them to a high sheen. She frequently crossed out the notated hairpins and other dynamic indications that would have legitimated considerable small-scale fluctuation; in the Sanctus, she marked the entry of the chorus “Sans nuances” suggesting that all the notated dynamics should be omitted. The correspondence between audible performance decisions and the emphases of Boulanger’s analysis and commentary on the Requiem seems especially clear. Her approach to the Requiem results in what Nicholas Cook has called “performance of the middleground”: layers of rhythm and counterpoint are audibly distinct but coordinated with large-scale harmonic direction, and phrases are detached from any regular emphasis according to measure.59 Elsewhere, Cook has observed that scholarship on analysis and performance has often adopted a page-to-stage way of thinking, in which structural performance is posited as an ideal to which performers should aspire, or analytical criteria are used to distinguish between good and bad performances. As he remarks, such attempts can be problematic, especially where there is no evidence that performers were especially concerned with the musical elements structural analysis identifies as important.60 In Boulanger’s case, relatively unusually for the interwar years, both written analyses and recorded performances are extant. But the situation is more complex than a simple performing-out of an objectively existing, analytically discovered structure; as we have seen, many of the salient aspects of Boulanger’s performing style must have been in place before the intense turn to form of the 1920s and her increasing attention to analysis in her teaching. Instead, we can see Boulanger’s performances as part of the process creating the structures she perceived: following this logic, as Cook writes about analysis more generally, “structure . . . is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result.”61 The approach that can be deduced from Boulanger’s scores and performances is consistent not only with her concert criticism, but also with evidence of her coaching of performers. Clifford Curzon’s notes on a February 1935 session with her on Mozart’s Concerto in C minor, K 491, for example, show how linear and formal concerns guided her advice: 59 60

61

Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” 183–4. Nicholas Cook, “Methods for Analysing Recordings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 233–4. Nicholas Cook, “Analysing Performance and Performing Analysis,” in Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford University Press, 1999), 243. It seems particularly apt to Boulanger’s situation that Cook is here adapting a phrase from Judith Butler regarding the performance of gender (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

110

1st mvt: Follow lowest bass progressions right thro. bars 4 and 8 etc., rests exactly on 2. This is of first importance throughout whole work. 26 & 28 etc: feel bar falling immediately onto cello bass note of next bars. ... 76–8: bass slightly detached, and following progression to held bass Fs at 79. 233 etc 3 crotchets firmly held, a continuation of previous syncops in orchestra! 355 scales without any expression whatever – right to sudden return of the theme. 3rd mvt: Var 5 middle voice of importance, especially suspensions, bars 4–6. And in 2nd half Var 8 follow bass line clearly 5&6 and etc, No mixing of harmonies LH! (probably caused by bad fingering C.C.)62

Later correspondence with Curzon shows that their conversations about performance continued to emphasize the projection of musical structure above all. When he began giving masterclasses at Fontainebleau after World War II, the choice of repertoire was decided in advance between them, and Boulanger conducted classroom analyses of all the pieces preceding the performance sessions.63 And when Boulanger wrote in 1960 to query one of his performance decisions after hearing Curzon’s recording of César Franck’s Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, his response gives a good idea of how analytical and interpretive concerns were meshed in their discussions: Of course, it would be foolish not to own to my reason for that change of accent. I wish I had always a reason (even a bad one!). It is just that the statement of the theme at E is the last one before the variations proper, and the only one marked “a tempo” by Franck. This I feel to be the apex of this section of the work and it is also the only time the theme is repeated insistently three times. Every other time it has been “piu lento, espress. ad lib” or “recitando”, etc. I just felt that here Franck’s “a tempo” suggests that the music no longer implored, but rather commanded, and I could think of no better way of showing this than by accentuating, this once, the bar line. But that you noticed my method shows that I used the wrong means – or, at least, that I overstated!64

But Boulanger’s criticism of Curzon’s decision about this passage was a minor point, compared to her enthusiasm overall for his approach and abilities. As she wrote at the end of her letter, “You are such an inspired = architectural artist – what a joy to be so proud of you.”65 This comment once again underlines how Boulanger’s concept of the work links notions of emotion, expression and inspiration not to subjectivity but to form. The equation of an inspired performance with an architectural one suggests that

62 63 64 65

GB-Lbl Add. ms. 65077, fol. 205. See Curzon’s letters of August 15 and September 17, 1952, F-Pn NLa 64 (321 and 323). Curzon to NB, F-Pn NLa 64 (349), October 24, 1960. NB to Clifford Curzon, undated [September 1960]. The letter is inserted inside the cover of Curzon’s annotated score of the Franck at GB-Lbl Add. ms. 65022.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

111

she was an important contributor to the late twentieth-century situation in which the projection of musical structure was implicitly taken as an ideal. sounding the future, performing the past Historians of twentieth-century performance practice have stressed how “geometric” or “architectural” performance was promoted in relation to new music, particularly the non-developmental forms of neoclassical composition. In virtually every account, Stravinsky is given a decisive role in this growing ascendancy.66 In particularly, unitary tempo (or “clock time” as Stravinsky used Bergson to describe it) is usually considered essential to the metric displacement at the heart of Stravinsky’s rhythmic innovations. A consistent background tempo brings out the manipulation of meter and accent that provides the music’s principal forward impulse and drive.67 However, there is considerable evidence that many early performers of Stravinsky’s works used the same constant tempo fluctuation or structural rubato they applied to any other music.68 The composer’s advocacy for unitary tempi shows characteristics of the portamento phenomenon as described by John Potter: that is, Stravinsky’s calls for a monometric approach came at a time when many performers regularly used significant tempo variation, and some interpreters, such as Cortot, were stretching and bending with more abandon than ever before. Stravinsky’s increasingly dogmatic pronouncements on interpretation were part of an evolving approach to performance in the 1920s, when he first began to concertize regularly as a pianist and conductor. Comments in the Chroniques reflect this new emphasis, amplified still further in the sixth lecture of his Poétique musicale, “De l’exécution,” which functioned as a kind of credo that was retroactively applied to his earlier career. Boulanger assiduously followed Stravinsky’s publications and quoted them regularly in her teaching and public lectures. Kimberly Francis’s research has shown how the two musicians worked together in the decade before the outbreak of World War II: Stravinsky drew on Boulanger’s expertise to bring his music to publication, and relied on her efforts and contacts to generate commissions and performances; in exchange, Boulanger gained the composer’s imprimatur on her teaching, and used her privileged access to Stravinsky to bolster her authority as pedagogue and spokesperson for

66 67

68

See for example, Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present”; Philip, Early Recordings, 13–16; Day, A Century of Recorded Music, 162–3. On the large literature discussing Stravinsky’s rhythm, which includes particularly important contributions by Richard Taruskin and Pieter van den Toorn, see Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy, 81–131; Chandler Carter, “The Rake’s Progress and Stravinsky’s Return: The Composer’s Evolving Approach to Setting Text,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 (2010): 554–8. Fink, “‘Rigoroso (♪ = 126)’” shows this phenomenon at work in early recordings of The Rite of Spring.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

112

new music.69 This mutually advantageous relationship informed both musicians’ work in performance in the decade leading up to the publication of the Poétique in 1942. Though they had known each other for many years, Boulanger and Stravinsky became increasingly close after 1929, when the composer charged her with the education of his 19-year-old son Sviatoslav (Soulima), who was aiming for a career as a pianist.70 The choice of mentor was partly inspired by Boulanger’s loyalty to his music. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that, with a professional performance career in mind, Stravinsky would hand over his son’s training to someone whose approach he did not admire, and Boulanger was the perfect anti-interpretive interpreter as well as a committed Stravinskyite. Boulanger entrusted Soulima’s piano tuition to a fellow Pugno protégée, Céliny Chailley-Richez, and took over other aspects of his studies herself.71 Although she taught him only composition, history and analysis, her pedagogy relied heavily on keyboard performance and particularly on two-piano work with her students. Like Curzon, Lipatti, Jean Françaix, Beveridge Webster and other Boulanger students of the late 1920s and 1930s, Soulima Stravinsky was frequently recruited as the second pianist for Boulanger’s analysis sessions. He played duo repertoire with other Boulanger pupils, particularly Webster, and with Boulanger herself, as preparation for the concerts he was soon producing with his father, which were designed to smooth his entrée into the professional world.72 Partly as a result of this training, Soulima was a far more “geometric” player than his father ever was.73 69

70

71

72

73

Kimberly Francis, “A Dialogue Begins: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphonie de psaumes, 1930–1932,” Women and Music 14 (2010): 22–44; see also Francis, “A Most Unsuccessful Project: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphony in C, 1939–45,” Musical Quarterly 94 (2011): 234–70. In a letter of September 26, 1929 (F-Pn NLa 108), Stravinsky asked to meet with her urgently to map out Soulima’s future education. Within a few weeks the young man was in Paris, and his mother was writing to thank Boulanger for welcoming him into her family (Catherine Stravinsky to NB, F-Pn NLa 108 (68), October 23, 1929). Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 492. Céliny Richez (1884–1973) studied at the Conservatoire with Pugno from 1895 to 1898, and afterward played two-piano recitals with him. She married the violinist Marcel Chailley in 1908, and their oldest son, musicologist Jacques Chailley, was Boulanger’s pupil from 1925 to 1927. She had a well-known concert partnership with Boulanger’s friend and former classmate Georges Enesco from 1932 onward. See Dominique Chailley, “Autour de Georges Enesco à Paris,” www.musimem.com/enesco.htm (consulted September 15, 2011). In 1936, for example, Soulima was the soloist under his father’s direction for concerts in South America and Switzerland, playing works for piano and orchestra such as Capriccio and the Piano Concerto. Soulima generally played publicly with his father rather than Boulanger, but the Bliss archive at Harvard contains an undated concert program (c. 1947) for a two-piano recital they gave, entirely devoted to Stravinsky’s works, including arrangements of extracts from the Symphony in C and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, box 38. Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), describing his lessons with Soulima Stravinsky at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, notes (pp. 84–5) that Soulima’s approach to tempo was much more strict than his father’s, particularly with regard to accelerations. Joseph saw Boulanger’s influence on Soulima’s approach to counterpoint (p. 78): “[Soulima Stravinsky] excelled at counterpoint. I remember that many of my piano lessons focused

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

113

Soulima’s move to Paris to study with Boulanger ushered in a new phase in her relationship with the Stravinsky family and in her friendship with his father.74 After working with Soulima on revisions to the piano-vocal score for Symphonie des psaumes in 1931, she became increasingly involved in the editing of Stravinsky’s works for publication, and was particularly active in producing keyboard scores and arrangements. Francis’s research shows that Boulanger’s suggested edits were largely concerned with questions of tempo, rhythmic notation and performance directions. She also frequently intervened in the notation of voice leading, recommending changes that would make contrapuntal relationships clearer.75 Boulanger had lengthy experience in presenting Stravinsky’s music through keyboard performance in both public lectures and her classes, which could be brought to bear on producing performance scores. And although she had by this point abandoned any ambition to be an international concert artist on the organ, her earlier career had been more solidly oriented toward professional performance than Stravinsky’s. The composer was well established as both a pianist and conductor in the international performance arena by the end of the 1920s, but his reputation was principally built on compositional authority over his own works, rather than performance of standard repertory. There is abundant evidence from personal testimony, reviews and the composer himself that he had considerable technical shortcomings and that he lacked confidence in his performing ability.76 In his relationship with Boulanger he seems to have acknowledged her expertise and appreciated her rigor, particularly regarding rhythm and tempo, and he often deferred to her even when playing his own music.77 When Boulanger’s concert career took off in the mid 1930s, Stravinsky’s works regularly featured in her concerts in France and abroad. She shared a concert platform with him on a few occasions – most notably for a concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées during the 1937 Exposition Universelle, in which Boulanger conducted Bach and Stravinsky led the Symphonie des

74

75 76 77

on tracing the interlacing lines of most any composition, be it by Bach or Schubert. Soulima spent considerable energy in showing me how the tenor line of a passage migrated to the alto, and how I must honor that with my fingers . . . All these lessons, I was soon to discover, were learned from Boulanger, since she also regularly asked me to play the same exercises in private lessons I had with her one summer.” For further details see Francis, “A Dialogue Begins,” 24–6. For example, Boulanger soon became embroiled in efforts to quash Soulima’s romance with an American student; though Boulanger apparently approved of the relationship and declined actively to discourage it, she agreed not to openly support Soulima against his family (Catherine Stravinsky to NB, F-Pn NLa 108 (90 and 91), April 8 and May 7, 1931). Francis, “A Dialogue Begins,” 29–32. Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” n. 13, provides a good summary. Madeleine Milhaud described preparations for a lecture-recital Stravinsky gave at Mills College in October 1944, during which he and Boulanger played his Sonata for two pianos: “Igor had agreed to give a lecture. Nadia Boulanger decided to come as well, and suggested she play some piano duets with Igor. I attended the rehearsal. She was very severe and at one point slapped Igor’s hand saying ‘No, Igor, it isn’t right. Count!’” Roger Nichols, Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 28.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

114

psaumes – and in May 1938 she was entrusted with the premiere of his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. I discuss this piece in more detail in chapter 7, but note here that the preparation of the premiere and subsequent concerts provided further occasions for their exchange of views on the interpretation of Stravinsky’s music. It also furnished Boulanger with opportunities to bring the composer’s authority to bear on the promotion of the architectural approach she had been advocating all along, using his prestige to lend weight to the expression of her convictions. In the summer of 1938, she brought Stravinsky to her classes at Fontainebleau, noting in her diary how he emphasized that the pulse is everything in music, and writing down his quip on the subject for future use: “When the doctor comes, he takes your pulse and asks, ‘How are you?’ But it’s just politeness. You have already responded to his fingers.”78 In a BBC interview with Adrian Boult before the English premiere of the concerto later in the year, she reinforced Stravinsky’s claim that the emotional content of his works was built into the musical architecture and thus in no need of intervention from performers: [T]here is no need to speak of the composer in order to understand the composition, nor is there any need for an “interpretation” of what he has written. All that is needed is to play exactly what is written, exactly as he wrote it, and the effect the composer wants will be produced. It already contains the emotions you are to feel. . . . the expressiveness of the music is the result of the succession and choice of notes, of rhythms, or tone-colours and of dynamic marks made by the composer in his score and not added afterwards by the performer. As Strawinsky says: “Music should not be interpreted, but transmitted.”79

From the following spring, Boulanger was heavily involved in the production of Stravinsky’s Poétique, which provided perhaps the ultimate seal of approval for her work. The text grew out of his appointment to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard in 1939–40. It was the first time a musician had been asked, and Boulanger negotiated the invitation to Stravinsky from Edward Forbes, director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, whose son Elliot was her student.80 Stravinsky recruited two principal collaborators, Pierre Souvchintsky and Alexis Roland-Manuel, and the lectures were largely drafted between April and June while the composer 78

79

80

F-Pn Rés Vmf ms. 102, August 15, 1938: “Strawinsky fait la classe à l’école[.] [L]a pulsation dit tout en musique – ‘Quand le Docteur vient, il vous prend le pouls et demande: Comment ça va? Mais c’est de la politesse. Vous avez répondu à ses doigts’.” Transcript of “Music of the Week” introduced by Adrian Boult, October 30, 1938, 4:20–4:30 pm (GB-CaBBC Nadia Boulanger Artist File I). Boulanger conducted the English premiere at Broadcasting House on November 4. On Stravinsky’s contention that the emotion was written into the work (first aired in print in “Some Ideas about My Octuor”); see Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” 178–9. Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 310–12. Boulanger was staying with the family when the invitation was issued, and correspondence with Forbes (F-Pn NLa 70 (193–202)) confirms that she was behind the plan.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

115

was being treated for tuberculosis at Sancellemoz in Savoy. He returned to Paris in July, but after the declaration of war with Germany in September, he retreated to the relative calm and safety of Boulanger’s house in Gargenville. There he met the Forbes family, also in residence as they awaited passage home, and showed his lecture drafts to Boulanger’s neighbor Valéry.81 In late September, Stravinsky left for the United States – permanently, as it turned out – and he delivered the lectures over the course of the winter, assiduously looked after by Boulanger’s current and former pupils in Harvard’s music department, including Tillman Merritt and Walter Piston. Once Boulanger herself arrived in the United States in the summer of 1940, she resumed her role as go-between for the publication of the text (which was practically convenient, since she was living with the Forbeses in Cambridge while the composer had moved to the West Coast), and in 1942 she took over the final stages as the Poétique went to press.82 Although the Poétique was published under Stravinsky’s name and represents views he wished to embrace, its creation was very much the result of collective effort. Souvchintsky and Roland-Manuel made the most substantial contributions, and Soulima Stravinsky was also involved, providing rough translations into French of some of Souvchintsky’s work for subsequent polishing by Roland-Manuel.83 In contrast, there is no evidence that Boulanger made any specific contribution to the original French text of the Poétique, despite her constant involvement in the mechanics of the commission and Stravinsky’s stay with her near its completion. She was, however, Stravinsky’s principal collaborator for a lecture entitled “Composing, Performing, Listening,” an hour-long presentation in English based on the 81

82

83

The complex history of the text’s composition is treated in Valérie Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégètes (1910–1940) (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006), 213–44; see also Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America 1934–1971 (London: Pimlico, 2007 (paperback edn.; originally published New York: Knopf, 2006)), 91–103. In a letter of September 9, 1939, F-Pn NLa 70 (193–4), Forbes thanked Boulanger for the chance to meet Stravinsky and Valéry; his next letter (October 6, NLa 70 (195–202)) shows that Valéry was to be invited to take up the Harvard appointment if Stravinsky was prevented. Valéry wrote to his friend André Gide on seeing Stravinsky’s draft, noting the fairly literal borrowing of passages from his own Cours de poétique in Stravinsky’s discussion of the aesthetic object. See Stimpson, “Nadia Boulanger et le monde littéraire,” 151–3. Francis, “A Most Unsuccessful Project,” 238, provides a detailed account of Stravinsky’s and Boulanger’s interaction in 1939–40 as the lectures were being prepared. See Stravinsky’s letters of May 19 and October 13, 1941 (F-Pn NLa 108 (143 and 147)). Boulanger could discuss details with him in California in the late summer and early fall of 1941; see Francis, “A Most Unsuccessful Project,” 254. Stravinsky’s telegram to NB of March 13, 1942 (F-Pn NLa 108 (148)), sent to her at the Forbes’s house, Gerry’s Landing, reads: “Your November December letters never received. Because for me utterly impossible please take all necessary steps to rush publishing my lectures have entire confidence in your judgement thanks warmest greetings.” In gratitude for her help, the composer gave her the first copy, inscribed with an affectionate dedication: Boulanger’s exemplar (F-Pn Vmc 9362) is marked on “NB/ 1” in Stravinsky’s hand on the flyleaf, and his photo is inscribed, “Ce premier exemplaire / pour vous ma très / chère Nadia avec toute / mon affection / IStr / Santa / Barbara / Sept 42.” On the network of collaboration, see Dufour, Stravinski, 213–44. Dufour challenges claims made by Myriam Soumagnac in her edition of Igor Stravinsky, Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons, (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 11–55.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

116

Harvard lectures, which the composer first delivered in Chicago in January 1944, and several times in 1944 and 1945 on both the East and West coasts.84 The text was mainly based on the second, third and sixth Harvard lectures – on the musical object, his compositional method and on performance – and included a largely new final section on listening. Although the precise nature of Boulanger’s involvement is unclear, the importance of this new section and the inclusion of several new quotes and some characteristic turns of phrase argue strongly for her influence. In particular, new admonishments to active listening and a concern that all aspects of musical work should be infused with “enthusiasm, love and joy” duplicate the emphases of Boulanger’s own lectures and teaching; the more idealist cast of the lecture, as compared to the Poétique, closely resembles the tone of her concert criticism for Le Monde musical as well as her later lectures in English.85 And whatever the extent of Boulanger’s contribution to either the Poétique or the “Chicago lecture,” both were expressions of a largely shared vision. Her performance work with Igor and Soulima Stravinsky in the 1930s reinforced the composer’s ideas and fueled their expression, forming a background to “De l’exécution” just as her two-piano performances did for Stravinsky’s Sonata for two pianos, which was dedicated to Boulanger and which she premiered in 1944.86 Boulanger not only strongly promoted Stravinsky’s statements on performance, as she did his music; there is also abundant evidence that she performed much more like the Stravinsky of performance myth, created by his writings, than Stravinsky himself. Nicholas Cook has suggested that Stravinsky’s prose had more influence than his recordings and performances in encouraging structurally motivated performance styles.87 Boulanger’s performance in the classroom and on the concert stage was similarly important, since she was actually teaching her students how to do it while using Stravinsky as endorsement for her work. Throughout the interwar years, Boulanger mobilized the association of “architectural” performance with the new to advocate for music that might otherwise be dismissed or ignored. For example, in the 1920s, Fauré’s music 84

85

86

André Baltensperger, “Strawinskys ‘Chicago Lecture’ (1944),” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 5 (1992): 19, supplies venues and dates. Boulanger (and Maritain) had already delivered lectures in this series. Stravinsky repeated the lecture at Edgewood College in Wisconsin during Boulanger’s summer teaching engagement there in 1944. While Baltensperger (ibid., 22) sees Boulanger’s influence at work, Stephen Walsh (Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 153) believes that the changes could equally plausibly have stemmed from Stravinsky’s four years’ experience in America. Although Walsh is right that a definitive answer is not possible, further evidence for Boulanger’s interventions exists: to the sources listed by Baltensperger (20–1) should be added Boulanger’s copy of the Poétique (which contains her pencil markings seemingly indicating which sections of the text should form the basis for the English lectures) in F-Pn, and a copy of the English text with manuscript annotations in both Stravinsky’s and Boulanger’s hands held at CNLB. Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 161–2. 87 Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” 191.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

117

was often characterized as sentimental or even saccharine. As Boulanger pointed out in her Rice lectures, “The simplicity of Fauré’s music has deceived even his compatriots. For many of them, Fauré is still a mere ‘charming musician’ and nothing more.”88 A little over a year later, Boulanger responded to Minna Lederman’s invitation to write for Modern Music with a proposal for an article on Fauré’s Pénélope. Lederman accepted, but found the choice intriguing, asking Boulanger “to point out to us in what respect you, or any other admirers in France consider Fauré a modern,” and confirming that in America, “he is not ranked in this category.”89 Performed with all the notated expressive elements and a flexible approach to tempo, Fauré’s music could sound rooted in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Boulanger’s taut, stripped-down performances, in contrast, can be understood as a further facet of her campaign to present Fauré not only as a great composer but also as a modern one. Similarly, through the reduction of expressive effects and concentration on counterpoint and rhythm, Boulanger’s performances could contribute to notions of Brahms as a progressive.90 Perhaps even more influential than Boulanger’s approach to new music, however, was her architectural attitude toward musical works from the remote past. A striking aspect of recent performance history involves how elements of “geometric” style became fundamental to the twentieth-century early music movement. Influential studies by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Richard Taruskin have shown how leading proponents of historical performance practice shared many essential traits with modernist performance more generally, and have explored how historicist arguments have been used to validate aspects of contemporary taste.91 But although the implications of this overlap have generated heated debate, we are still only beginning to understand how it happened – what Robert Fink has called “the historical process by which modernist-historical performance constituted itself” in the first half of the twentieth century.92 In some accounts, Stravinsky remains a central figure; but it is sometimes hard to see why, if 88 89 90 91

92

Boulanger, Lectures on Modern Music, 125. Minna Lederman to NB, F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 139, March 19, 1927. Arnold Schoenberg’s “Brahms the Progressive,” an essay first presented as a radio broadcast in 1933 and published after the war, was instrumental in promoting this view. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “The Limits of Authenticity,” Early Music 12 (1984): 13–16; see also the discussion in the same issue, Richard Taruskin, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Temperley and Robert Winter, “The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion,” Early Music 12 (1984): 3–25; and Richard Taruskin, “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance,” Journal of Musicology 1, no. 3 (1982): 338–49. This work was part of a wider critique of the early music movement and its claims, which included Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” Musical Quarterly 69 (1983): 297–322; Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present”; and other contributions (by Robert Morgan, Gary Tomlinson and others) to the 1984 conference that led to Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford University Press, 1988). Butt, Playing with History, 3–50, summarizes the debates and explores their consequences in later writing on historical performance. Fink, “‘Rigoroso (♪ = 126)’,” 312.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

118

it is not simply because musicologists still like to have a composer to whom they may attribute musical developments of any kind. The power of compositional authority in the twentieth century means that of course Stravinsky’s comments on interpretation carried considerable weight despite his lack of involvement with early music performance. But, as Leech-Wilkinson’s research shows, other figures were far more practically implicated in promoting various aspects of modernist performance style for historical repertories.93 Taruskin surmises that Stravinsky may have learned equalized, geometric rhythmic approaches to Bach from hearing the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.94 Not only Stravinsky, but also many, many others could have taken similar lessons away from work with Boulanger. In fact, unlike either Stravinsky or Landowska, whose authority was mainly centered in new music and early music respectively, Boulanger’s teaching and performance very conspicuously engaged with both, and her work was an important bridge between the neoclassic aesthetic of new music performance and a particular sonic version of the past. Boulanger’s route to early music was principally through repertoire rather than instruments, which may partly explain why her role has been little examined. She rejected anything resembling historical performance practice conceived as instrumentation, and – perhaps precisely because of Landowska’s pre-eminence – was particularly reluctant to employ a harpsichord for continuo parts, which had become standard practice in many of the milieux where she regularly performed. Her correspondence with concert organizers reveals that if local musicians were very committed to using a harpsichord she would agree to do so, but if they expressed no strong feelings she preferred to conduct from the piano. This attitude carried over into her arrangements of early music. Her recitals in the 1930s often featured her own two-piano adaptation of Bach,95 and she regularly added accompaniments or instrumental effects to early vocal music. Her interventions caused consternation for some. Julian Herbage of the BBC, in an internal review of Boulanger’s 1936 concert of the Schütz Historia der Auferstehung in London, commented drily, “I am afraid also I was not quite reconciled to Mme. Boulanger’s arrangement of the orchestral part which included such effects as complete pizzicato passages, muted brass, etc.”96 He recommended that she be invited for repeat performances of Fauré and other recent French repertory, but advised against further engagements for earlier works. Edward Tatnall Canby anticipated similar criticism 93 94 95

96

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present,” 167. Her 1933 arrangement of the eponymous aria from Widerstehe doch die Sünde is on the program with Curzon (see figure 3.1, above); a manuscript copy of the piano 1 part is in Curzon’s archive at GB-Lbl Add. ms. 64971, fols. 34–9, and photostats of both parts are held in CNLB. Julian Herbage, internal memo, December 11, 1936 (GB-CaBBC Nadia Boulanger Artist File I).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

119

of Boulanger’s Petit Concert recording, commenting that her “freezing of the performance medium” – music from 900 years performed with the same group of singers, modern strings and piano – would raise the hackles of those who were used to hearing Couperin with harpsichord, or who objected to her addition of an accompaniment to trouvère songs.97 Boulanger’s rare published comments on historical performance suggest how she would have responded to such protests. In her 1921 review of Koussevitzky’s rendition of Beethoven, she praised the conductor for a performance which may not have been historically correct, but was nevertheless “full of youth, of force, not speaking the language of the past, but opening doors to the future”; she then quoted Nietzsche on the need to infuse historical masterpieces with the soul and blood of the present, concluding that “in spite of the regret we may feel about it, we are certainly incapable of performing or hearing a work as it was performed or heard in the past.”98 Her comments were typical of opposition to the more extreme claims of the nascent early music movement and consistent with her desire to avoid the “isolated cult of the past” she condemned as dangerous.99 It was also, however, just one aspect of a notable lack of concern for original medium in music of any time. She regularly performed keyboard arrangements of even very recent music; for example, her organ recital programs for her 1925 American tour included extracts from Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu and a version of Lili Boulanger’s Cortège, originally scored for violin and piano. When she recorded Cortège in 1930 with Yvonne Astruc in the piece’s original instrumentation, Boulanger added a piano prelude of her own devising.100 Her willingness to make arrangements and adaptations of Lili Boulanger’s works – usually presented without comment as if they represented the original version – for a wide variety of performing forces was typical of the time, but seems almost cavalier today, in light of her many pronouncements on textual fidelity and her deeply felt respect for her sister’s memory. Yet Boulanger was not indifferent to questions of timbre or sound

97 98

99

100

Edward Tatnall Canby, liner notes to “Petit Concert” of French Vocal Music from 12th–20th Century, Vox PL 6380, LP, 1950. NB, “Concerts Koussevitzky,” MM 32, nos. 23–4 (December 1921): 401: “en dépit du regret que nous en pouvons éprouver, nous sommes certainement incapables d’exécuter ou d’entendre une oeuvre comme elle fut exécutée ou entendue dans le passé.” The passage from Nietzsche comes from “Art of the Past and Soul of the Present” from volume 2, section 126 of Human, All Too Human, cited from the French translation: Frédéric [Friedrich] Nietzsche, Le Voyageur et son ombre: Opinions et sentences mêlées, translated by Henri Albert, Humain, trop humain, deuxième partie (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902), 82. NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 32, nos. 7–8 (April 1921): 129, in a discussion of programming warhorses. Boulanger resisted the claim that the canon of historic masterpieces was crushing new talent, saying that masterworks always have something new to teach us; they are dangerous only when part of a “culte isolé du passé” which considers anything new to be inferior. Segond-Genovesi, “Lili Boulanger par Nadia Boulanger, 1918–1993,” 25–38. Correspondence with concert organizers through the 1930s suggest that her drive to make her sister’s music better known motivated her to accept considerable adaptation wherever local conditions required.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

120

quality: she conceived of such elements in the service of form, however, not history. This is abundantly clear not only from her recorded performances but also from the evidence in her annotated scores. For example, performance indications on her copy of Bach’s Cantata no. 3 divide the bass line of the initial chorus into arco and pizzicato passages to emphasize its construction from two figures, a descending walking pattern in eighths and ascending fourths in quarters. Her organ registrations for performances of Fauré’s Requiem aimed at similar goals.101 While not sharing the interests in organology that motivated many French activists in early music, in other respects Boulanger conformed to newly emerging norms. These included not only a stricter approach to tempo and rhythm, but also the use of a small instrumental chamber group and solo voices for early music in contrast to the large forces that were frequently employed. Very different from Boulanger’s renditions, for example, were performances by Henry Expert, who promoted French Renaissance music both through scholarly editions and concerts with his choir, La Chanterie de la Renaissance. Expert’s approach can be heard in a 1935 recording of Clément Janequin’s famous programmatic chanson Le Chant des oyseaux (“Reveillez vous, coeurs endormis”), which featured on an early disc in the music-historical collection Anthologie sonore.102 His choir includes at least thirty voices, its size perhaps accounting for the relatively slow tempo, and the performance is highly “conducted”: there are dramatic tempo changes, swells, pauses and other expressive effects. Even more interesting is Expert’s rendition of Claude Le Jeune’s musique mesurée setting of La Belle Aronde, which La Chanterie de la Renaissance recorded in 1930.103 Expert’s performance is much more rhetorical than proportional, with tempo fluctuations both within and between sections, which render inexact the relationship between short and long values that forms the basis of musique mesurée. Boulanger’s 1952 recordings of Janequin and Le Jeune, which can be taken as fairly representative of her pre-war approach, are strikingly different; her Chant des oyseaux is performed with a group of soloists in a rapid, more even tempo, and in her rendition of Le Jeune’s Revecy venir le printemps the “measured” aspect of the setting is projected by short values exactly half that of long ones.104 101

102 103

104

“Ach Gott, wie manches Herzelied” in Joh. Seb. Bach’s Kirchencantaten. Erster Band. No. 1–10, edited by M. Hauptmann (Leipzig: Bretikopf & Härtel, 1851), pp. 73–83, in F-LYc, fonds Nadia Boulanger, U Mon Bac 01 UFNB. L’Anthologie sonore, directed by Curt Sachs, disc 7, Clément Janequin, one 78rpm disc, c. 1935. A digital remaster can be heard through the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Gallica database. Columbia DFX 54, recorded July 2, 1930. See the description in the discography of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music at www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/discography/disco.html (consulted August 6, 2012). Musique chorale française de la Renaissance / French Renaissance Vocal Music, directed by Nadia Boulanger, one 33rpm disc, Paris, 1952, Decca UMT 233102 and New York, 1952, Decca DL 9629; see Giuliani, “Discographie,” 433–4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

121

The chopped-up (as Boulanger would characterize it) approach so audible in Expert’s recordings was not limited to large groups or amateurs; solo performers also regularly applied it to early music. Yvette Guilbert, for example, whose recitals of medieval music garnered considerable attention in both France and the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, used a highly narrative, rhythmically fragmented delivery for her performances of troubadour and trouvère songs.105 Such approaches were on their way out when Boulanger’s performances of early music began to attract international attention. Influential voices in the scholarly community advocated an architectural style, using rhetoric and vocabulary similar to that employed in discussions of new music. In the same 1938 issue of the Revue internationale de musique that carried a profile of Nadia Boulanger, the highly regarded Belgian scholar Charles van den Borren laid out the basic principles of what he presented as a historically accurate performance.106 Discussing polyphony of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, van den Borren advocated an even approach to rhythm, based on a unvarying tactus, and without attention to the bar lines that modern editions used as a convenience. He asserted that accelerandi and ritardandi, and sudden or frequent changes in dynamic, were romantic and dramatic impulses alien to the medieval and early modern aesthetic. He advocated above all attention to line, saying that singers should shape their own phrases independently, within relatively limited, not exaggerated or dramatic, parameters; a steady tempo would allow the relationships of these lines to emerge. Many of his remarks on performance could have been written by Boulanger, so closely do they resemble comments in her earlier concert criticism, though she was discussing performance of much later works and did not present her views in the context of historical validity. Notably, van den Borren does not adduce documentary evidence such as descriptions of performance, or treatises on performance style, for his assertions; instead, he bases his view on composition treatises and above all on analysis of compositional technique. Like Boulanger’s approach, van den Borren’s account rested on the assumption that the most important information – including historical information – about any piece of music was to be found in its structure. If

105

106

The sound is represented on recordings such as Yvette Guilbert, La chanson d’hier et aujourd’hui, six 78rpm discs, c. 1933 (Gramophone K7064–7068, available at F-Pn SD 78 25–12550, digital transfer SDCR 9785). I am grateful to Jacqueline Waeber for allowing me to consult her “Notre Dame de la Chanson: Yvette Guilbert’s American Career,” paper presented at the American Musicological Society annual conference, Quebec City, November 2007. Guilbert employed the same approach for the cabaret songs that initially made her famous, as well as for mélodies by composers such as Fauré and Duparc. Charles van den Borren, “La Pureté du style et l’interprétation de la musique du Moyen Age,” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 96–102. Van den Borren was the musicological advisor to the Brussels ensemble Pro Musica Antiqua, founded in 1933.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

The work in performance

122

architectural coherence is a hallmark of the masterwork of any age, it follows that performance styles that can be understood as communicating that coherence may be presented as providing superior insight into the music’s essential qualities, including its historical significance. Van den Borren’s aim, as he explained in the opening to his article, was to render medieval music a living art by restoring to it the “synthetic order” and “purity of style” characteristic of the middle ages, and given concrete expression in its cathedrals of stone and glass. In his view, problems of notational interpretation and anachronistic performance habits acted as obstacles to the perception of how music, like other arts, embodies the highest aspirations of medieval culture through its forms.107 That such structuralist convictions have continued to underpin the way we have been trained to hear early music for nearly a century now perhaps explains why, of all Nadia Boulanger’s recordings, the most successful have been her Monteverdi discs, which have been in the recorded catalogue continuously from their release in 1937 until the present day. As Robert Philip remarks, the survival of these performances has “very little to do with the extent to which they approach later notions of ‘correct’ period performance”; instead, he says that Boulanger’s group “cuts through the years . . . with their sense of conviction, and their combination of intensity and lightness.”108 I believe the impression of “cutting through the years” is partly because certain aspects of Boulanger’s approach, and particularly her emphasis on architecture, have become fundamental to how pieces of early music are understood as musical works. Performances of early music became even faster and lighter in the second half of the twentieth century, and the use of historically sanctioned instruments became de rigueur. Boulanger’s slower tempo and use of modern piano and strings for Monteverdi’s duo setting of his Zefiro torna, for example, sound almost quaint in comparison to recent renditions. At the same time, the effort to maintain unitary tempi and to project form and line that animated Boulanger’s performances helped to create new norms for the interpretation of early music, and provides a connecting link between her work and that of later early music practioners. In many ways Boulanger’s work did not fit neatly into “historical performance” as it is understood now – and as it was beginning to be understood in the early twentieth century – as an attempt to recapture the sound of music as it was performed near the time of its composition. In her efforts to harmonize her commitment to the new with her attachment to

107

108

Van den Borren, “La Pureté du style,” 96–7. Similar structuralist convictions marked much contemporary work on medieval music. For a discussion of the fascinating intersections between analysis and performance practice for medieval music through the twentieth century, see LeechWilkinson, The Modern Invention, 157–214. Philip, Performing Music, 211.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Performing the work

123

memory and tradition, she invented new ways of bridging the gap through sound in her concerts of the 1930s. And she used performance to construct her own vision of history not just through the presentation of individual works, but by imagining ways of performing their relationship to each other. What kind of history resulted from her efforts, and what it meant, will be the subject of the second part of this book.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.005

part ii

The work in history

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Feb 2020 at 09:36:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Feb 2020 at 09:36:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

chapter 4

The problem of concerts

The rise of historicism alongside the establishment of a fully fledged musical work concept in the nineteenth century created far-reaching effects on Western concert life. By century’s end, the concert hall was not only a temple: it had become a display case where listeners could encounter works from an ever-expanding museum of masterpieces from the past, as well as recent music that aspired to achieve museum status as rapidly as possible.1 Imagining the concert as a mode of exhibition for great works of art invested performance with a new role in validating music history. As the relocation of paintings and sculptures from their original settings into public galleries endowed the objects themselves with new meanings and pressed them into service of new narratives, the concert now brought together music of radically different origins into the temple of art, and by arranging pieces in sequence implicitly demanded the construction of some meaningful relationship between them. And as in museums, different orders could tell different stories based on different conceptions of the past. For Boulanger, choice and order were just as crucial to a concert’s success as the performance of individual works. And in her Monde musical reviews, she repeatedly rebuked concert organizers for their failure to mount convincing programs. About the Concerts Colonne season of January–March 1921, she wrote: It is clearly not a question of seeking a chronological order, which would have a pedantic and pointless character, but indeed of finding, as much through the law of contrasts as by the requirements of harmony, the general idea that permits the most audacious juxtapositions without destroying unity.2

1

2

See Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, especially pp. 176–242; J. Peter Burkholder, “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream of the Last Hundred Years,” Journal of Musicology 2 (1983): 115–23. On how this process contributed to the expansion and reconfiguration of concert repertory, see William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge University Press, 2008). NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 32, nos. 5–6 (March 1921): 86: “Il ne s’agit évidemment pas de chercher un ordre chronologique qui aurait un caractère pédantesque et vain, mais bien de trouver, tant par la loi des contrastes que par les exigences de l’harmonie, l’idée d’ensemble qui permet les plus audacieux rapprochements sans rompre l’unité.”

127

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

128

Since each work generates its own physiological and psychological state in listeners and performers, brusque collisions between the states demanded by adjacent pieces can diminish or destroy listeners’ capacity for emotional response. She elaborated through an extended metaphor of hanging paintings in a museum: It is easy to represent through vision the error thus committed: certain paintings cannot be brought together without doing harm to each other, whether by too great a contrast, by too marked a similarity, or by a crushing superiority. Sometimes one attracts to itself everything that cannot then be given to the others that surround it – sometimes they mutually weaken each other and become monotonous, sometimes they destroy each other a little. Though each work is a fixed and tangible thing whose beauty seems unchangeable – yet, not only does their setting help [us] to see them, to understand them, to feel them, it also gives off an atmosphere of which each ray seems to cast a beneficial harmony over the entire group. A demonstration of this, alas, can be made in the majority of museums. The abundance of works, the lack of space explains it – but does not alter the feeling of regret any more than it diminishes that of fatigue, leaving in the heart the sense of melancholy at a joy for which only a little silence, respect and solitude was missing.3

The analogous aspect of concert planning is too often ignored; musicians think of the performance, but forget that the performance depends on the program for its success. Bad programming is especially disastrous for unfamiliar works: “If we lose some of our emotion even when confronted by masterworks, when they are not in their proper environment, how much more troubled are we when faced by new works that demand our immediate understanding?” She concludes by evoking her sadness “not perhaps to have received or have given as much as was required, all because a little order was lacking.”4 Her images resonate strikingly with ideas advanced by Paul Valéry, in a brief but scathing critique of contemporary museum practice. In “Le Problème des musées” (1923), he claimed that only a civilization neither rational nor sensual could have conceived a “house of incoherence” as insane as an art museum. The visitor, initially attracted by the desire to 3

4

Ibid., 86: “Il est facile de se représenter par la vision, l’erreur ainsi commise: certaines toiles ne peuvent être rapprochées sans se nuire, soit par un contraste trop grand, soit par une ressemblance trop marquée, soit par une supériorité écrasante. Tantôt l’une attire sur elle tout ce qu’on ne peut plus donner à celles qui l’entourent – tantôt elles s’affaiblissent réciproquement et deviennent monotones, tantôt elles se détruisent un peu. Chacune d’elles est pourtant une chose immobile et tangible dont la beauté semble immodifiable – or, non seulement leur mise en place aide à les voir, à les comprendre, à les ressentir, mais elle dégage une atmosphère dont chaque rayon semble répandre sur l’ensemble une harmonie favorable. // La démonstration peut, hélas, être faite dans la plupart des musées. La profusion des oeuvres, le manque de place l’expliquent – mais ceci ne change pas plus le regret que cela ne diminue la fatigue et laisse au coeur la mélancolie d’une joie à laquelle a manqué un peu de silence, de respect et de solitude.” Ibid., 86: “Mais si nous perdons un peu de notre émotion devant les chefs-d’oeuvre mêmes, alors qu’ils ne sont pas dans leur ambiance, combien troublés ne sommes-nous pas devant des oeuvres nouvelles qui réclament notre soudaine compréhension. Tout ceci n’est pas dit dans un but de censure: il n’y a dans ces constatations que la tristesse de n’avoir peut être ni reçu ni donné autant qu’il eut fallu, parce qu’un peu d’ordre a parfois manqué.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

129

experience beauty, is soon stunned by the profusion of competing works: portraits and seascapes jostle for attention with still lifes and historical paintings of completely different dimensions, until the hapless visitor is reduced to stumbling between them like a drunkard from bar to bar. The more beautiful [the works] are, the more they are the exceptional effects of human ambition, the more they should be distinct. They are rare objects, which their creators would have wished to be unique. “This painting,” people sometimes say, “KILLS all the others around it . . .” I am sure that neither Egypt, nor China, nor Greece, which were wise and sophisticated, knew this system of juxtaposing creations that devour each other.5

The system he condemns is the arrangement of artworks in successive rooms by period and style, which Valéry calls a “strange organized disorder.” It imposes time as a controlling principle – the chronology Boulanger had labelled “pointless” and “pedantic” when applied to music – without regard for thematic or formal harmony; it turns the gallery into an illustrated history of art rather than a garden of delights, the hang a mere tool for the art historian’s craft: In the domain of art, erudition is a kind of defeat: it sheds light on what is least delicate, it deepens that which is not essential. It substitutes its hypotheses for feeling, its prodigious memory for the presence of the marvellous; and to the immense museum it annexes an unlimited library. Venus transformed into document.6

Just as the Concerts Colonne season left Boulanger with a melancholic sense of thwarted joy, Valéry quits the museum feeling exhausted and sad. For Valéry, museum practice is an obstacle to aesthetic engagement: the “problem of museums” is a failure to foster successful exchanges between the visitor and art. In the same way, the concert appears to Boulanger as a problem of access to the musical work. Boulanger’s passionate comments on program order in her concert criticism seem at odds with her belief in the self-sufficiency of the autonomous artwork. If masterpieces need nothing from listener or performer in order to exist, why should the order of works on a concert matter? How can chronology hurt something that is by definition timeless? Boulanger herself summarized, but did not resolve, the paradox in her review of the 1921 5

6

Paul Valéry, “Le Problème des musées,” in Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, edited by Jean Hytier, 2nd edn., 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1992–3) 2, 1290–3: “Plus elles sont belles, plus elles sont des effets exceptionnels de l’ambition humaine, plus doivent-elles être distinctes. Elles sont des objets rares dont les auteurs auraient bien voulu qu’ils fussent uniques. Ce tableau, dit-on quelquefois, TUE tous les autres autour de lui. . .. // Je crois bien que l’Égypte, ni la Chine, ni la Grèce, qui furent sages et raffinées, n’ont connu ce système de juxtaposer des productions qui se dévorent l’une l’autre.” Ibid., 1293: “En matière d’art, l’érudition est une sorte de défaite: elle éclaire ce qui n’est point le plus délicat, elle approfondit ce qui n’est point essentiel. Elle substitue ses hypothèses à la sensation, sa mémoire prodigieuse à la présence de la merveille; et elle annexe au musée immense une bibliothèque illimitée. Vénus changé en document.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

130

Colonne series: if the masterwork is a “fixed and tangible thing” whose beauty is unchangeable, it should not fear competition from other works. Yet unless it is sympathetically placed, art cannot provoke the emotional engagement Boulanger believed essential to its revelation. For Didier Maleuvre, Valéry’s complaints about crowding and placement in museums demonstrate the weakness of his concept of aesthestic autonomy: by introducing concerns of context Valéry betrays the artwork in attempting to defend it.7 It might be tempting to read Boulanger’s concert reviews in a similar light. However, it is useful here to distinguish between a strand of formalism concerned with the play of pattern and associated with an anti-emotional, dehumanizing aesthetic and a position that, although also broadly formalist, was oriented around the ability of form to abstract, embody and thus engender emotional experience. As we saw in chapter 2, this concept was central to both Valéry’s and Boulanger’s vision of the masterwork. The capacity to generate response is a definitive characteristic of great art, and necessarily opens the critical door to questions of perception and experience. This aspiration to perfect union between self and broader human values translated into art leads to the strong concern with conditions of display that marks Valéry’s critique of the museum. Similar convictions motivated Boulanger’s concert practice in the 1930s. As her career attained international dimensions, she worked to build programs whose choice and order could promote her own way of seeing both historical and modern musical works, and rapidly established herself as a performer whose concerts could provide a unique and memorable experience for listeners. Through the repertory she brought to audiences in Europe and the United States, Boulanger built her reputation as a niche performer and advocate for the unfamiliar, particularly in relation to tropes of the unjustly neglected masterpiece. And she organized her audiences’ encounters with the masterwork through an idiosyncratic approach to programming, based around the “audacious juxtapositions” she had promoted in her post-war concert reviews. In both her choice of repertory and her construction of programs, Boulanger appealed to the skills and approaches in which she herself was best placed to instruct her public.

que de trouvailles! boulanger’s repertoire between the wars Although her reputation as a teacher of composers and campaigner for new music was firmly established by the mid 1920s, Boulanger’s re-emergence as an internationally successful concert artist in the following decade did not start with contemporary composition. Instead, it began with pedagogical 7

Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford University Press, 1999), 88–91.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

131

performances of historical repertory, reworked in the context of the aristocratic musical salon. Her Wednesday classes at the rue Ballu were by this time principally devoted to the performance and analysis of Bach’s cantatas, and by 1930 she had established a schedule that rotated through excerpts or entire cantatas on a weekly basis.8 Bach had served as a reference for absolute musical values in France for nearly a century. The situation was pithily summed up in the announcement for one of Boulanger’s lectures during the composer’s 250th anniversary year: “If there is a musician’s name synonymous with beauty, with power, it is that of Bach. He is at the center of music and summarizes it completely in himself.”9 But outside scholarly circles, this veneration was based on familiarity with a limited body of music. Bach’s keyboard works were widely known: The Well-Tempered Clavier had been used to teach fugue in Paris conservatories through the nineteenth century, establishing the composer as the supremely serious, technically adept figure he represented for early twentieth-century musicians, and facilitating his adoption as the poster boy for anti-Romantic aesthetics. By the mid 1920s, neoclassical compositions were regularly described in relation to Bach, and debates about new music often also involved consideration of his music’s meaning and value. Boulanger was well aware, for example, of the battle between her friend Charles Koechlin and the influential critic Boris de Schloezer over the “Retour à Bach” in the pages of La Revue musicale, which extended over several months in the winter of 1926–7.10 But despite Bach’s prominence in contemporary music discourse, the cantatas were admired more by reputation than in performance. In a 1921 article on the conservatism of Parisian organizers and audiences, Koechlin lamented the absence of Bach’s vocal works from the main concert series: “is it not truly a scandal that we can never hear the Mass in B minor, nor the Passions, nor any of those admirable cantatas?”11 8

9

10

11

F-Pn Rés. Vmc ms. 134 (1), fols. 22v–25r, is an attendance record for Wednesday sessions devoted to Bach’s cantatas for the academic year 1929–30. Among the fifty-eight students listed are Soulima Stravinsky, Lennox Berkeley, Igor Markevitch, Elie Siegmeister and Israel Citkovitz. Boulanger’s volumes of the Bach Gesellschaft in Lyons F-LYc are annotated with the year various cantatas figured in the schedule between 1930 and 1935. Émile Brande, Notes musicales (Dunkirk: Éditions du Nord Maritime, 1925), 35, cited in the program for Boulanger’s lecture in Lille, February 24, 1935: “S’il est un nom de musicien synonyme de beauté, de puissance, c’est bien celui de Bach. Il est au centre de la musique et la résume toute en lui.” On Bach’s role as music incarnate, see Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach: l’amour de la musique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 33–51. The debate began with Charles Koechlin, “Le ‘Retour à Bach’,” in ReM; Boris de Schloezer used his regular column, “Refléxions sur la Musique,” in the February 1927 issue of the journal to contest Koechlin’s views, inspiring a counter-response from Koechlin (“Réplique sur le ‘retour à Bach’”) in the March issue, and further response from de Schloezer in the October issue. All four texts are edited in Koechlin, Écrits, 241–61. Charles Koechlin, “Le Public et les programmes de concerts,” Le Ménestrel 83, no. 48 (1921): 474: “n’est-ce pas un scandale, en vérité, que jamais nous ne puissions entendre la Messe en si, ni les Passions, ni aucune des admirables Cantates?” Fauquet and Hennion (La Grandeur, 122–3) confirm

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

132

Boulanger’s cantata sessions thus introduced her students to a rich body of unfamiliar music by a composer whose greatness was already firmly established, and whose achievements played an essential role in contemporary aesthetic debates. These were ideal conditions for an exhilarating experience of revelation, which is exactly how many described their encounters with Bach at the rue Ballu. Israel Citkovitz, who had come to Paris to study with Boulanger after work in the United States with her former pupils Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions, wrote to her: I am so glad we’re doing the Bach cantatas this year. They’re a revelation. I’m only afraid my heart won’t be able to stand the strain of the excitement for a whole year! . . . If each Wednesday leaves [your students] as excited about the music as I was, we will all be lunatics by the end of the year!12

Similar reactions came not only from other advanced composition pupils, but also from the wide range of music students, professional performers and amateur musicians who attended Boulanger’s Wednesdays on an occasional or regular basis. Jane Campbell, a teacher at Eastern Kentucky State Teacher’s College who studied harmony, fugue and music history with Boulanger at the École Normale, used the same term as Citkovitz in describing the cantata sessions as a “revelation.”13 The Polish soprano Maria Modrakowska, an internationally active professional singer, regularly performed for the Wednesdays; on leaving Paris in 1935, she wrote to Boulanger that the cantatas had been the supreme musical experience of her career.14 The princesse de Polignac was fired with enthusiasm after attending her first session in December 1932, and became a regular auditor of the classes through the spring of 1933.15 Her niece, countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac, who began accompanying her aunt in the spring of 1933, wrote in her journal “the atmosphere [for the cantatas] is mesmerizing. Students come from every corner of the world [. . .] She is the apostle, and they are really her disciples.”16

12 13 14

15

16

that performances of the B minor Mass and the cantatas were rare before 1900; the exception was BWV 80, Ein feste Burg, whose chorale melody had been widely popularized by its prominent use in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Israel Citkovitz to NB, F-Pn NLa 62 (221), undated [winter of 1929–30]. Jane Campbell to NB, F-Pn NLa 59 (100–3), September 29, 1935. Maria Modrakowska to NB, F-Pn NLa 87 (155), May 28, 1935. On Modrakowska, see the promotional booklet produced by her Paris agents: La Saison musicale 1931–32 de Maria Modrakowska (Paris: Bureau International des Concerts Kiesgen & Ysaye, [1932]). Her well-received Parisian début season in 1931–2 included the role of Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique. Polignac heard BWV 30, Freue dich, erlöste Schar: Boulanger noted in her daily diary “cantate 30 – avec orchestre Psse de P vient un moment” (F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 98, December 14, 1932). The princess sent a card the next day expressing her admiration, particularly for the aria “Kommt, ihr angegochten Sünder” (F-Pn NLa 94 (196 bis)). Through the spring of 1933, Polignac heard extracts or entire pieces for over twenty Bach cantatas; BWV numbers for each week, and the princess’s presence for sessions she attended, are noted in Boulanger’s 1933 diary (F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 99). Marie-Blanche de Polignac, diary, February 23, 1933 (private collection, cited in Sylvia Kahan, “La Collaboration entre Nadia Boulanger et Marie-Blanche de Polignac,” 87).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

133

This role of advocate for unfamiliar treasures of the past would provide one vital impetus for Boulanger’s reinvention as a conductor. The transformation began in June 1933 when she directed a concert based on the repertory of her Wednesday cantata sessions at the princesse de Polignac’s atelier, the smaller performance space in her mansion that housed the organ (figure 4.1).17 The chorus of thirty included many of Boulanger’s composition students, such as Marcelle de Manziarly, Leo Préger, Anton Szalowski and Elliot Carter; they joined sopranos Marie-Blanche de Polignac and Maria Modrakowska, and a 23-member chamber orchestra from the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (OSP) to perform extracts from nine different cantatas.18 The extracts, in groups of three, were punctuated by Boulanger’s arrangement of a Vivaldi concerto, with the princess at the organ, and Bach’s fifth Brandenburg concerto, with the OSP’s principal flute, Roger Cortet, and the much-admired violinist Paul Kochanski in the concertino group along with Marie-Blanche de Polignac at the piano. The strong association with Bach’s cantatas that arose from Boulanger’s Wednesdays and marked her early concerts for the princesse de Polignac remained a consistent element of her concerts through the 1930s and beyond, with sets frequently composed of extracts and the regular appearance of a handful of complete cantatas. Of these, BWV 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, and BWV 4, Christ lag in Todesbanden, figure particularly prominently, demonstrating the early emergence of a preoccupation with themes of death and resurrection, sacrifice and redemption that would mark Boulanger’s repertorial choices.19 In the mid to late 1930s, building on her reputation as a Bach performer, Boulanger began to concentrate on lesser-known works of the seventeenth century, performing extracts or entire works by Henry Purcell (The Fairy Queen), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Pestis Mediolensis, Médée) and Giacomo Carissimi (Jephte). A major success of 1936 was her rendition of Heinrich Schütz’s treatment of the Resurrection, the Historia der Auferstehung, which she had first performed privately at the Hôtel Singer-Polignac in January 1935. In March 1936 the work was the centerpiece for an important Lenten charity concert at the Salle Gaveau, which garnered both extensive press coverage and admiring fan mail. Interest in the work led to a reprise at the 17

18 19

Two sets of concert programs from Boulanger’s archives exist, at F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 and at CNLB. The two sets largely duplicate each other but are not identical, with some events represented by a program in only one collection. In the following, concert dates refer to a program extant in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 unless noted otherwise. The ensemble for Boulanger’s concert comprised the orchestra’s principal strings and winds (listed on OSP programs in F-Pn Arts du Spectacle, 8o RO 5968, 1928–33). In 1934, Boulanger performed Christ lag in Todesbanden for Polignac on January 21, at the École Normale on February 13, the Interallié on May 22, and for La Sérénade at the Salle Gaveau on June 9 (programs in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195). In 1937, she used it for a high-profile concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on June 1, and made a recording of the piece that was, however, never commercially released.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

134

The work in history

Figure 4.1. Program, salon of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, June 30, 1933. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

Figure 4.1.

135

(cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

136

Interallié that was broadcast on Radio-Paris, and the piece became a major feature of Boulanger’s London début at Queen’s Hall in November.20 At every stage, both the quality and the novelty of the piece drew comment: the critic for Le Jour was typical in describing the Schütz as an “unknown masterpiece” (chef d’oeuvre inconnu) and its performance as a revelation.21 Boulanger’s interpretations of Monteverdi’s secular chamber works generated even greater acclaim. Interest in the composer was already keen in France: early in the century Vincent d’Indy had directed important revivals of Monteverdi’s operas at the Schola Cantorum, and produced French editions and arrangements of his music; there was a growing body of scholarly work in French, including Henry Prunières’s influential La Vie et l’oeuvre de Claudio Monteverdi (1926, reprinted 1931); and in 1931 Prunières had joined with Gian Francesco Malipiero to stage Monteverdi festivals in Paris and Venice. Boulanger was close to Prunières and knew Malipiero well. Malipiero came to the rue Ballu to dinner during the Paris festival and Boulanger attended some of his rehearsals.22 As in the case of the Bach cantatas, the ground was already prepared when Boulanger began a period of intense concentration on Monteverdi in 1935. But instead of choosing extracts from stage works that might emphasize the “birth of opera” scenario that had often accompanied performances of Monteverdi in the early twentieth century, Boulanger focussed on the composer’s secular chamber music, particularly madrigals from books 7 and 8. She was especially interested in pieces with ostinato bass patterns or harmonic grids such as the chaconne or passacaglia; examples include the Lamento della ninfa, the duet setting of Zefiro torna, and the romanesca duet Ohimé dov’è il mio ben. These choices echoed the focus of her teaching – through the 1920s, all Boulanger’s composition pupils were asked to write a passacaglia – and also facilitated connections with Bach’s use of such techniques.23 The release of Boulanger’s Monteverdi madrigal recordings to great fanfare in June 1937 highlighted her connection with the composer to an 20

21

22

23

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, programs January 17, 1935 (Polignac); March 18, 1936 (Salle Gaveau); April 28, 1936 (Interallié, broadcast on Radio-Paris). The London performance took place on November 24, 1936. Le Jour, March 15, 1936. Notices and reviews also appeared in Paris-Soir (March 21); La Page musicale (March 26); Beaux-Arts (March 27); Paris-Gazette (March 27); Le Ménestrel (March 27); L’Art musical (March 27); Aux écoutes (March 28); L’Écho de Paris (March 29); Le Figaro (March 30); Le Monde musical (March 31); Comoedia (April 6); and as far afield as the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung (April 10). F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 97, diary entries for October 24 and 25, 1931. Further on the 1931 festivals, see Cyrilla Barr, “The Musicological Legacy of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,” Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 266–7. Boulanger apparently participated in a 1928 performance of Orfeo, possibly at the École Normale, for which no program survives in her archive (rehearsals noted in her diary February 25 and 27, 1928, F-Pn. Rés. Vmf ms. 96). A letter from the princesse de Polignac (F-Pn NLa 94 (289), October 28, 1935) refers to volumes of the complete edition that she had brought from Malipiero’s home in Asolo for Boulanger. Copland and Perlis, Copland, 78; Copland’s own passacaglia was published in 1922, and he reflected on the form in his What to Listen For in Music (1939).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

137

international audience, leading to many concerts in which Monteverdi was requested by organizers or presented as a special feature. At the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels, for example, an October 1938 program included notes of which pieces were available on Boulanger’s recent disc. A month later, her third British broadcast series was devoted to Italian music, a choice that allowed her to devote two full programs to Monteverdi; as Anthony Lewis wrote to her from the BBC, “his works are relatively so little known over here, and I think many would rejoice at the opportunity of hearing as much of his music as practicable during your visit.”24 Interest in the United States, where audiences had even fewer chances to hear Monteverdi’s music than in Europe, was particularly high. The reviewer from the Boston Herald commented after a 1938 concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “We know of Monteverdi as a figure of great importance in the history of music, but most of us are probably unacquainted with his music.”25 When news reached Leopold Stokowski that Boulanger would perform Monteverdi on her visit to Philadelphia in 1939, the conductor wrote enthusiastically to ask if she would meet him and allow him to see her scores.26 It was not only in the realm of early music that Boulanger’s repertoire encouraged reception built on tropes of discovery and revelation. Her concerts almost invariably included new or recent works, whether by established figures such as Stravinsky or Poulenc or by her own composition pupils, some – such as Copland or Markevitch – already firmly launched on successful careers, and others as yet completely unknown. Her premiere performances included Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge noire Notre-Dame de Roc-Amadour in 1936, Poulenc’s Organ Concerto and Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, both in 1938, and Stravinsky’s Sonata for two pianos in 1944, as well as many works by Françaix, Manziarly and other current or former students. The young Jean Françaix was the most frequent beneficiary of Boulanger’s promotional efforts in the 1930s, and she conducted premieres of his Trois duos in 1934, the Paris premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1936, and his chamber opera Le Diable boîteux in 1938.27 But a focus on premieres can unhelpfully misrepresent the extent of Boulanger’s involvement with new music. If famous male conductors 24

25 27

Anthony Lewis to NB, GB-CaBBC, Nadia Boulanger Artist File 1, August 23, 1938. When first discussing the program, Lewis had written (June 29), “I have recently been playing through your Monteverde [sic] records, which needless to say have given me very great pleasure, and I hope that you will able to repeat some of the items over here.” Boston Herald, February 14, 1938. 26 Stokowski to NB, F-Pn NLa 108 (46), March 7, 1939. On premieres of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto and works by Françaix and Markevitch, see Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” 454–64. On Boulanger’s 1936 premieres of Poulenc, see Alexandra Laederich, “La Première Audition.” On Stravinsky’s Sonata for two pianos, which Boulanger premiered with Richard Johnson before going on to play it later in 1944 with Robert Tangeman and then the composer himself, see Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 161–2. The premiere of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto is discussed in detail in chapter 7 below.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

138

were more often engaged for splashy first performances than Boulanger, she was assiduous in mounting the repeats she believed essential to the broader acceptance of new music beyond specialist and avant-garde circles. For example, though she conducted the private world premiere of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the United States in May 1938, the composer himself directed the far more prestigious public premiere in Paris, in keeping with his by-then established authority as performer of his own works. But it was Boulanger who then took the piece to London, performing the English premiere in November 1938 in the BBC’s Contemporary Concerts series; and in 1943 she included it on an important war charity concert at Harvard with members of the Boston Symphony. Through the 1930s she regularly programmed Stravinsky’s recent vocal and chamber works, especially the Duo Concertant for violin and piano (1932) and Ave Maria (1934; Boulanger directed the second performance of the piece, at the Interallié), as well as earlier pieces such as the Pastorale (1907, both in the original version for soprano and in the 1933 version for violin and piano), Trois histoires pour enfants (1915–16) and the Quatre chansons russes (1918–20). These works provided short bursts of Stravinsky – often in his more accessible modes – as if to persuade audiences who did not yet know the composer’s music (but had heard of him as the enfant terrible of the teens, or as a demolisher of musical tradition) that there was nothing to fear. Similar motives lay behind Boulanger’s performance of arrangements or fragments from longer and more ambitious pieces, which provided a taster of their musical language and which she believed would foster enthusiasm and acceptance. This strategy was particularly important for her relationship with Stravinsky’s neoclassical compositions of the 1920s and 1930s. Boulanger’s most frequently programmed excerpts included Jocasta’s aria, “Nonn’ erubescite, reges” from Oedipus Rex (1926–7) and the final chorus from Perséphone (1934). Boulanger was especially engaged in early propaganda for the latter work: she organized a reading in her salon a few days before Stravinsky conducted the premiere at the Paris Opéra, and less than a month later she was performing extracts in the princesse de Polignac’s salon and at the Interallié.28 In the 1930s Boulanger also grew closer to Poulenc (who claimed in 1932 that she was “one of the few whose judgement counted” for him).29 While she had thought some of Poulenc’s earlier work superficial, she was enthusiastic about the inventive use of classical forms and Renaissance contrapuntal and melodic techniques that marked his works of the 1930s, 28

29

Program of May 17, 1934 at the princesse de Polignac’s salon in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195; the program from May 22, 1934 at the Interallié exists only in the collection at CNLB. On the pre-premiere reading and the premiere, see Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 532–3. Poulenc to NB, F-Pn NLa 95 (86), April 12 [1932]: “souvent en travaillant je pense à votre jugement, un des rares qui compte pour moi.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

139

and she grew to admire his distinctive lyric voice.30 Poulenc later claimed that it was Boulanger’s performances of Monteverdi at the princesse de Polignac’s salon in March 1936 that motivated him to delve into the masterpieces of Renaissance polyphony, and which inspired his return to choral music that year after more than a decade’s hiatus.31 Boulanger frequently programmed his mélodies, his Suite française for piano (1935, modeled after the Renaissance composer Claude Gervais), and pieces from his Sept chansons for vocal ensemble (1936–7), especially “Belle et ressemblante,” which received its premiere by Boulanger’s ensemble during their 1936 BBC series. She was even more attached, however, to the sacred works that followed his return in the mid 1930s to a deeply felt Catholicism. She regularly performed not only the Litanies – the first fruits of his religious turn – but motets from the Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence (1938–9), the third of which (“Tenebrae factae sunt”) was dedicated to her.32 Poulenc’s prayer for peace to the Virgin Mary, “Priez pour paix” (1938), on a fifteenth-century poem by Charles d’Orléans, became richly significant for her as Europe plunged into war, and she repeatedly performed it from 1939 through World War II.33 Where Stravinsky had a reputation as a “difficult” modern for many ordinary concert-goers, Poulenc was in contrast often portrayed as a humorist or brilliant mondain, and his music dismissed as frothy or facile. Boulanger’s steady concentration on his sacred works and neoclassical instrumental music revealed an unexpected side to the composer and promoted the serious aspects of his music. The music of Lili Boulanger was a special case for Nadia’s advocacy. At the time of her death in 1918, little of Lili’s work was known outside Parisian new music circles, and much of it had been performed only once or not at all. Nadia’s voluminous correspondence testifies to her unceasing efforts to get her sister’s music published and performed, and by the early 1920s these activities had already led to a wave of prestigious concerts and enthusiastic reviews of Lili’s large orchestral and choral works. Nadia often participated in these concerts herself, which both satisfied her own strong desire for active remembrance and provided concert organizers and 30

31 32

33

Boulanger described one of Poulenc’s works as “silly” in a letter to Marcelle de Manziarly (F-Pn Nla 289 (178), October 13, 1930), but her correspondence with the composer from 1931 onward (F-Pn Nla 95, 102–21) demonstrates increasing regard for his work and the development of both trust in his judgement and warm personal affection. Francis Poulenc, Entretiens avec Claude Rostand (Paris: Julliard, 1954), 99. For details on the pieces see Carl B. Schmidt, The Music of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963): A Catalogue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). On Poulenc’s return to religion in 1936, see Francis Poulenc, Correspondance 1910–1963, edited by Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 424–9; Benjamin Ivry, Francis Poulenc (London: Phaidon, 1996), 90–1. Charles d’Orléans was captured at Agincourt and held hostage by the English for the next twentyfour years, during which he wrote the bulk of his poetry. “Priez pour paix” asks for the Virgin’s intercession so that her son the Redeemer will banish war. Poulenc had completed it in September 1938 during the Munich Crisis, after finding the poem in Le Figaro’s regular column of prayers for peace; see Schmidt, The Music of Francis Poulenc, 285–6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

140

audiences with a sense of special insight and human connection to the works.34 In the 1930s, when Nadia was able to construct programs of her own on a regular basis, Lili’s music became a staple feature, and in her dealings with concert organizers she showed considerable tenacity in arguing for their inclusion even when local conditions made performance difficult.35 In the spring of 1939, she conducted Lili’s works on high-profile concerts with the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But for her the highlight of the season was a Symphony Hall concert with members of the Boston Symphony, choruses from Harvard and Radcliffe, her own French soloists and the organist E. Power Biggs, in which the entire second half was devoted to Lili’s sacred music. Mounted as a “Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Concert” and devoted to raising money for the further dissemination of Lili’s work, the event took place during the month when, each year since 1918, the memorial Mass at the Trinité had included performances of Lili’s music. The Boston concert audience of leading social and musical luminaries was impressed by the elevated purpose and sober atmosphere of the concert, which was noted in reviews.36 Poet May Sarton believed that its significance was too great even for applause: she wrote to thank Boulanger instead with an elegy, imagining the audience “filled / As fountains are with sound” and urging listeners to “Spend all this given grace, / Live back her darling breath, / Her heart her unknown face – / You must transform her death.”37 A week later, Sarton wrote another poem – “Memory” – which reflected instead on Boulanger’s own role: “Between this ardent life and cruel death / Take up your station, heart, and there stand blazing, / That for her sake while you draw living breath / Remembrance may become the gift of praising.”38 Though few among Boulanger’s public shared Sarton’s lyric powers, the poem testifies to the sense of intense connection with Lili Boulanger that Nadia’s concerts could create. Outside France, Boulanger frequently appeared as ambassador for French music, and was often specifically engaged to present French programs by British and American concert organizers. In some cases the works were more or less well known in France but far less familiar, or completely 34 35

36

37

38

Spycket, À la recherche de Lili Boulanger, 361–9. The lack of an organ was a frequent issue; see for example Boulanger’s correspondence around her Harvard Glee Club concerts in 1938 (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143) and Dayton Philharmonic appearance in 1939 (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 144). The concert, on March 6, 1939, opened with the Kyrie from Bach’s B minor Mass, and included Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang, Op. 118 and the American premiere of extracts from Malipiero’s San Francesco d’Assisi on the first half. For further details see Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 308–10. May Sarton, “Elegy at a Concert in Memory of Nadia Boulanger,” sent to NB in a letter of March 7, 1939 (F-Pn NLa 103 (297)). Sarton apparently met Boulanger in Paris, possibly in 1931, and was in regular contact with her during Boulanger’s years in Boston during World War II. May Sarton, “Memory / for Nadia Boulanger,” typescript, March 16, 1939 (CNLB).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

141

unknown, elsewhere. For example, in 1937 she mounted a series of “Scenes from French Lyric Opera” for British radio that mixed unfamiliar baroque opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and recent music by Albert Roussel with extracts from French stage works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion, Gounod’s Faust and Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche, an opera in which Boulanger’s grandmother had premiered the role of Jenny. Although these pieces had sometimes been performed in England, in France they enjoyed a virtually unbroken performance history well into Boulanger’s lifetime, and they were as familiar to many French performers and opera-goers as Verdi was in Italy. The music of Gabriel Fauré provides an even more striking example of Boulanger’s ambassadorial role, for the authority accorded to her performances through national association was strengthened by the personal connection she represented as the composer’s student.39 When pressed by cultural organizations in London to include a French work on her 1936 Queen’s Hall performance of the Schütz Historia der Auferstehung, she proposed Fauré’s Requiem, which had never been performed in Britain. The reaction to one of her most cherished masterworks was gratifyingly enthusiastic. In an end-of-year article for The Listener, Rollo Myers declared: “The performance of the ‘Requiem’ under Mlle Nadia Boulanger last November must have been a revelation to many. To some it stands out as one of the major musical manifestations of the year, and richer in beauty than many a more pretentious performance of universally acclaimed masterpieces.”40 He continued by affirming Fauré’s nationalist credentials, claiming that the Requiem demonstrated not only the voice of genius, but also that Fauré was the only late Romantic French composer to have escaped the German “Wagnerian microbe.” The reviewer for the Morning Post exclaimed, “Can nobody persuade her and her colleagues to return quickly and give us another performance of this lovely, disgracefully neglected work?”41 In 1937, she did: and the Fauré Requiem soon became a signature piece for Boulanger not only in England but also in the United States. Boulanger’s role as standard-bearer for French music became increasingly important as the international political climate darkened. In England and America, Boulanger and her repertoire could provide attractive alternatives to the usual concert fare, which was already dominated by Austro-German works and became increasingly so after the arrival of large numbers of refugee performers who concentrated on the repertory from Beethoven to 39

40 41

For example, W. H. Haddon Squire (“Nadia Boulanger as Conductor,” Christian Science Monitor, December 29, 1936), commented in his review of the Requiem, “No better performance of the Fauré work seems possible; there was the complete understanding perhaps only to be found in one who had studied with the master.” Mention of Boulanger’s studies with Fauré would become a standard feature in reviews of her performances of his works. Rollo H. Myers, “Fauré’s Piano Music,” The Listener 17, no. 418 (January 13, 1937): 94. Morning Post (London), November 26, 1936.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

142

Wolf. This view of her work emerges strongly in a letter from the Cambridge professor Edward Dent, who wrote to Boulanger shortly after she left for the United States in 1940: I am very glad you have escaped from Paris and from France and that you are going to America, where you have so many friends who will never desert you. And if you feel regrets about leaving “la chère patrie” you must remember that you can do a great deal in America to spread an understanding and appreciation of French music, and that is most important in these days, when both England and the U.S. are overrun with German refugees, who are excellent people but all “Teutsch” to the core, and faithfully propagating Schubert and Bruckner and the rest – and the fatal idea that there is no music anywhere except what comes from Vienna! You will not accuse me of being a chauvinist or liable to momentary hatred of everything German, but I see a real danger in it all, because it is all so reactionary and old-fashioned and “gutbürgerlich”. At our London concerts I see that people are going on Hugo Wolf and the old German classics; they like to think, and we all like to think, that we are superior to political prejudices, but in reality it is sheer inertia. I wish somebody would sing Duparc and Fauré and still more I wish they would leave the 19th century alone and perform the music of today, whether English, French or German.42

Although Dent regarded Boulanger as a champion of recent French music, she did in fact regularly perform German repertoire of the nineteenth century: particularly Brahms, as we have seen, but also Schubert, Schumann, Weber and Mendelssohn, among others. Aside from Brahms, however, she performed very little Austro-German music of the late Romantic period, and virtually none from the twentieth century. The notable exception was the music of Paul Hindemith, which she regularly programmed throughout the 1930s, an inclusion even more striking in the wake of the Nazi bans on the composer’s work after 1933. And as Dent predicted, Boulanger’s presence in the United States became a symbol of French musical culture, and more broadly of French resistance to German occupation. Her first major performance on arriving in America was a November 1940 concert of the Fauré Requiem at the Washington Cathedral; in April 1941 she performed it at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic for a concert in aid of Polish war refugees. In 1945, as the war drew to a close, the campaign for Fauré that she had begun twenty years before, on her first American tour, reached a climax with an entire Fauré festival at Harvard University. Boulanger directed two of the five festival concerts, giving a concert version of the composer’s virtually unknown opera Pénélope and performing the Requiem to a house so packed that several hundred would-be listeners were turned away at the

42

Edward Dent to NB, F-Pn NLa 66 (342), November 4, 1940. Dent and Boulanger had known each other since 1923 at the latest, when Dent became the founding president of the International Society for Contemporary Music and Boulanger was on the organization’s board.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

143

door.43 In 1950, Edward Tatnall Canby’s liner notes to the American release of Boulanger’s Petit Concert recording demonstrate how strong Boulanger’s association with French resistance to an oppressive German force still remained: he claimed that she was “a champion of French musical thought – notably those elements of continuity that are essentially French, in the face of the overweening Germanism of the last century.”44 Everywhere she performed, Boulanger became famous for her promotion of unfamiliar works. Although she produced fewer concerts, broadcasts and recordings than did many of her contemporaries, her adventurous repertory captured listeners’ imaginations. At home and abroad, the reactions of audiences and critics exuded the enthusiasm of discovery; this was perhaps most pithily expressed in Étienne de Beaumont’s exclamation, the day after a concert at the Polignac salon that had included music by Dowland, Mozart, Hindemith, Roussel, Copland, Boyce, Monteverdi and Bach, “What a magnificent concert yesterday evening – what finds!” (“Quel magnifique concert hier au soir – que de trouvailles!”).45 Reviewers regularly headlined Boulanger’s choice of music, and devoted more column inches to the pieces than to evaluating her performance of them. (This mirrored her own practice as a concert critic: in her Monde musical columns, Boulanger inevitably spent more time discussing pieces than she did performers, even when the works under discussion were warhorses well known to her readership.) As the Boston Herald told its readers in 1938 after a concert in the Gardner Museum, “Like all the events in which Mlle Boulanger has a hand, this was an interesting occasion. All the music . . . is out of the ordinary run which we are accustomed to hear at concerts.”46 A year later, the Philadelphia Inquirer titled its article on her début with the Philadelphia Orchestra, “Mlle Boulanger Reigns at Concert of Novelties.”47 Boulanger herself appeared in many ways as a “trouvaille” in the eyes of her audiences. The unusual nature of her repertory was underlined and strengthened by the rare spectacle of a woman on the podium: the sheer curiosity value emerges very strongly from press accounts, and in anglophone contexts was often further overlaid with fascination with her nationality and the reputation for distinction enjoyed by the French. And by promoting unfamiliar music, Boulanger could avoid competition with male conductors of the standard repertory, and to some extent elude direct comparisons based on gender stereotypes. As late as 1921, André Suares, one of the main contributors to La Revue musicale, could open the journal 43 44 45 46 47

May Sarton to NB, F-Pn NLa 103 (300), November 30, 1945. Sarton arrived forty minutes before the concert but was turned away, and said that at least 800 others were also disappointed. Canby, liner notes to Nadia Boulanger, “Petit Concert” of French Vocal Music. Étienne de Beaumont to NB, F-Pn NLa 53 (270), February 8, 1936. Boston Herald, February 14, 1938. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 1939. The concert was given twice on November 10 and 11, and featured Jean Françaix’s Piano Concerto (with the composer as soloist), and works by Lili Boulanger and Monteverdi among others.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

144

with the statement that performances of Bach and Beethoven by women made him laugh; according to him, masterworks of that calibre were simply beyond their reach, and even highly regarded professional female players made themselves ridiculous in the attempt.48 Though not all held such extreme attitudes, his claims provide an index of how difficult it would have been for Boulanger to succeed as a conductor of many of the widely acknowledged masterpieces she praised in her reviews and analysed in her teaching. In contrast, her association with little-known music – whether historical works or new compositions – allowed her to cultivate a form of niche profile, in which a performer is identified strongly with a repertory to which they have privileged access or over which they command special authority. Here her reputation as a pedagogue was a major advantage: who better to guide audiences in the exploration of the unknown than someone who was well established as an inspirational communicator of musical knowledge and experienced judge of compositional promise? Perhaps most importantly, her choice of music encouraged a reception concentrating on the works rather than her performance – however often her renditions were praised – and helped to promote her own views on the principal location of musical meaning in form and design. audacious juxtapositions If Boulanger’s presentation of unfamiliar gems was a major draw for audiences, her construction of concert programs built around striking combinations of old and new was even more distinctive. As a reviewer for Le Monde musical, she repeatedly called for the “audacious juxtapositions” she described in her overview of the Concerts Colonne in 1921, returning to the subject in no fewer than eight reviews between 1919 and 1922.49 When she began to plan her first American tour in 1925, she was able to put her principles into practice. By this time she had worked closely with American colleagues and students for many years, and her arrival at last was a big event. She was met at the dock by photographers, journalists, representatives from the American Guild of Organists and the New York Symphony Society, and a flock of her students led by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson; then escorted to Walter Damrosch’s apartment near Central Park, which would function as headquarters for her trip. After several days of festivities in her honor – including a lunch at the Damrosches’ for nearly a hundred members of the New York musical community, at which Boulanger was the only female guest – she traveled to Philadelphia to prepare her first concert in the United States: a 48

49

André Suarès, “Vues sur Beethoven.” La Revue musicale 3, no. 1 (November 1921): 1. This was the second part of a multi-section article that had begun in June 1921, and which included further installments through 1922. MM reviews of February 1919: 42–3, March 1919: 69–70, December 1920: 359, March 1921: 86–7, April 1921: 129–30, November 1921: 347, January 1922: 24, and April 1922: 137.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

145

recital on the the immense Grand Court Organ at Wanamaker’s department store. She described to Raïssa her first encounter with the instrument: “an organ – a world – nothing could give you an idea of it – a little delay, because of the great distance and the grandeur – but an indescribable splendor. A little too beautiful for me . . . but I will do anything for this to work.”50 A week later, she wrote that the recital had gone fairly well, despite insufficient rehearsal time and a bad case of nerves.51 She would go on to play the same concert, with minor variations, in New York and Cleveland before returning to France. Boulanger’s idiosyncratic program for the organ recitals for her American tour resonates with the comments on choice and ordering in her reviews just a few years earlier (figure 4.2). The recital began with the Finale of Alexandre Guilmant’s first symphony, then continued with an otherwise unidentified “Piece in D minor” by Scarlatti, followed by arrangements of François Couperin’s Soeur Monique and sections from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. The third group juxtaposed a Bach prelude and fugue with Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H. After a fourth group consisting of Boulanger’s own Airs populaires flamands, extracts from Stravinsky’s Firebird, a “Piece in B minor” by Manuel de Falla, and Lili Boulanger’s Cortège, the concert closed with the Finale of Louis Vierne’s first symphony. Although the repertory is disconcertingly heterogeneous in style and origin, Boulanger had spent months choosing and arranging the music, and what at first glance might seem a potpourri represents a carefully planned structure.52 Two groups – the Couperin-Ravel sequence and the Bach and Liszt fugue pair – involve placing early music next to later pieces to underline shared musical techniques. The program also shows strong concern for formal symmetry. The Vierne and Guilmant Finales open and close the concert, and the central Bach/Liszt pillar is framed by two sets

50

51

52

NB to Raïssa Boulanger, F-Pn NLa 282 (18–20), January 5–7, 1925: “un orgue – un monde – rien ne peut t’en donner une idée – un peu de retard, à cause de l’immense distance et de la grandeur – mais une splendeur indescriptible. Un peu trop beau pour moi [. . .] mais je ferai tout pour que cela marche.” Built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ – the largest in the world – was installed in John Wanamaker’s new store in 1909; the store had its own concert agency and hosted an international recital series by famous organists. The prestige of the instrument fed Boulanger’s fears of not living up to expectations: as she continued, “j’ai trop de cartes dans mon jeu pour n’avoir pas un peu peur – tout le monde est si touchant – on dirait qu’un échange s’établit, immédiatement – mais . . . il s’agit de répondre à leur attente.” Ibid. (2–25), January 12, 1925: “à 8h30 – les mains sur le clavier – sale moment – début assez faible mais pas d’accidents – combinaisons en ordre, tout préparé pour tout le concert – c’est vraiment extraordinaire – mais il y a du retard et physiquement je suis gênée – joué le Liszt bien – à partir de ce moment mieux – grande impression du Cortège que j’ai dû bisser et qui sonne si bien à l’orgue – ce m’est si doux de sentir notre petite Lili associée à tout – Elle serait si heureuse de m’aider – sympathie générale – impression bonne – contrôle constant – Beaucoup de monde après, signé des masses de programmes, vu des tas de gens touchant.” See the exchange of letters from August to October 1924 with J. and W. Chester, Stravinsky’s London publishers, about obtaining Stravinsky’s works and arranging them for organ to use on the tour (F-Pn NLa 62 (8–9).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

Figure 4.2. Program, Grand Court, Wanamaker’s Department Store, Philadelphia, January 9, 1925. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

147

of short pieces and fragments; these groups are further linked by thematic correspondences, such as the mirror placement of the two “ceremonial” works, Lili Boulanger’s Cortège and Ravel’s Tombeau. The result is that the concert can be read on the page as a form similar to those resulting from Boulanger’s structural analyses of musical works. It would be nearly a decade, however, before Boulanger would succeed in mounting similar programs on a regular basis. Initial concerts for the princesse de Polignac consisted almost entirely of the works by Bach that were at the core of the new friendship between them, replicating the repertory of the Wednesday cantata sessions. Boulanger’s second concert for the princess, for example, was similar to the inaugural June 1933 event in mixing extracts from Bach cantatas with two concerti: Bach’s fourth Brandenburg, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, K 622, with the famous clarinettist Louis Cahuzac as soloist.53 But Boulanger soon began to construct concerts similar to her American organ recital, featuring chronologically and geographically diverse historical works in counterpoint with new or recent music, often in combinations far more adventurous than those she had attempted in 1925. Her January 1934 program for Polignac, for example, began and ended with Bach around a central section of Fauré, Hindemith, Mozart, Stravinsky and Lully (figure 4.3). At the École Normale a month later, she again used Bach as frame, this time for premieres of works by her students Jean Françaix and Marcelle de Manziarly.54 This heterogeneous approach to programming became a major hallmark of her work as her conducting and performing career began to flourish. Boulanger insisted on surrounding new pieces with much earlier music even for series where all-contemporary programs were the rule. The premiere of Markevitch’s Psaume at the Salle Gaveau on June 9, 1934 was typical of her approach. The concert was the tenth for La Sérénade, a society founded expressly for the performance of new music and directed by a committee made up principally of composers, including Darius Milhaud and Georges Auric. Markevitch conducted his Psaume as the centerpiece of a program otherwise directed by Boulanger, who began the evening with two Monteverdi works and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto and concluded the concert after the Psaume with a Bach cantata (figure 4.4).55 This resembles today’s well-known ruse of slotting premieres just before the intermission of a concert otherwise made up of older pieces, to reassure audiences wary of new music by administering it in small doses. But it broke 53

54 55

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, January 8, 1934. As before, the programme was symmetrically constructed, this time with the two concerti bracketing an aria and two duets from Bach cantatas, sung by Modrakowska and Marie-Blanche de Polignac. F-Pn Res. Vm dos. 195, February 13, 1934. The premieres were Françaix’s Concertino pour piano et orchestre and Manziarly’s Triptyque pour Madonne de Lorenzo d’Alessandro. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, June 9, 1934.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

148

The work in history

Figure 4.3. Program, salon of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, January 21, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

149

Figure 4.4. Program, La Sérénade, Salle Gaveau, June 9, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

150

The work in history

Figure 4.4.

(cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

151

completely with normal practice for La Sérénade, whose programs were overwhelmingly devoted to recent works.56 For the 1938 private premiere of Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, Boulanger constructed a program for the princesse de Polignac’s salon that began with a Purcell suite, continued with a Bach ensemble sonata framed by two sets of mélodies by Poulenc, and concluded with Poulenc’s new piece, so that the Purcell-Bach-Poulenc instrumental chamber music sequence was symmetrically punctuated by two groups of recent songs. For the public premiere of Poulenc’s work for La Sérénade a few months later, Roger Désormière conducted the same musicians – the Orchestre de chambre de la Société Philharmonique de Paris, with Maurice Duruflé as soloist for the concerto – but the program matched Poulenc’s piece with works by Milhaud, Vittorio Rieti and Arthur Honegger.57 Many of Boulanger’s concerts featured groups of short pieces or fragments of works in symmetrical patterns similar to those of her 1925 organ recitals, but with even more strikingly heterogeneous mixtures. The program she conducted at Fontainebleau in July 1936 is an extreme but not uncharacteristic example: it featured works from the fourteenth century through to very recent music by Françaix, with no discernable order by chronology, geography or language (figure 4.5). The chronological distance between the new works and the pieces surrounding them was often extraordinarily wide, and shifts from past to recent music within groups could be dizzyingly rapid: as in a 1935 concert for the Union Interalliée in which a single set featured pieces by Rameau, Poulenc, Machaut, an anonymous medieval composer, Milhaud and Fauré. That the program listed the date of each work (1737, 1925, 13th century, c. 1350, 1920, 1865) only emphasized the chronological leapfrog effect.58 And although Boulanger’s juxtaposition of new or recent music with pieces from the distant past was especially striking, it was not only early and contemporary music that she manipulated in this way. Some of her heterogeneous groups of pieces were entirely selected from the historical repertory: at the Union Interalliée in 1935, she composed sets in which Monteverdi’s Su, su pastorelli vezzosi was surrounded by vocal works by Carl Maria von Weber, and an extract from Bach’s cantata BWV 21 appeared in the center of a group of Schubert 56

57

58

On La Sérénade (founded 1931), see Michel Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939 (Liège: Mardaga, 1997), 123–8. Although the society was associated with tonal conservatism and concerts sometimes opened with a piece of historical repertory to establish a theme (as in its inaugural concert, which began with a Mozart divertimento before serenades by Milhaud, Sauguet, Markevitch and Rieti), the majority of its concerts featured only new or recent music. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, December 16, 1938 (Polignac salon); see Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac”: 463–4. For the Sérénade concert on June 21, 1939, see Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 330. Duchesneau notes that one newspaper reported that a Purcell work was a late addition to the Salle Gaveau program; it seems likely that the change was related to the program construction of the private premiere. F-Pn. Rés. Vm dos. 195, February 19, 1935.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

152

The work in history

Figure 4.5. Program, Conservatoire Américain, Fontainebleau, July 7, 1936. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

153

Figure 4.5. (cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

154

lieder.59 At the princesse de Polignac’s salon in early 1936, Boulanger programmed a group in which two Mozart overtures framed a symmetrical set of Renaissance dances.60 That is, even when the works performed were not unfamiliar or challenging, Boulanger’s programs combined them in unusual ways. When Boulanger’s conducting career took on international dimensions in the late 1930s, she brought similar programs to new performers and audiences. Like her 1934 Sérénade concert, these programs frequently stood out as unusual for the performers or series. During the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 1937–8 season, Boulanger’s November program of Rameau, Monteverdi, Haydn and Fauré was followed by Thomas Beecham conducting an all-Sibelius concert in December, and Felix Weingartner directing a Weber overture and symphonies by Brahms and Schubert in February. Only Willem Mengelberg’s January mix of J. C. Bach, Franck, Wagner and Tchaikovsky remotely approached the heterogeneity of Boulanger’s event.61 Her programs for school, conservatoire and university groups were equally diverse. Boulanger conducted a particularly large number of such concerts during her visits to the United States in 1937, 1938 and 1939, as well as during her wartime stay in the country between 1940 and 1946. Her 1938 concert with the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society, for example, included a whole series of characteristic pairings: new motets by Leo Préger and Stravinsky next to Palestrina; Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge noire with the Apt manuscript Iste confessor; Hindemith’s O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod with Thomas Tallis’s O Nata lux; all on a program framed by Bach and Purcell.62 When she returned to Harvard’s Sanders Theater in 1939, a similar Bach/Purcell frame surrounded a program of recent works by Copland, Françaix, Poulenc and Stravinsky alongside Mendelssohn, Tallis and Bach, placed mirror-style in symmetrical groups around the central axis (figure 4.6). Usually, Boulanger selected and supplied the music for her American university and conservatoire programs, which were then rehearsed in advance by local conductors, who were often bemused by her choices. Correspondence with her former student Arthur Quimby of Case Western Reserve University suggests how different Boulanger’s programs

59 60

61

62

Ibid., November 19, 1935 and December 17, 1935. Ibid., February 7, 1936. The Mozart overtures are labelled “Petite ouverture,” and it is unclear which works are meant. The dances (three by John Dowland, interspersed with two sixteenth-century French pieces) were performed in orchestral arrangements. Ibid., November 4, 1937; the booklet for Boulanger’s concert contains programs for the entire season. The eclecticism of her concerts with the New York Philharmonic (February 11, 1939) and the Philadelphia Orchestra (March 10–11, 1939) was similarly striking in comparison with the rest of the groups’ seasons. Ibid., March 3, 1938. Boulanger’s correspondence with the Harvard conductor Wallace Woodworth about the program figures in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

Figure 4.6. Program, Sanders Theater, Harvard University, April 26, 1939. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

156

could be from the normal fare.63 As Quimby explained in his initial letter to Boulanger, the university choir usually started with a program of works composed before 1800, which they would study for the whole of the fall semester before considering more recent works later in the year. Boulanger responded that a program of mixed early and contemporary music would be better for her guest appearance in early 1939; and the final program included works by Lili Boulanger and Stravinsky, the American premiere of Poulenc’s “Tenebrae factae sunt” and a world premiere of a motet by her student Michal Spisak, mixed with pieces by Palestrina, Tallis, Monteverdi, Schütz, Purcell and Bach. By the onset of World War II, Boulanger had devoted discs to Monteverdi, to vocal chamber music by Brahms and to Jean Françaix’s Piano Concerto. But her ambition to make a recording based on the juxtapositions that characterized her concerts proved more difficult to realize. In early 1940, the opportunity seemed to arise when a successful performance with her ensemble in Brussels led to a proposal from Charles Leirens for a set of six discs devoted either to French Renaissance music, or to a mixture “tout à fait éclectique.”64 When Boulanger responded with a plan to mix Sermisy with Fauré, Debussy and Françaix, however, it became clear that by “eclectic” Leirens had meant a combination of French and non-French music – Dowland and Monteverdi, for example – and that he wanted the recording to be entirely devoted to works from before 1650. The consortium of recording companies he represented required a minimum number of subscriptions before they would endorse the project; and as he explained, “I fear that in mixing composers such as Sermisy, Consilium, Claude Le Jeune (the [Henry] Expert series, in sum) with modern composers, we would be appealing to two audiences, which is always dangerous in launching an endeavor. The early music fan, whose tastes are sometimes very narrow, will hesitate to subscribe for an album of six records, of which only three could be fully endorsed.”65 Once the series was established and a following assured, he continued, they could consider more unconventional combinations for future projects. Discussions continued through April 1940, until the plan had to be definitively abandoned because of the war. On her return to France in 1946, Boulanger renewed her efforts to record a heterogeneous concert of vocal ensemble music. The project 63 64

65

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 144, liasse 2. The final program is in Rés. Vm dos. 195, January 13, 1939. Charles Leirens to NB, January 18, 1940, the first in a series of letters about the recording project in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 145. Leirens negotiated with Boulanger on behalf of a consortium of His Master’s Voice, Columbia and Parlophone. Leirens to NB, February 1, 1940 (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 145): “Je crains qu’en mélangeant des auteurs comme de Sermisy, Consilium, Claude Le Jeune (la série Expert pour tout résumer d’un mot) avec des auteurs modernes, nous ne nous adressions à deux publics, ce qui est toujours dangereux pour lancer une entreprise. L’amateur de musique ancienne, dont les goûts sont parfois très étroits, hésitera à souscrire à un album de 6 disques dont 3 seulement rencontreront son adhésion complète.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

157

again collapsed when Pathé-Marconi, with whom Boulanger now had a contract, objected to her program not only on financial but on musical grounds. Boulanger broke with the company rather than consenting to changes. In a letter to Doda Conrad, she fumed: That they should give practical or commercial reasons for considering my combination of a piece of medieval music with Fauré’s Madrigal “absolutely impossible” might just about be a valid argument, though I doubt it. But that they permit themselves to add “aesthetic reasons” naturally rules out ever working with PathéMarconi!66

A small company, La Boîte à Musique, directed by the Boulanger admirer Jacques Levi-Alvarès, retrieved the project. Completed in 1949 and tellingly entitled Petit Concert, the recording reproduced the juxtapositions of her pre-war concerts: sixteenth-century chansons next to Fauré and Debussy, motets by Préger and Lili Boulanger next to medieval music (table 4.1).67 When the recording was later released in the United States, New York music critic and conductor Edward Tatnall Canby anticipated that listeners might find her choices disorienting; as he wrote in the liner notes, “the unconventional mixtures on this disc may, according to usual concepts of concert-building, seem to achieve an acme of auditory disjunction.”68 Although Boulanger often went beyond familiar paths in her choice of historical repertory, early music performance in itself was nothing new in France by the 1930s; it was precisely because of its lengthy past that Boulanger was able to construct the wide-ranging programs she championed. From the beginning of her musical education she had first-hand knowledge of some of the most influential Parisian efforts to promote historical repertories. In 1904, at the age of 17, she played the organ for the Chanteurs de Saint Gervais directed by Charles Bordes, among the most renowned activists for the performance of early music in France at the time.69 During the 1905–6 season, she realized the continuo parts at organ and harpsichord for concerts of Gustave Bret’s newly founded Société J. S. Bach.70 Later in her career she maintained 66

67

68 69

70

Undated letter [early 1949], cited in Doda Conrad, Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe, 180: “Qu’ils invoque des raisons d’ordre pratique et commercial pour considérer ‘absolument impossible’ mon accouplement d’une musique du Moyen Âge avec le Madrigal de Fauré, peut à la rigueur être un argument valable, bien que j’en doute. Mais qu’on se permette d’ajouter l’ ‘ordre esthétique’ exclut évidemment toute collaboration avec Pathé-Marconi!” See Giuliani, “Les Enregistrements de Nadia Boulanger,” 191–202 and “Discographie,” 424–4. Boulanger’s commercially released recordings from 1930 to 1949 are currently available on Nadia Boulanger, Hommage à Nadia Boulanger: Enregistrements réalisés à Paris, 1930–49 (Cascavelle VEL 3081, 2004), 2 CDs. Canby, liner notes to Boulanger, “Petit Concert” of French Vocal Music. The program included Palestrina, Josquin, Vittoria, Nanini, and Giovanni Gabrieli (CNLB, October 9, 1904). On Bordes and the Chanteurs, see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105–11. Programs of November 22, 1905, January 17 and February 7, 1906 – all devoted uniquely to Bach – in CNLB.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

158

Table 4.1. Contents of Nadia Boulanger, Petit Concert (Paris: Les Éditions de la Boîte à Musique, 1949). Four 78rpm discs, BAM 79–82, matrices 211/215 (recorded July 6, 1949) and 218/220 (recorded July 8, 1949). No 79. [Side 1] a) Consilium (1529): L’autre jour. b) G. Fauré (A. Sylvestre) Madrigal (Op. 35). [Side 2] a) G. Costeley: Las je n’irai plus jouer au bois. b) Cl. Debussy (Charles d’Orléans): Dieu qu’il l’a fait bon regarder. No 80. [Side 3] Lili Boulanger: Pie Jesu. [Side 4] a) Léo Preger: Cantique de St Jean de la Croix. b) Anonyme XIIe siècle: S’on me regarde (Manuscrit de Montpellier). No 81. [Side 5] a) F. Couperin (La Fontaine): Épitaphe du paresseux. b) Marcelle de Manziarly (La Fontaine): L’Oiseau blessé. c) F. Couperin: Musette. [Side 6] a) Claudin de Sermisy: Amours partez. b) Anonyme (Troubadours XIIIe siècle). Ai pris en chantant plour . . . c) Anonyme: Le Lay des amants. (XIIIe siècle). No 82. [Side 7] a) Lully (Quinault): Trio d’Amadis. b) N. de la Grotte (Ronsard): Quand ce beau printemps. c) Jean Françaix (Marot): À une demoiselle malade. [Side 8] a) Jean Françaix (Ch. d’Orléans): Levez ces couvre-chef. b) J. Françaix (J. du Bellay): Belaud, mon petit chat gris.

associations with organizations such as the Société de Musique d’Autrefois, founded in 1926.71 But such groups generally focussed their efforts uniquely on early music, often combining their advocacy of the repertory with attempts to recover historical performing practices. At the same time, her programs also diverged from those of concert societies aimed at promoting new music, which – like La Sérénade – normally excluded all but very recent works from their programs. The SMI, for example, only rarely programmed early repertory, even though the possibility of doing so was specifically mentioned in its statutes. It is probably 71

Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens, 554–7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The problem of concerts

159

not coincidence that the only SMI concert to feature a significant proportion of early music, on June 27, 1933, was held at the École Normale de Musique and dominated by Boulanger pupils.72 In some ways Boulanger’s programs of the 1930s were throwbacks to a time when prominent concert series regularly included both early and recent music, often with titles or program notes calling attention to the gesture. This practice of placing historical and contemporary repertories in dialogue was fairly common after 1870. Jann Pasler has argued persuasively for the educational purpose behind such programs, which invited listeners to compare works from different periods and to construct larger questions about the historical and national trajectories connecting them.73 The Concerts Colonne, for example – the same group Boulanger lambasted for poor programming in 1921 – included early and recent music on its Sunday symphonic programs from their inception in 1874. “Ancient music” in this context was generally understood as any music from the sixteenth to the mid nineteenth century, and “modern” as from Schumann onward, with a large proportion of recent French works. By 1900 new concert societies devoted to “musique ancienne et moderne” – including some who concentrated on specific genres such as the string quartet or sonata – had been founded. The performance of early music in both established and new concert series was accompanied by a notable interest among French composers in exploring historical techniques, particularly Renaissance modal harmony and baroque dance forms, in contemporary musical composition.74 In some cases programs involved the juxtaposition of historical and contemporary pieces within a single group in order to underline such connections: as for example at the Opéra on December 19, 1895, when a Fauré Pavane was inserted into a group of dances by Lully, Handel and Rameau.75 When Boulanger programmed Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin next to Couperin in her American recitals in 1925, she was essentially continuing this practice. And for some concerts given by chamber music groups and solo recitalists of the late nineteenth century, the mix of old and new did not follow obvious chronological or geographical patterns.76 Most concerts, however, grouped early music together, often in the first half, 72

73 74 75 76

The SMI’s founding announcement declares that although the society’s principal mission is to “favoriser les plus jeunes tendances et à préparer l’avenir,” its programs will not exclude “les oeuvres du passé dont la révélation pourrait sembler intéressante.” Mercure de France, April 1, 1909, cited in Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 65; see 305–27 for an index of SMI programs 1910–35. Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 217–20. On precedents in the 1860s and 1870s, see Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 44–5. Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 631–8. On the nineteenth-century social changes and programming habits that preceded these developments, see Weber, The Great Transformation. The program is reproduced in Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 636. Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 84–91, describes concerts by Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Diémer that fall into this category.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

The work in history

160

rather than mixing it consistently with more recent works through the concert. For example, Colonne’s Thursday chamber music concerts were divided into halves labelled “musique ancienne” and “musique moderne” from 1897 to 1901, in concerts specifically conceived as music-historical education for their audiences. When Boulanger shared programs with other conductors, her reputation as an advocate for early music often led to similar results: for the the launch of the Orchestre de la Société Philharmonique de Paris in 1934, Boulanger’s performances of Bach, Schütz and Monteverdi were corralled into the first half as a prelude to Stravinsky’s Symphonie des psaumes, conducted by Désormière (figure 4.7). With their firm compartmentalization of “ancienne” and “moderne” such programs follow an overarching chronological path. New patterns in concert programming after 1900 were in part a response to the unprecedented choice of repertory now available to musicians. The Parisian concert scene was marked by an especially broad range, which included not only considerable amounts of unfamiliar historical works generated by musicological research, but also substantial quantities of new music, which successive government policies and activism by groups such as the Société Nationale did much to encourage. The sheer amount of choice presented exciting opportunities, but could also create problems of intelligibility. Critics complained that the heterogeneity of some concerts was confusing, asserting that works should be heard together with others by the same composer or from the same period.77 The trend increasingly moved toward more consistent grouping by composer, period, genre and geography. Concert artists devoted individual programs or entire series to single periods, genres or composers, or presented their “historical concerts” in an overtly didactic chronological arrangement of the kind Boulanger explicitly rejected as pedantic. In 1920–1, the Concerts Pasdeloup, for example, mounted an extensive series of “Concerts Historiques du Jeudi” devoted to “L’Évolution de la Musique Dramatique Française au XIXe Siècle, de Meyerbeer à Debussy”; between October and April, audiences could hear extracts of French operas by two dozen different composers in chronological order.78 Boulanger herself often participated in such series: in 1920, for example, she was the soloist for the Handel Concerto in G, Op. 4, no. 1, for a concert in Pleyel’s “La Musique Symphonique aux XVIe–XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles,” a chronologically organized six-concert series devoted to music up to and including Mozart and Haydn.79 Even the concert series of La Revue musicale, whose advertisements emphasized the novelty of both the 77 78 79

Jann Pasler, “Concert Programs and their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology,” International Journal of Musicology 2 (1993): 293–4. and Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 92–93. For the contents of the entire series, see ReM 2, no. 3 (January 1921): inside cover. January 10, 1920 (conducted by Ingelbrecht, who was also on the committee of the SMI with her at the time, and a promoter of new music).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

Figure 4.7. Program, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, December 18, 1934. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

The work in history

162

historical and new works that would be featured, followed such patterns: for example, the four programs of 1925–6 began with “Musique ancienne” (Lully, Monteverdi, Handel and Vivaldi), before continuing with “Oeuvres de Debussy,” “Oeuvres de Ravel” and “Oeuvres modernes pour violon et piano.”80 Boulanger not only defied this trend (sometimes despite considerable opposition, as in her dispute with Pathé-Marconi) but also went to extremes both in the chronological span she covered and in the frequency of her shifts between epochs. The engagement with music history implicit in any performance of early music was simultaneously foregrounded and problematized by her rapid seesawing between chronologically distant pieces. And although the results in some cases were broadly similar to earlier concert practice, in the context of interwar musical aesthetics their significance was especially highly charged. Boulanger strongly resisted the discourse of difference that often surrounded her work, and the concentration on unusual repertory and opposition between old and new that frequently drew comments from critics and audience members. Instead, she promoted a historical vision stressing the similarities linking past and present, similarities based on the properties shared by masterworks of all times and places. This historical commitment would become the motor for a verbal as well as sonic campaign, pursued on the airwaves, in the classroom, in lectures and talks in France and abroad. 80

ReM 7, no. 6 (April 1926): unpaginated front matter. The concerts took place at the Salle Gaveau.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.007

chapter 5

New links between them

Listeners all over Britain could imagine they were part of an exclusive Parisian concert audience when they tuned in to the BBC for five short programs of French music in November 1936. On their first visit to England, Nadia Boulanger’s newly established professional vocal ensemble presented the same unusual repertory and unconventional mixtures that marked their work on the other side of the Channel. Their opening program alternated anonymous medieval music with pieces by Machaut, Sermisy, Janequin, Couperin and Roger-Ducasse, and a premiere of one of Poulenc’s Sept chansons. In their third broadcast, on religious music, the premiere of Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge noire featured amid pieces by Perotin, Févin and Josquin; in the fourth, Josquin, Fauré, Lassus and Marc-Antoine Charpentier joined Lili Boulanger.1 The BBC prepared the ground carefully, sending a writer to interview Boulanger in Paris for the Radio Times and offering her a preliminary broadcast slot for a talk on the music she would perform. Boulanger leapt at this chance to explain the rationale behind the programs’ construction: What have we tried to do? How have we done it? The purpose was to give an idea of the different aspects vocal ensemble music has had and still has in France, what it has meant and means. What it has been and is, as a medium of expression. In order to succeed, was it necessary to follow a chronological order? At first one would say so, but considering the question from another angle, we came to another conclusion, and that for two reasons: the first, if built in successive periods, each recital would only let appear one isolated part of the ensemble we had the purpose to display in its entirety: the second, certainly the more important, refers to the real relationship in art; in looking for it, one makes associations which seem at first strange to the mind, but are clear to the deeper understanding.2

Returning to the graphic metaphor she had regularly applied in her reviews for Le Monde musical some fifteen years before, she claimed that, “some 1 2

Programs for all five broadcasts are transcribed in Laederich, “La Première Audition à Londres,” 166–7. Script for BBC radio broadcast, November 16, 1936, 6:40–6:55 p.m. (GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1). Boulanger prepared the text in advance with the help of an English-speaking student; CNLB holds several drafts as well as a copy of the final version. A dossier labelled “Londres 1936” (CNLB) includes correspondence with G. R. Barnes of the BBC’s Programme Division about using the interview and script to explain her programs.

163

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

164

modern painting is infinitely nearer to the 14th century than to a painting of 50 years ago.” She concluded her exposition by emphasizing the nature of the links between the apparently disparate artworks: In building these programmes, we were intending to illustrate the way in which a certain character or human type continually appears throughout the ages different in clothing, different in manner, different in language, but expressing a same thought, a same aspiration, a same emotion.3

After moving to the piano for brief remarks on each of the pieces to be performed during the week, she closed the broadcast by re-emphasizing the continuities that justified her rejection of chronology: It is not for the sake of variety or contrast that DEBUSSY, RAVEL and POULENC are inserted in the midst of Renaissance masters, that Francis POULENC’S Litanies and PREGER’S Motet are surrounded with medieval and early Renaissance music. There is in the grouping one intention, our purpose; works of the most striking periods having been chosen. The point was to set to ordain [vice order] the five pictures we spoke of at first in order to demonstrate that the past lights the present, but also the present the past, and they have thus created new links between them.4

As they listened to these explanations, British audiences could also feel they were Boulanger’s students. The Radio Times feature that preceded her arrival was explicitly aimed at revealing the programs’ didactic intent. Titled “A Distinguished French Teacher,” the article presented the upcoming concerts for the BBC as an inspired form of pedagogy: Music has at different times been written in all sorts of different conventions. The student, studying the history of music, can analyse them and label them and show how one followed on another. He can assign each particular idiom to its century, and write whole books on forms and schools and idioms. But the idioms, the conventions, are merely means to an end. . . . With Nadia Boulanger the essence of music, the things it is trying to say (as distinct from the particular musical language in which it happens to be expressed) have always been unusually clear. And being a teacher she has devised a means of making them a little more clear for other people. Her method is summed up in the French word rapprochements. She will take several pieces of music from widely separate periods, in totally different styles. To the mere historian they will seem poles asunder. No one else would have thought of them in the same breath. Yet to her it is clear that each in its own way is saying the same kind of thing. And so she brings them suddenly together in one programme in the hope that her listeners may be able to appreciate for themselves the meaning that they have in common.5

“To the mere historian”: this dismissal of history as a route to music’s essential meaning highlights contradictions faced by Boulanger herself in 3 4 5

Script, November 16, 1936 (GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1). Script, November 16, 1936 (GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1). Aitken, “A Distinguished French Teacher,” 19.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

165

reconciling her concert practice and classroom pedagogy. Throughout the 1930s, her performances and her explanations of their rationale provided a complex counterpoint with her own and others’ teaching of music history. Although her programs shared the didactic impulses that had marked French concert culture since the late nineteenth century, her aim was not to illustrate in sound the common contemporary understanding of music history, but instead to construct a dramatic alternative to conventional historical narratives. more useful for education and pleasure As in the lecture preceding her BBC broadcasts, distinctions between variety or contrast on the one hand, and “associations . . . clear to the deeper understanding” on the other, were a constant theme of Boulanger’s explanations as her conducting engagements multiplied through the 1930s. The expansion of her career to the international concert stage, to radio and recording provided opportunities to reach new audiences, but also a more frequent need to defend her work. Her idiosyncratic programs were often resisted, particularly when she was away from the Parisian milieux where she was a known figure, where personal connections with patrons and venues could afford her a relatively free hand in her choices, and where her listeners’ knowledge of current debates in French musical circles could be taken for granted. As in her dealings with Leirens and then Pathé-Marconi over the Petit Concert recording, she was frequently told that early music, the classical canon, and new music were separate countries on the musical map. Where a broad range of repertory was to feature, organizers generally expected chronological ordering, and had to be convinced of the effectiveness of Boulanger’s less conventional approach. Evidence for this sort of negotiation is particularly abundant around Boulanger’s 1936 broadcasts for the BBC, since details were painstakingly and voluminously arranged by post while she was still in France the preceding summer. The unusual repertory, historical range and “audacious juxtapositions” that characterized her Parisian concerts had all been important selling points in Doda Conrad’s initial pitch to the music-historical series “Foundations of Music”: May I suggest that the BBC should take the opportunity of the presence in London of so important a figure in contemporanean music as, Miss Boulanger actually is, and ask her to perform with her ensemble and conduct several programs of both ancient and modern music . . . Mr Calvocoressi with whom I spoke over the matter suggested a beautyful program on french ensemble singing during the four past centuries. This plan could be completed by a concert of modern and ancient music . . . Mlle Boulanger could conduct on that occasion a number of first performances (or rarely performed) for London of genuine masterpieces of vocal solo or ensemble works, put together in one of those programs where musicians like

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

166

Schütz, Monteverdi, Palestrina, Bach are united to Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith and Stravinsky.6

The programs were booked as a set of five short concerts to be broadcast over the week of November 15. But the BBC envisaged a chronologically ordered sequence, in which each program would be devoted to works from a single historical period. Boulanger’s former pupil Anthony Lewis, then working for the corporation, suggested devoting the first broadcast to Perotin and contemporaries, the second to Janequin and the sixteenth century, the third to Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the fourth to the eighteenth century, and the final program to contemporary music, according to by-then familiar concepts of didactic historical programming.7 This was of course not at all what Boulanger had in mind: As far as the five programmes – my intention was to have in each ancient moderne as groups of tendancies rather than chronological – what do you think of that – is it better for an English audience to make it by periods – I don’t believe so, but shall wait for your advice. . . . If ancient modern could one do, as I should like: XVI very modern XIII very modern XVI – or something in this direction. . . . I truly believe that parentages or contrasts through history are more useful for education & pleasure, than going century after century.8

While discussions over the historical programs continued, scheduling problems arose with Conrad’s proposal for a complementary full-length concert to figure in the BBC’s Contemporary Concerts series. While negotiations continued, Boulanger strove to persuade the organization to drop its policy of including only recent works in this series, arguing that a mixed program of music from different periods would show the modern works in a better light.9 The Contemporary Concert was eventually postponed until a later visit, but the five programs in the “Foundations of Music” series went ahead as planned: and Boulanger was able to get her way on the order of the works. In the correspondence leading up to the series, Boulanger offered variety as one justification for her programming, and this seems to be how BBC

6

7 8 9

Doda Conrad to Arthur Wynn, GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1, June 29, 1936. Further on the BBC concerts, see Laederich, “La Première Audition,” 153–67. Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi became close to Ravel during his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, and after moving to London was an active promoter of Ravel’s music in England. Conrad collaborated with Calvocoressi on a “Foundations of Music” series on Ravel in early June 1936, when they apparently conceived the plan to engage Boulanger for the same series (GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1). Anthony Lewis to NB, GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1, September 4, 1936. Lewis suggested music by Caplet, Schmitt and Ravel for the contemporary session. NB to Anthony Lewis, GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1, n.d. [early September 1936]. Boulanger wrote: “It was proposed to be, not only modern music, but mixed periods, the one bringing light on the others – and I truly consider, at least till now, that this orientation would bring variety and serve more actively modern music, than only contemporary works. All the experiments I made reinforced my convictions on the subject.” NB to unnamed BBC official [Kenneth Wright], GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1, n.d. [before September 10, 1936].

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

167

managers principally (mis)understood her rationale.10 Contrast is usually recognized as a common-sense requirement of any concert program; but in Boulanger’s case the variety principle often seems pushed so far as to border on the random. Similar kinds of extreme heterogeneity marked important trends in early twentieth-century expressive culture – particularly in the graphic arts but also in music – and it might be tempting to read her concerts in that light. The point was generally to confront the listener with highly divergent musical languages to explode notions of a single, monolithic tradition. This was Jean Wiéner’s plan for the Concerts Wiéner, founded in 1921, which would program “concerts salade” of music from a range of periods, contexts and styles, including jazz and light theater music. Wiéner’s project seems closely related to contemporary surrealist collage in its aim to release new meanings through the juxtaposition of disparate objects from normally separate realms of knowledge or use.11 Confrontational heterogeneity was not Boulanger’s goal, however. As a reviewer for Le Monde musical she had regularly disparaged concerts where concern for difference was not governed by a higher principle of coherence.12 And although she sometimes used the words “variety” and “contrast” in defending her own concert practice, she placed even greater emphasis on the resemblances and connections that, for her, transcended potential conflicts between music of different periods. This concept was repeatedly emphasized not only in the print and broadcast introductions to her first BBC series, but in all the material associated with her 1936 London trip. In the program notes for the main event, a concert at Queen’s Hall of music by Schütz, Fauré and Lennox Berkeley, her biography claimed: “She has sought to bring together in her programmes works which, though of different periods, are spiritually and artistically akin, holding that the inner qualities of music are the more vital.”13 That is, seemingly wildly divergent works are not juxtaposed for difference, but because they are in some fundamental sense the same; careful placement can bring out essential expressive similarities between pieces that at first glance would seem to have nothing in common. To employ Boulanger’s own vocabulary, these affinities are the “general ideas” within which “audacious juxtaposition” makes sense. In Boulanger’s thinking, the combination of pieces sharing 10

11

12 13

As in a letter from Kenneth Wright, agreeing that while a mixed program of old and new music would achieve a “desirable contrast” it was against the policy of devoting Contemporary Concerts exclusively to recent music (Kenneth Wright to NB, GB-CaBBC, NB Artist File 1, September 10, 1936). On the Concerts Wiéner, see Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens, 525–32. On the surrealist poetics of collage and its potential applications to models of musical meaning, see Nicholas Cook, “Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music,” in Approaches to Meaning in Music, edited by Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 107–34. See, for example, her reviews for Le Monde musical of February 1919 (30, no. 2: 42–3), December 1920 (31, nos. 23–4: 358–62), and January 1922 (33, nos. 1–2: 23–6). F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, November 24, 1936.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

168

such kinships establishes a deep unity that not only remains undisturbed by surface contrast, but which the contrast instead serves to underline and intensify. Here her practice drew upon another potential effect of collage, a label applied by others (though resisted by Boulanger herself) to her characteristic juxtapositions. Collage may be used not only to dramatize difference, but also to emphasize whatever its diverse materials may share; as Glenn Watkins remarks, in collage “juxtaposition characteristically italicizes complementary qualities in the seemingly contradictory.”14 Boulanger regularly employed the rhetoric of surfaces and depths to express this concept. Her language is consistent not only with broader twentieth-century structuralist trends, but resonates especially with contemporary modes of musical analysis, including her own analytical explanations of musical works, in her emphasis on cogency and higher-level continuities. Projection of coherence at a meta-level is a principle shared by virtually every twentieth-century music-analytical approach, however diverse their methods or philosophies may otherwise be; and, as Nicholas Cook shows, Schenker and other structural theorists regularly “explain away” disjunctions and moment-to-moment musical contrasts through appeals to underlying unity.15 Boulanger’s rejection of the label “collage” – which she took in the surrealist sense to be a principle stressing discontinuity and disorientation, a mode of emphasizing and exploiting irreducible difference – is consonant with this approach to musical meaning. But although Boulanger’s attitude is based in a structuralist approach, the “narrative archetype” (as Cook describes it) that underpinned it – the story that supplied the framework for her sequence of works – was radically different. Laurence Dreyfus argues that structural music analysis from Schenker onward generally relies heavily on teleological, largely evolutionary narratives: music begins from primitive origins and progresses toward perfection, which may be followed in some views by decline or decadence in the present day.16 Boulanger’s juxtapositions, in contrast, implied filiations that leap and zig-zag unpredictably through time. the second road: encounters with history The development of Boulanger’s concert practice through the 1930s coincided with an increasingly intense concentration on questions of history and tradition in her teaching, both at the École Normale and in her private courses. This took place against a backdrop of the debates over neoclassicism 14

15 16

Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 3. For Boulanger’s resistance to the word “collage,” see Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 67. Cook, “Uncanny Moments.” Laurence Dreyfus, “Musical Analysis and the Historical Imperative,” Revista de musicologia 16 (1993): 407–19.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

169

that had occupied Parisian contemporary music circles for well over a decade, and in which she was an active participant. Her published concert criticism had appeared in print in the early 1920s when newly dominant musical values – emphasizing order, clarity and formal rigor, among other attributes – became firmly attached to the creative reworking of historical musical materials and techniques under the banner of neoclassicism. In critical commentary on Stravinsky’s new works, praise for architectural construction emphasizing form, line and counterpoint as against description or emotion was increasingly conveyed through association with music of the past. Boulanger’s glowing review of the 1923 premiere of Stravinsky’s Octet was typical of the new neoclassicist rhetoric in describing the piece in terms of geometrical construction, classical form, simplicity and clarity, and then comparing it to masterpieces of Renaissance counterpoint and the works of Bach.17 By the time Boulanger was reinvented as a conductor in the 1930s, Stravinsky and his supporters had established the composer as the standard-bearer of the new aesthetic, and comparison with “classical” qualities of past masterworks, particularly those of Bach, had become a cliché. Boulanger’s position in these debates was well known; it was certainly no accident that Edwin Evans – the critic generally credited with starting the trend for StravinskyBach comparison in 1921 – was commissioned to write the program notes for her 1936 Queen’s Hall concert in London.18 As early as 1920, in a review of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Reynaldo Hahn had critiqued the way advocates of compositional neoclassicism claimed similarities between historically divergent works: Sophisticated people have always enjoyed discovering in art the mysterious genealogies of hidden but “obvious” relationships between the most contrasting figures, those most opposed by their tendencies, by their education, and who, to the common mortal, do not seem to be united by any bond. In this little game, “intermediaries” are neglected, transitions are not recognized; one indicates two points widely distant from each other, and one exclaims: they are contiguous! [. . .] Now, behold that Stravinsky has composed a graceful, strange and seductive paraphrase on motives of Pergolesi. You will see that before long it will be established by ingenious argument that Petrushka and Amor fa l’uomo ceco are the same thing, that nothing is closer to Adriano in Siria than the Chant du rossignol, and that after all Oiseau de feu is only a modern transposition of Il prigionero superbo.19 17 18 19

NB, “Concerts Koussevitzky,” MM 34, nos. 21–2 (November 1923): 365. Edwin Evans, “Igor Stravinsky: Contrapuntal Titan,” Musical America (February 12, 1921): 9; see Messing, Neoclassicism, 134. Reynaldo Hahn, “Les Théâtres: Les Premières,” Excelsior, May 17, 1920, 4: “Les gens raffinés ont toujours eu le goût de découvrir dans l’art des généalogies mystérieuses, de parentés cachées mais ‘evidentes’ entre les personnalités les plus contraires, les plus opposées par leurs tendances, par leur éducation, et qui, pour le commun des mortels, ne semblaient être unies par aucun lien. Dans ce petit jeu, on néglige les ‘intermédiaires’, on méconnait les transitions: on indique deux points fort distants l’un de l’autre, et l’on s’écrie: ils sont contigus! [. . .] Or, voici que M. Stravinsky a composé une gracieuse, étrange, et séduisante paraphrase sur des motifs de Pergolèse. Vous verrez qu’avant longtemps on établira par des arguments ingénieux que Petrouchka et Amor fa l’uomo ceco, c’est la

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

170

Hahn pointedly observes that the current mode of establishing similarity between chronologically distant music involves the suppression of intermediaries and transitions, which might instead draw attention to the distance between works by evoking concepts of development and change over time. Yet exactly these concepts were at the heart of music history: and the suppression of intermediary connections can be read as the suppression of history itself. The conflict between Boulanger’s approach to past masterworks and the demands of music history would become a crucial issue after she began teaching history courses at the École Normale in the fall of 1929. Initially these seem to have been conceived principally as repertory surveys. They were apparently open to members of the public as well as École Normale students, and certainly involved performance of the works discussed. The announcement in Le Ménestrel advertising the start date for Boulanger’s history lectures for the 1930–1 academic year lists the pieces that would be “commented and sung,” beginning with the Palestrina Missa Papae Marcelli, and continuing with sixteenth-century madrigals; the madrigals of Monteverdi; unspecified extracts from Lully, Purcell and Rameau; Handel’s Messiah; Bach’s St. John Passion, Haydn’s Creation; Mozart’s Magic Flute; Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; Schubert’s Mass in C; Schumann’s Faust; and the Fauré Requiem, before concluding the year with Stravinsky’s brand-new Symphonie des psaumes. The same notice also supplied the list of Bach cantatas that would be “analysed and sung” for her private Wednesday classes at the rue Ballu.20 The vocabulary suggests that there is some distinction in method between the two types of class, but it seems likely that in practice this was not the case; instead, it was only the broader repertory and chronological sequence that set the history course apart from the earlier cours d’analyse. Increasingly convinced that deeper study of early music could help her students to understand the classical values it embodied, Boulanger began to concentrate more intensively on history teaching in the early 1930s in tandem with the expansion of her conducting activity. A manuscript notebook of 1932 contains a series of reflections and questions, related to work with her student Elie Siegmeister, that indicate some of her main preoccupations.21 Noting that she wanted to provide an insight into “the evolution

20

21

même chose, que rien ne se rapproche d’avantage d’Adriano in Siria que le Chant du rossignol, et qu’enfin L’oiseau de feu n’est qu’une transposition moderne d’Il prigionero superbo.” See Messing, Neoclassicism, 115. Announcement, Le Ménestrel 4931 (October 31, 1930): 464. A similar notice in the previous year (Le Ménestrel 4879 (November 1, 1929): 472) advertised the restarting of Boulanger’s “analysis course” on Bach cantatas (Wednesdays, rue Ballu), and “history course” (Saturdays, École Normale), which in 1929–30 would be devoted to “The Sonata from Liszt to Debussy.” F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 140. This is a bloc-notes of correspondence paper, in which Boulanger made a numbered list of topics – including the relationship of tempo designations to metronome marks and methods for teaching solfège as well as plans for a history course – with a series of questions associated with each. The opening page is marked “Questions Siegmeister 1932” but it is not entirely clear whether Siegmeister was asking the questions or whether Boulanger was proposing he should investigate or react to them. The first-person narrative voice and declarative nature of much of the material suggests the latter.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

171

of forms envisaged as technical procedures,” especially concentrating on the periods 1000–1750 and 1900–32, she continued: “I would like to present music not according to the categories of time, place and personality, but as a general development of certain forms and techniques of composition.” She imagined beginning with basic forms – such as strophic, binary, ternary, and simple refrain structures – that could be seen in traditional melodies and early medieval songs and plainchant, and building upon these to show how they are the basis for more complex constructions. The succeeding pages are devoted to a series of questions about form in folk music that she apparently wanted to ask Siegmeister, who had a strong interest in traditional music; these are followed by a further series of questions and statements about pre-1750 repertories. These include, for example: “What are the technical differences between motet and madrigal? Were they regarded as different in composition?”; “Is it true to say that in Bach for example there is an encounter between different streams: the polyphonic stream, as in the Kyrie for organ, and the more harmonic stream, as in the suites and preludes?”; “The origin of square phrasing in dance – these structures will become the structures of the era 1600–1900.” These notes show not only the structuralist basis of Boulanger’s historical thinking, but also her intention to use history classes to demonstrate how basic forms were already apparent in the earliest music of the West, coverage of which was essential to the argument. In new materials prepared for history courses at the École Normale for the academic year 1932–3, although traditional music was largely excluded – perhaps because she still felt too insecure in her knowledge – she accordingly devoted a significant number of lectures to music from the Greeks through the middle ages and Renaissance.22 By the mid 1930s her focus on early repertories brought Boulanger into conflict with the founders of the École Normale, Auguste Mangeot and Alfred Cortot, who wanted her to restrict her classes to works from the common-practice period to the present. Cortot thought earlier music was of no interest to students, and that Boulanger would do better to stick to repertories they knew as performers. In 1936, he wrote to Mangeot: “What we do after all is secondary teaching, and she brings us a course in comparative musicology that can usefully capture the attention of only a few rare students, at least concerning the primitive periods. Here, I agree with you that we should ask Nadia to begin her course around the period of Couperin and Rameau – permitting immediate application to the works in the repertory of the instrumental classes.”23 Boulanger’s own position on 22

23

I have examined course materials from the 1932–3, 1934–5 and 1935–6 academic years from the collection of the late Cécile Armagnac, who was among Boulanger’s student assistants in those years. Duplicates are held in F-LYc and CNLB. Alfred Cortot to Auguste Mangeot, F-Pn Rés Vm dos. 127, fol. 19v, 16 October 1936: “Nous faisons en somme de l’enseignement secondaire et elle nous apporte un cours de musicologie comparée qui ne peut utilement retenir l’attention que de quelques rares élèves, du moins en ce qui concerne les

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

172

what Cortot considered “primitive periods” had been expressed earlier in what became a protracted dispute: “The music from before Bach is unknown, it is never played, never sung, the names [of composers] are hardly even present in people’s minds – yet, there is no more beautiful, no more meaningful [music] . . . all the reasons in the world argue in favor of the effort I am making in this direction – the only one that opens up for our students unknown horizons that without me, would remain unknown.”24 But in introducing her students to the early masterworks she was convinced they needed to know, Boulanger found herself at odds with the historical narratives through which this music was usually understood. Since she was not herself a historian, she relied on others’ texts to prepare her courses; and the most influential French music histories of the period were overwhelmingly teleological in their approach. These included Jules Combarieu’s massive Histoire de la musique des origines au début du XXe siècle (3 vols., 1913 and 1920) and Paul Landormy’s Histoire de la musique (1910), both of which were regularly used in universities and conservatoires.25 The book she recommended most often to her students, however, and which furnished many of her lecture examples, was the Histoire de la langue musicale (1911) by her École Normale colleague Maurice Emmanuel.26 She had long relied upon this text in making connections to new music: for example, in her 1926 public lectures on modern music at the École Normale, she particularly recommended Emmanuel’s chapter on ancient Greek rhythm in her introduction to the rhythms of Stravinsky.27 Emmanuel was a product of the Paris Conservatoire, where, like Boulanger, he was taught by the highly influential Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray. Boulanger’s efforts to expand the history offerings at the École Normale were in some ways analogous to Fauré’s work at the Conservatoire at the turn of the century when she and Emmanuel were students; from 1905, soon after taking over as director, Fauré made Bourgault-Ducoudray’s

24

25

26

27

époques primitives. Là, je suis d’accord avec vous pour penser qu’il nous faut demander à Nadia, de commencer son cours aux environs de l’époque de Couperin et Rameau – de manière à en permettre l’application immédiate aux oeuvres qui sont au répertoire des classes instrumentales.” Manuscript draft of a letter from NB to Auguste Mangeot, F-Pn Rés Vm dos. 127, fol. 12r–v, undated [c. September 1935]: “On ignore la musique avant Bach, on ne la joue, ne la chante jamais, à peine représente-t-on des noms dans l’esprit des gens – or, il n’en est pas de plus belle[,] de plus significative . . . toutes les raisons du monde militent en faveur de l’effort que nous faisons dans ce sens – le seul qui ouvre à nos élèves des horizons inconnus qui sans nous, le resteraient.” I have translated Boulanger’s “nous” as the literary mode of referring to the author, but she may have intended it to be read as a normal first person plural referring to efforts by herself and other colleagues at the École Normale. On the evolutionary basis of these and other early twentieth-century French music histories, see Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music 1600–1960 (New York: Dover, 1962), 130–9. Maurice Emmanuel, Histoire de la langue musicale, 2 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1911; reprint, facsimile edition, n.p.: Éditions Henri Laurens, 1981). Boulanger’s École Normale teaching materials from 1932–6 regularly note that examples have been drawn from Emmanuel’s book. NB, “La Musique moderne” (d’après la sténographie des cours à l’École Normale de Musique), MM 37, no. 2 (February 1926): 61.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

173

courses compulsory and instituted repertory classes, reducing the prevailing focus on operatic training and instrumental competitions and emphasizing the need for performers to have a broad historical perspective.28 In the preface to the Histoire de la langue musicale, Emmanuel claimed that his own work was based on Bourgault-Ducoudray’s approach, pointing particularly to his teacher’s research on tonal structures and rhythms of early music and his advocacy for their reintroduction into contemporary composition.29 Emmanuel’s work matched Boulanger’s needs by providing a history of musical techniques rather than people, places or ideas. Her statements about the existence of a limited number of formal types and their presence in earliest repertories may have derived partly or entirely from Emmanuel’s book, which includes a lengthy chapter devoted to exactly this issue. And in the introduction to the Histoire, after first summarizing the differences between the “Art Antique” and “Art Moderne,” Emmanuel asserted that profound connections nevertheless existed between the two. To demonstrate the point he makes a formal analysis of a lyric passage from Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers and then shows how Wagner applied the same principles in Tristan.30 Having established the “permanence of principles” underpinning the history of musical language, Emmanuel continues, however, by explaining that the project of the book is not further exploration of this phenomenon, but instead the demonstration of music’s evolution over time, concentrating on the progression of musical techniques from their origins in Antiquity to the works of the present day. The overall organization of the text is therefore chronological, and emphasis is often placed on how techniques or forms develop from immediate predecessors. Boulanger’s history classes resembled Emmanuel’s textbook in their concentration on aspects of “the music itself,” principally the analysis of forms, melody and harmony, with virtually nothing on aspects of performance practice, function or context and – more unusually for the time, but consistent with Emmanuel’s approach – relatively little even on composer biography. Similarly, her examination of works also followed an overall chronological path that suggested steady evolution and incremental progress through time. For each period, she provided sheets of musical examples and supplementary historical summaries, which identified important genres and supplied basic information on significant composers and their output. From the 1935–6 academic year her course sheets were supplemented by a comprehensive historical table distributed at the beginning of the year and published in Le Monde musical, which the students could use to 28

29 30

Gail Hilson Woldu, “Nadia Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré et le Conservatoire: Visions d’une esthétique musicale au début des années 1900,” in Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich (Lyons: Symétrie, 2007), 268. Emmanuel, Histoire, 1–2. The dedicatory preface to Bourgault-Ducoudray is not reproduced in the 1981 facsimile edition. Ibid., 9–16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

174

orient their study. Like the music history textbooks on which it is based, this “Tableau résumé de filiation des formes musicales” (figure 5.1) organized musical genres into a forward-moving chronological sequence that subsumed the individual work of art and its creator into generic descriptors. Students were instructed to elaborate the table for themselves by choosing sample works and composers to exemplify each labelled box: that is, works were to be singled out for their historically representative qualities, not for those aspects they shared with music of other times or for their illustration of timeless values. That Boulanger was uncomfortable with the implications of music history as she and her contemporaries had been taught to understand and teach it is suggested by the disruptive tactics she used to undermine the grand narrative of her own classes and the relentlessly forward-flowing genealogy suggested by the Tableau. She frequently drew parallels with recent works when teaching the early music in her curriculum, and discussions of contemporary music regularly involved emphasis on the similarity of expressive means with those of much earlier repertories. But perhaps the most significant challenge to the classroom historical trajectory figured in the program of the Wednesday afternoon sessions at the rue Ballu. Boulanger’s Wednesday sessions were included gratis in the enrollment fee for her students at the École Normale, and there was thus significant overlap in attendance. While in the early 1930s the Wednesdays were exclusively devoted to Bach’s cantatas, Boulanger soon expanded the repertory to include both new works and early music that were also discussed in her history classes.31 The program for the 1935–6 Wednesdays made a significant break with her previous practice: though Bach cantatas and the St. John Passion were prominent features, the season also included analyses of Stravinsky’s recent Perséphone and music by Gemblaco, Binchois, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schütz, Carissimi and Debussy. Many sessions centered on two or more pieces from very different eras, in the same kind of “audacious juxtaposition” she relied upon for her concert programs and often involving the same works (figure 5.2).32 Though programs in subsequent years were rarely as heterogeneous as in 1935–6, Boulanger constructed her Wednesday schedule along similar lines for the rest of her career, mixing early and recent music with large doses of Bach without regard to chronology. A manuscript schedule from 1936–7 providing a breakdown of both her Wednesdays and her history teaching shows elements of global planning: and while in some weeks students 31 32

Some information on the relationship of Boulanger’s private teaching and the École Normale in 1934–8 figures in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 127. Schedules for the Wednesdays for 1934–9 and 1946–79 figure in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 128. The 1934–5 session had been mainly devoted to twenty Bach cantatas, although Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung was studied for two Wednesdays and one was given over to the Buxtehude cantata Gott hilf mir.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

175

explored related music (for example, when studying the Renaissance in both the history class and the Wednesday of that week), in most the conjunctions were less obvious. In February 1937, for example, while studying Bach through Mozart in the history class, the students had three Wednesdays in a row on Stravinsky’s Les Noces. When they arrived at contemporary music history in May – with the notable concentration on Stravinsky that entailed – they were at the same time singing Bach cantatas at the rue Ballu.33 Students who attended both Boulanger’s history classes at the École Normale and her Wednesday sessions were exposed to the same pieces in radically different historiographical contexts. Although sharing the emphasis on “the music itself” that drove more familiar teleological historical approaches, the Wednesdays allowed Boulanger to construct an alternative history, a dramatic counterpoint to the chronological narrative of the history class. Like her Wednesdays, Boulanger’s public talks and lecture series matched her concert program juxtapositions by emphasizing connections that leapt over yawning historical gaps. At the École Normale she gave thematically designed public lecture series on topics such as “La Musique dramatique de Monteverdi à nos jours” (1935) or “Choix d’oeuvres religieuses” (1936). At the Centre d’Études Contemporaines, as part of a 1937 lecture series intriguingly entitled “Trésors et figures de la musique Française” Boulanger offered sessions on “Danseries, danses et ballets de Claude Gervaise à Jean Françaix,” “L’Élément descriptif et pittoresque à travers l’histoire de la musique française,” “La Monodie française du XIIe siècle à Gabriel Fauré” and “L’Esprit religieuse dans la musique française.”34 Although in some cases she followed a chronological sequence tracing a theme from its origins to the present, she frequently organized these presentations around the same juxtapositions she included in concert programs, relying upon her regular stable of performers to provide live music examples and concentrating on the continuities she perceived between works chosen from widely different eras. The project of establishing similarity emerged even more explicitly from a lecture that she gave in the United States under various titles, designed in part to help American audiences understand the concert programs she was touring. In 1938, versions of the talk included “The Relation of Old Music to Modern Music” in New York for the League of Composers on April 1, and “Links Between Past and Present in Choral Music” at the Cleveland Museum of Art on April 15. In March 1939, the In-and-About Pittsburgh Music Educators Club heard “Modern Music and the Continuity of Tradition,” with musical illustrations sung by a local high school choir (figure 5.3).35 An 33 34 35

Ms. course schedule, 1936–7, CNLB. This is a fair copy in the hand of a secretary, possibly Cécile Armagnac. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, January 29, 1937, lays out the program for the series. Programs for these and other similar talks are in F-Pn. Rés. Vm dos. 195, and in the collection of CNLB.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

176

Figure 5.1.

The work in history

Nadia Boulanger and Annette Dieudonné, “Tableau résumé de filiation des formes musicales,” MM 46, no. 11 (November 1935): 334–5. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

177

Figure 5.1. (cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

178

The work in history

Figure 5.2. Typescript schedule for Boulanger’s Wednesday sessions at the rue Ballu, 1935–6. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 128. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

Figure 5.2.

179

(cont.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

180

The work in history

Figure 5.3. Program, Lecture-demonstration for the In-and-About Pittsburgh Music Educators Club, January 28, 1939. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. Photo © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

181

anonymous report for the Friends of Music of the Library of Congress on a version of the talk presented in Washington described its subject as “the relationships existing between prominent twentieth century composers and the medieval music of France.” According to the report, Boulanger claimed that although much of early plainchant and organum arose in France, it was not exclusively French, representing “certain universal practices far removed from any spirit of nationalism”; she then showed how Debussy, Poulenc and Stravinsky, by accident or design, use similar techniques (which include “freedom of modern melodic movement and the starkness of harmonic progression”). The author concluded that Boulanger’s lecture was of significant value to “anyone desiring a greater understanding of both the old music and the new.”36 Lectures such as these allowed Boulanger to shift the emphasis of her pedagogy from difference to resemblance. That these are two sides to the same coin is implicit in the surface/depth metaphors she employed. Boulanger recognized the legitimacy of either approach, but preferred the (fundamentally anti-historical) “history of the same.” As she later explained to Bruno Monsaingeon: The idea of chronology in the domain of art seems to me completely fallacious. There can exist a history of oppositions: tired of going down that road, I take another road. That does not prove that my first road was wrong nor that it was exhausted, but the first road does not follow the second one because they are not the same. And it is abundantly true that certain old works are much closer to the music of today than to the music of the 19th century . . .37

hearing history Although Boulanger condemned pedantry in her Monde musical critique of the usual style of concert-building – just as Valéry saw erudition in the museum as a kind of defeat – her programs required an educated audience, who had to be trained in the ways of hearing through which her work made sense. From the 1920s onward, Boulanger’s analysis courses had been designed to develop the structural listening her students needed in order to hear and understand the architectural forms of great musical works. Her approach to concert audiences also emphasized the need for these skills. In a 36

37

Undated typescript, US-Wc, Old Correspondence 1937–47, unalphabetized files; my thanks to Annegret Fauser for providing me with this document. The lecture was held at Dumbarton Oaks, probably in May 1941 (to judge from NB’s letter to Mildred Bliss in HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8 Box 9, May 14, 1941). Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 114: “L’idée de chronologie en matière d’art me paraît tout à fait fallacieuse. Il peut exister une histoire des oppositions: étant fatiguée d’aller sur cette route, je prends une autre route. Cela ne prouve pas que ma première route était mauvaise ni qu’elle ait été épuisée, mais la première route ne suit pas la seconde puisqu’elle n’est pas la même. Et c’est tellement vrai que certaines oeuvres anciennes sont beaucoup plus proches de la musique d’aujourd’hui que de la musique du XIXe siècle . . .”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

182

1938 BBC broadcast on how to listen, entitled “Music and Everyday Life” (“La Musique et la vie quotidienne”), Boulanger explained that listeners should learn to make music themselves to develop their understanding of how pieces work, so that instead of perceiving only tunes, they hear harmonic and contrapuntal relationships. Armed with this ability, listeners are prepared for an experience “at the same time intellectual and emotional; spontaneous, certainly, but also reflective,”38 in which an intense emotional-spiritual encounter is allied to appreciation of structure and form. The same concept of structural listening underpinned her teaching of history in the 1930s. When a group from the Université des Annales came to visit the École Normale in 1933, Boulanger explained to them the principles of her historical pedagogy: “In history, what good is knowledge of dates, of names and facts, if one cannot recognize the style, its characteristics completely founded on a certain manner of being that only the auditory intelligence can discern? This is why knowledge of the history of music should be based on music examples first. In guiding students to knowledge of characteristic works for each era, in making them sing together, one can inspire them to read music, to know it in such a way that a word, a name, is immediately transformed in their minds into a certain music, so that it is not just a label devoid of meaning, but sounds within them in the sonorous aspect for which the labels should be only a symbol.”39 Boulanger’s juxtapositions relied on the ability of listeners to hear not only relationships within musical works, but also those between works of radically different origins. And her classes and concerts of the 1930s aimed to teach listeners how to do it. A recording of a 1954 lecture on Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, though made many years later, gives a good idea of how she worked.40 The technique will be familiar to anyone whose musical education predates classroom playback technology. When Boulanger discussed Stravinsky’s Act I, scene 2, in which Tom Rakewell joins the whores and roaring boys in Mother Goose’s London brothel, she pointed out that the composer was aiming at a feeling of “très grande désinvolture” (very great relaxation or casualness) and “drôlerie” (amusement). He achieves this 38 39

40

A revised transcript of the talk, broadcast on November 2, 1938, was subsequently published in the The Listener, November 24, 1938, 1153. Both the lecture and the article appeared in French. Zygmunt Mycielski, “La Visite de l’École Normale de Musique de Paris,” Conferencia 27 (1933): 642: “En histoire, à quoi bon la connaissance des dates, des noms et des faits, si l’on ne peut reconnaître le style, ses caractéristiques toutes fondées sur une certaine manière d’être que seule l’intelligence auditive peut discerner? C’est pourquoi la connaissance de l’histoire de la musique sera fondée sur des exemples musicaux d’abord. En amenant les élèves à connaître des oeuvres types de chaque époque, en les faisant chanter en choeur, on les incitera à lire de la musique, à la connaître de telle sorte qu’un mot, un nom soit immédiatement transposé dans leur esprit en une certaine musique, qu’il ne reste pas une étiquette vide de sens, mais sonne en eux-mêmes par tout le côté sonore dont il ne doit être que le symbole.” This is Mycielski’s summary of Boulanger’s talk in March 1933; as her student, he probably checked the contents with her before publication to ensure her approval. F-Pn SDCR-7154. The lecture preceded a performance of The Rake’s Progress at Monte Carlo, and was made for a general audience that included the rulers of Monaco and their guests.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

183

Example 5.1. William Byrd, “The Woods so Wild,” mm. 1–4, after J. A. Fuller-Maitland and W. Barclay Squire, eds., The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (London and Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899), p. 263.

through a rousing introduction that alternates between C major and B major, followed by the chorus alternating between C major and B♭ major. Boulanger played a reduction of the passage at the keyboard, then commented that the alternation of root-position harmonies a tone apart was similarly used by William Byrd, and segued without pause into the opening section of Byrd’s “The Woods so Wild,” which consists of two phrases with alternating root-position F major and G major harmonies (example 5.1).41 She did not identify the Byrd by title or date, or mention that it is an arrangement of a pre-existing popular song; her point was that the two composers used the same technique to produce the same rollicking effect, an approach that assumes the emotional effect to be inherent in the notes, deployed in different historical moments to achieve the same result. She did the same thing when discussing Anne Trulove’s Act I aria, “No word from Tom.” In the preceding action, Tom has been persuaded to sleep at the brothel; Nick Shadow’s parting words, “Sweet dreams, but when you wake you will die,” close the scene in A major. The action then shifts to Anne’s father’s garden, where – in the most lyrical moment of Stravinsky’s opera – she pours out her love for Tom as well as her anguish at his apparent abandonment. Boulanger pointed out that Anne’s aria shifts the tonal center from A major to A minor, and that in this transition Stravinsky, just like Schubert, plays on the bittersweet quality that inheres in the alternation of major and minor thirds. As an example, she played the end of song 16 from Die schöne Müllerin, “Die liebe Farbe,” when the maid of the mill has thrown over the miller for the more glamorous charms of the 41

J. A. Fuller Maitland and W. Barclay Squire, eds., The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899), Vol. I: 263. See Igor Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Piano-vocal score. (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1951), 58–78, for the section Boulanger compares.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

184

Example 5.2. Franz Schubert, “Die liebe Farbe,” from Die schöne Müllerin, D 795, mm. 18–26, after Franz Peter Schuberts Werke, Serie XX: Sämtliche einstimmige Lieder und Gesänge, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1894–5), pp. 172–3.

hunter. The key shifts from the main center of B minor to B major when the abandoned miller thinks back to happier days, at the words “Mein Schatz hat’s Grün so gern” (My sweetheart loves green so much), before moving back to B minor for the repetition of the words and the final cadence (example 5.2).42 Again, Boulanger did not identify the song or even the cycle from which it derives; she played only the closing bars, to demonstrate the poignant effect that Schubert achieves through the inflection of the third, claiming that Stravinsky should be heard as using the same technique to convey Anne’s similar feelings when forsaken by her beloved. In Boulanger’s lecture examples, the reduction of all the music to the keyboard made differences of scale and timbre vanish, concentrating attention on harmonic or rhythmic elements and helping her to make her points about technical similarity. When her students sang and played historically disparate works during her Wednesday sessions or in their history classes at the École Normale, they performed similarly smooth transitions themselves. And her 42

Franz Schubert, Franz Peter Schuberts Werke, Serie XX: Sämtliche einstimmige Lieder und Gesänge, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1894–5); facsimile edition: Complete Works: Breitkopf & Härtel Critical Edition of 1884–1897, Vol. XVI, series 20: Lieder and Songs for One Voice, edited by Eusebius Mandyczewski (New York: Dover, and Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1965), 172–3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

185

application of these principles to the concert as a whole allowed her to construct long sequences where musical techniques similarly joined adjacent pieces. Take, for example, the combination that Pathé-Marconi had found “absolutely impossible”: the Petit Concert recording of Fauré’s Madrigal, Op. 35 (1883) followed by “L’autre jour” (1529) by Jean Conseil, known as Consilium. “L’autre jour” is a largely homophonic piece in mode 1 transposed to G, with a flat signature. Fauré’s work is a setting of a poem by Armand Silvestre that follows the Symbolist vogue for deliberate archaisms, and it occupies an analogous tonal terrain. Evoking rather than employing mode 1, it is composed in D minor / D major in the restrained pseudomodal style that Richard Taruskin has called “glueless” and of which Fauré might be considered the quintessential representative.43 It involves not only modally inspired harmonies, but also a characteristic avoidance of strong dominant-totonic progressions, especially at cadences where they would normally be most expected. In Madrigal, such progressions are undermined by oscillation between harmonies on F and B♮, up and down a minor third from the tonic, so that the tonic D seems to float between them; deceptive cadences to B♭; avoidance of melodic leading tone resolutions from C♯ to D; and a strong melodic emphasis on C♮ (example 5.3). Virtually all of these gestures can be seen in Fauré’s Requiem, which is also in D;44 and Madrigal could function almost as a mini-Requiem, a shorter substitute appropriate for a mixed concert that allowed Boulanger to demonstrate Fauré’s style in a sonorous didactic context of her own devising. The Conseil piece features not only the ♭VII and III harmonies that characterize innumerable sixteenth-century chansons in this most widespread of modes – and which figure prominently in late nineteenth-century uses of modal harmony – but, in Boulanger’s rendition, every major cadence is missing the melodic F♯ after the suspension that would have been added by Renaissance performers (example 5.4). Here she was following the claims made by Henry Expert in his 1897 edition of the piece, where he insisted that the practice of raising the leading tone into cadences became widespread only in the middle of the sixteenth century. Its application in music before 1550 was optional, but in Expert’s opinion to be avoided because it muddled the purity of the modes.45 Expert’s position was in 43

44 45

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. V: The Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), 97–103. Boulanger had of course emphasized this aspect of Fauré’s music in Lectures on Modern Music, 128–9. Taruskin, The Oxford History Vol. V, 102 shows how the same techniques figure in the “In paradisum” section of the Requiem. Henry Expert, ed. Trente et une chansons musicales (Attaingnant 1529), Vol. V: Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1897), “Avertissement” (n.p.). Into the 1930s Maurice Cauchie continued to defend the notion that cadential sharps should be avoided in music before 1550, regretting that other musicologists refused to follow Expert’s example; see Maurice Cauchie, “La Pureté des modes dans la musique vocale franco-belge du début du XVIe siècle,” in Theodor Kroyer-Festschrift zum sechzigsten Geburtstage am 9. September 1933, edited by Hermann Zenck, Helmut Schultz, and Walter Gerstenberg (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1933), 60.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

186

The work in history Example 5.3. Gabriel Fauré, Madrigal, Op. 35 (1883) (Paris: Hamelle, 1884), mm. 1–19.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

187

Example 5.4. Consilium (Jean Conseil), “L’autre jour,” mm. 7–14, after Henry Expert, ed., Trente et une chansons musicales (Attaingnant 1529), Vol. V, Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française (Paris: Leduc, 1897).

conflict not only with that of the majority of his contemporaries but with the historical evidence provided by Renaissance treatises on performance and counterpoint, and he eventually retreated from it in later volumes of the series in which his edition of Conseil appeared. Boulanger knew Expert and may have been aware of the debate, but she took advantage of the opportunity provided by his earlier ban to control the sequence between the pieces on her program. The use of the minor dominant in the cadential approach not only makes the Conseil piece sound “more modal,” but also allows its final bars to link directly with the D minor triad that begins Madrigal, in a seamless tonal transition from the early sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. The second side of the record continued with Costeley’s “Las je n’yray plus” (1570), which like the Conseil chanson, is in G with a B♭ in the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

188

signature, though this time using the plagal (Hypodorian) mode 2 form, and with the F♯ performer accidentals added to cadential approaches.46 It opens with a point of imitation around the modal dominant, outlining a D major triad – the final chord of the Fauré – and does not settle onto a G cadence until the end of the refrain at measure 14. This could have provided a tonal retransition from D to G minor, but for the recording, where the need to stop and change sides would presumably have broken the continuity here in any case, Boulanger transposed the piece up a minor third to B♭ minor. The reason becomes apparent at the opening of the second piece on side 2, Debussy’s “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder,” from his Trois Chansons on texts by the fifteenth-century poet Charles d’Orléans.47 It begins homophonically on F♯ major, sharing a pivot pitch in enharmonic spelling (A♯/B♭) with the close of the (transposed) Costeley, which ends with a Picardy third on a chord of B♭ major. Debussy’s first phrase oscillates between chords of F♯ major and C♯ minor, rocking around the pivot pitch of C♯ (heard as D♭ as a continuation of Costeley, in a possible move to B♭ minor); it echoes the motion of the plagal extension that had closed Costeley’s song (in Boulanger’s transposition, on B♭ major and E♭ minor under a held B♭) to further emphasize the smoothness of the join (examples 5.5 and 5.6). The tonal links between the pieces are matched by contrapuntal correspondences: for example, “Las je n’iray plus” has a busy imitative texture with frequent duetting, similar to the imitative duos that animate the opening and closing sections of Madrigal, and the parallel motion of the descending first-inversion triads that appear in measures 14–16 of the Costeley chanson is mirrored at several points in the Debussy. Similar connections weave through the rest of the recording. The subsequent sets, for example, emphasize how the dissonance treatment and displaced metric accents of medieval music echo in works by Préger and Lili Boulanger. Many of these links are clear enough from comparison of the scores. But Boulanger created other continuities through her choice of tempi, which often operated proportional relationships between the underlying pulses of adjacent pieces. Thus her rendition of the Conseil piece transforms into the Fauré through a bar-equals-bar relationship (whole note = dotted half note) within the same tempo, smoothly moving from a duple to triple division of the main beat; in the following pair, her transition continues the same basic pulse by equating the smallest metrically significant values, turning the half note of the Costeley chanson (in a fast 22) into the eighth note of Debussy’s slow 34. Here the “geometric” aspects of her management of tempo relations operate at a meta-level that aligns the historically disparate materials along a single trajectory of musical time. 46 47

Guillaume Costeley, Musique, 2e fascicule, in Les Maîtres musiciens, ed. Expert, Vol. XVIII, 1–8. Claude Debussy, Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Durand, 1908), 1–4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

189

Example 5.5. Guillaume Costeley, “Las je n’iray plus” after Costeley, Musique, ed. Henry Expert, Vol. XVIII, Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française (Paris: Leduc, 1904), mm. 88–98.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

190 Example 5.6.

The work in history Claude Debussy, “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” from Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Durand, 1908), mm. 1–5.

When the Petit Concert recording was released in the United States, Edward Tatnall Canby remarked in the liner notes that some might be troubled by Boulanger’s “freezing of performance medium.” But this was crucial, because it allowed her to concentrate on the elements of musical structure and compositional technique that were most important to her, so

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

191

that her concert juxtapositions could emphasize connections within those domains. Canby claimed that Boulanger’s method resulted in a “very special dramatic continuity,” and argued that the tonal elegance and coherence of the disc more than made up for Boulanger’s failure to investigate historical instruments and performance practices: “Again and again in these recordings the tonality (which often means the modality) of a work, the musical line and shape, leads in the most natural manner directly into that of a following work, be it a few years removed in time or several centuries. Artificial, if you will, but wholly legitimate as a means of bridging for the ear what, to Boulanger, are determinedly superficial differences.” As Canby concluded, “Here is French culture in terms of actual sound; and it is in that sound, and there only, that the Boulanger impact can be understood.”48 The Petit Concert recording’s title emphasized that it was intended to mimic a concert, and there is considerable evidence that Boulanger’s interwar concerts were designed to work in precisely this way. In several cases, her programs explicitly requested audiences not to applaud or enter between pieces, so that the connections between adjacent works could be perceived without interruption.49 While the constraints and hazards of live performance (the need to accommodate different singers when deciding transpositions, for example, or unexpected applause between works) no doubt prevented her from achieving the optimum result in every instance, the intent as preserved in the Petit Concert recording seems clear. She took particular care over the seams between pieces, avoiding the kinds of brusque collisions that she had excoriated in her earlier concert reviews. Difference was further diminished through her refusal to explore original instruments and performance practices, and by her use of arrangement to complicate questions of scoring. This allowed her programs to function just like her lecture illustrations at the keyboard: all distinctions of function and medium vanish, leaving the domain of musical technique in high relief. Boulanger’s concerts allowed appropriately equipped listeners to track rhythmic, tonal and contrapuntal elements through her sequence of works; and she expected that the discovery of such similarities and connections between the disparate items in her programs would provide a special form of musical and intellectual satisfaction. As François Valéry (son of the poet, and Boulanger’s student) explained in notes to Boulanger’s first “Morning Musicale” concert at the Hôtel George V in 1936, “If it is true that the mind delights in discovering what is one in that which changes or differs, [Boulanger] has wished and sought here that, out of the variety of all 48 49

Canby, liner notes to Boulanger, “Petit Concert” of French Vocal Music. For example, the program for her first “Morning Musicale” at the George V noted that the pieces in each group would be performed without interruption and the doors would remain closed during their performance (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, November 4, 1936). Instructions to a wartime New York audience (Rés. Vm dos. 195, May 7, 1942) similarly state that each chronologically mixed group will be performed without pause.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

The work in history

192

these works and even in their contrasts, the mind can draw out this exquisite pleasure and this intellectually delectable unity.”50 Returning to the topic in his liner notes for the original French version of the Petit Concert, François Valéry stressed that the delightful coherence created by Boulanger’s sequences was a phenomenon created by musical material, claiming that, The more the reasons for choice reject classifications foreign to the substance of the chosen works (the more they are interior and even inexpressible), the more the act of choosing takes its meaning, which is, starting from diversity, to create unity. The unity these four records suggest is not that of Time.51

He continued by explaining how the Petit Concert could function both to confirm the unity principle in sound, and as a special form of ear training that could help listeners overcome the misleading diversities of history: It seems that there is a singular virtue in the juxtaposition of works from distinctly different epochs. The most recent, like the most distant, gain from this cohabitation, in which the ear loses many of its prejudices. For here we must listen to our ears: which teach us that the problems posed in the past and which are posed today in apparently completely different terms, are fundamentally the same.52

Valéry frames the action of “listening to the ears” as if the ear could become an infallible guide toward an existing musical truth. But in reality, as we have seen, Boulanger’s teaching was designed to inculcate and develop the aural facility that produced this truth. And the idea of teaching through the ears was fundamental to her historical pedagogy in the concert hall as it was the classroom. That her programs were intended to provide an alternative history lesson in sound was often made explicit in publicity material for concerts, just as it was in the more obviously didactic context of the “Foundations of Music” series for the BBC. In press releases prepared for her residence at Radcliffe in 1938, for example, where one of her courses was called “Early and Modern Music – A Comparative Study” the connection between her teaching and her concert with Harvard and Radcliffe choirs and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was underlined:

50

51

52

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, November 4, 1936: “S’il est vrai que l’esprit se plaise à découvrir ce qui est un dans ce qui change ou diffère, on a voulu et cherché ici, que de la variété de toutes ces oeuvres et même de leurs contrastes, il pût tirer ce plaisir exquis et cette unité intellectuellement délectable.” François Valéry, liner notes to Boulanger, Petit concert sous la direction de Nadia Boulanger: La Polyphonie vocale française à travers les siècles, Éditions de la Boîte à Musique BAM 79–82, four 78rpm discs, 1949. “Plus les raisons de choisir s’écartent d’une classification étrangère à la substance des oeuvres choisies (plus elle sont intérieures et même indicibles), plus l’acte de choisir prend son sens qui est, partant de la diversité, de créer l’unité. L’unité que suggèrent ces quatre disques n’est pas celle du Temps.” Ibid.: “Il semble qu’il y ait une vertu singulière dans le rapprochement d’oeuvres d’époques distinctes. Les plus récentes, comme les plus éloignées, gagnent à ce voisinage, où l’oreille perd bien des préjugés. Car il faut ici écouter son oreille: elle nous instruit que les problèmes qui se sont posés naguère et se posent aujourd’hui en des termes apparemment tout différents, sont fondamentalement les mêmes.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

New links between them

193

In selections for her programs she tries especially to seek out and to bring close together the works of different epochs which are of the same class. . . . Her teaching also attempts to bring together very ancient traditions and the essentially modern, to find a relationship in sound between Stravinsky, for example, and certain twelfth-century masters – that continuity of certain spiritual families among the artists of all times and traversing techniques often very different, is one of the points on which she will lay emphasis in the course of her teaching at Radcliffe this winter . . . Her programs differ from those of any other conductor, in the way she combines ancient and modern music. She chooses from all periods, pieces which are not usually heard, pieces which are both beautiful and enjoyable. She selects museum pieces from the history of music and places them side by side with recent compositions, as for instance in the Harvard Glee Club-Radcliffe Choral Society Concert which she will conduct on 3 March . . .53

And as Boulanger’s explanations made clear, her work was not only aimed at validating the neoclassical strain of contemporary composition. It was also a mode of rescuing early masterpieces from history. Her choice, ordering and performance practice made it possible to morph between music of different epochs in a seamless flow and to encourage the “presentist” listening practice that François Valéry thought among the most striking benefits of Boulanger’s approach: In a general way, the early works recover their power to surprise and seduce us, thanks to the manner that is imposed upon us [by Boulanger] to listen to them as we would to modern works. The latter, conversely, find themselves confirmed by a tradition in which they very naturally take their place.54

53

54

Harvard University, Schlesinger Library, RG X Series 1, Box 1, folder 7 (containing documents from the Harvard publicity office); my thanks to Kimberly Francis for a transcript of this document. The resemblance between this passage and the material prepared in English for the 1936 BBC broadcasts suggests that Boulanger and her secretaries were the source of most of this material, which was assembled by Suzanne Wunder for the press release announcing Boulanger’s residency. Valéry, liner notes to Boulanger, Petit concert: “D’une façon générale, les oeuvres anciennes retrouvent leur pouvoir de surprendre et de séduire, grâce à l’habitude qui nous est imposée de les écouter comme on ferait des oeuvres modernes. Celles-ci, inversement, se trouvent confirmées par une tradition où elles prennent très naturellement place.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:48:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.008

chapter 6

Tomb or treasure

In October 1938, the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Brussels welcomed Nadia Boulanger, her vocal ensemble, and Dinu Lipatti for a concert in a prestigious chamber music series under the aegis of the Maison de L’Art. The organization was founded in 1933 by Charles Leirens, who had recently left his position as the first director of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, the home of Belgium’s national art collection. Between 1928 and 1930, Leirens had mounted an ambitious range of concerts, lectures and events at the Beaux-Arts. The Maison de L’Art would continue the program, aiming to provide more adventurous fare than that offered by the established, and often extremely conservative, Belgian arts organizations and musical societies.1 Boulanger’s event would be followed in November by a Bartók festival, in which the composer would feature as pianist and which would include the Belgian premiere of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Leirens may have asked Boulanger to concentrate on earlier music as a foil; or she may herself have decided to counteract the new music bias of the series with a historical program, to bring her early music repertory forcibly into the contemporary arena represented by the Maison de L’Art. Whether or not this was the case, her concert included no very new music. The most recent pieces were by Fauré, Debussy and Lili Boulanger, and the most prominently featured works were two sets of Monteverdi madrigals. The program explained that Boulanger’s recordings of them had been recently released by Columbia, and that “the madrigals of Monteverdi have been revised and realized by her.”2 The following week a review in Cassandre praised Boulanger’s ability to make such unfamiliar historical treasures reach out to her Belgian audience. The language of archaeology provided a frame for reflection on the joys and dangers of investigating the musical past: Nadia Boulanger loves early music, but she escapes by the grace of her mind – perhaps also by some subtle feminine intuition – from the trap that lays in wait for 1 2

On Leirens, the Maison de L’Art and its concerts 1933–40, see Robert Wangermée, André Souris et le complexe d’Orphée: Entre surréalisme et musique sérielle (Liège: Mardaga, 1995), 200–1. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, October 28, 1938: “Ces morceaux ont été enregistrés par Nadia Boulanger, chez Columbia. Les madrigaux de Monteverdi ont été révisés et réalisés par elle.”

194

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

195

so many scholars. She does not let herself be carried away by the intoxication of research, of discovery; she does not present as wonderful and unique that which is only curious; she does not declare to be living and essential that which is only a fossil, without life, good at best only to be examined as a document. Certainly, in the prospecting work to which those who look into the past are devoted, one must have the courage to sift through a lot of debris; and for every ten excavations undertaken, there springs forth sometimes only a single discovery capable of touching the sensibility of today.3

Boulanger’s concerts were not solely concerned with using the past to bolster the claims of the modern masterpiece, but also with establishing the presence of historical works: their “living and essential” qualities and their ability to “touch the sensibility of today.” For Boulanger, the transcendent qualities of the masterwork inhered in form; but she imagined form as a property of life, the work itself as a dynamic rather than static entity, and the ideal musical experience as engagement between this dynamic work and the minds and spirits of listeners animated by both knowledge and desire. In devising an approach that would allow listeners and works to give and receive as she believed they should, she sought an escape from the “museal”: the deadening effect of historicism on experiencing works of the past. Theodor Adorno used the word in his analysis of Valéry’s “Le Problème des musées” to describe “objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship, and which are in the process of dying” and which “owe their preservation more to historical respect than the needs of the present.”4 In her attempt to rescue music from the museal, Boulanger, like Valéry, aligned herself with a significant strand of modernist reaction against the progressive bias and scientific aspirations of nineteenthcentury historiography, and with a museographic trend that saw history’s presumed servant, the museum, as a species of mausoleum that effectively kills the art it purports to serve. But in contrast to modernist movements, such as Futurism, that represented a complete refusal of history, this involved a reinvention of the concept of tradition in which the past figured as a vital component of present life. 3

4

Cassandre, November 6, 1938: “Nadia Boulanger aime la musique ancienne, mais elle échappe par la grâce de son esprit – peut-être aussi par quelque subtile intuition feminine – au piège qui guette tant de savants. Elle ne se laisse pas emporter par l’ivresse de la recherche, de la découverte; elle ne donne point pour génial et unique ce qui n’est que curieux – elle ne déclare point vivant et essentiel ce qui n’est qu’une pièce fossile, sans vie, bonne tout au plus à être examinée à titre de document. Certes dans le travail de prospection auquel se livrent ceux qui se penchent sur le passé, il faut avoir le courage de remuer beaucoup de débris et de dix travaux entrepris, il ne jaillit parfois qu’une seule découverte pouvant encore toucher la sensibilité d’aujourd’hui.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prismen (1955); see Adorno, Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), 175. “Museal” is the word in German as well as in English translation; for the original text see Adorno, Besammelte Schriften, Vol. X, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 181. On Adorno’s reading of Valéry, see Catherine Liu, “Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno’s Museum,” Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 217–44. On anti-museum critique and its absorption into debates over museum practice, see Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 13–50.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

196

the past lights the present, the present the past Boulanger’s approach grew out of a broader resistance to aspects of nineteenth-century historiography that characterized modernist historical thinking. By 1900, faith in steady human progress had already begun to fail; the wreckage of World War I further destroyed confidence in the forward march of history. No longer convinced that the present represented an inevitable product of historical events or an improvement on past achievements, historians sought new models for understanding their own and their society’s relationship to the past.5 In the arts, the problems were even more severe, for here aesthetic issues had long complicated attempts to construct straightforward progressive histories.6 While the increasingly powerful musical work concept combined with nineteenth-century historical practice to encourage the construction of history as a narrative of developing forms and genres, the work concept also contributed to the establishment of a canon of great masterpieces – unique, excellent, and therefore ill-suited to being cast as predecessors in an evolutionary account.7 Admiration for past masterworks, and fear that contemporary creations might not equal them, led to forms of historicism in which the past was considered equal to or even vastly superior to the present. But while offering an alternative to forwarddriving progressive narratives, such veneration for the past and its artistic monuments could give history a fatal stranglehold on modern life. Boulanger summed up the unsatisfactory alternatives in her first Monde musical review in 1919, “So, two phenomena occur: either an exaggerated tendency to consider our own time as decadent; or a no less exaggerated propensity to attribute value only to today’s production.”8 French opposition to the dominant historical models of the late nineteenth century received a major boost when the Mercure de France began publishing Nietzsche’s work in 1898. Boulanger was familiar with at least some of his writings in this translation, which she quoted in her concert

5 6

7

8

Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 8–9. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30–3. On music, see Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music 1600–1960 (New York: Dover, 1962), 128–9 and 263–96. A few years after Allen’s study, Dahlhaus furnished an influential analysis of “aesthetics” and “history” as conflicting demands in his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Cologne: Musikverlag Hans Gerig, 1967); see Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, translated by J. B. Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 33–52. See Jim Samson, “The Musical Work and Nineteenth-Century History,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, edited by Jim Samson (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–28. See also Lydia Goehr, “Writing Music History,” History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992): 182–99. NB, “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux,” MM 30, no. 1 (January 1919): 12: “Or, deux phénomènes se produisent – ou une tendance exagérée à considérer notre époque comme décadente; ou une tendance, non moins exagérée à n’accorder de valeur qu’à l’effort actuel.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

197

criticism for La Monde musical.9 For Nietzsche, excessive reverence for history was a burden with the power to crush creativity. At the same time, he approved of history that emphasized stable elements the present shares with the past.10 A related emphasis characterized the work of “existential historians” whose approach entailed both a rejection of linear models of historical change and a re-evaluation of the aspirations to scientific objectivity that marked nineteenth-century historical practice. In this strand of thinking, instead of cataloguing and arranging facts scientifically, modern historians create history in the present through acts of empathy or intuition that allow them to understand the meaning of past human experience.11 Reconceiving the past as a product of present historical consciousness provided a way to embrace rather than reject history, while at the same time avoiding the antiquarian, positivist and scientific aspects of the preceding generation’s historicism. In France, these trends were closely tied to Bergson’s concept of durée. As he explained in the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1899), durée occupies a realm of sensation, emotion, desire and volition – psychic states that cannot be measured, but are no less real than space or matter. This realm, which Bergson sums up under the rubric of “intuition,” accords a powerful role to memory: as R. C. Grogin explains, “it is memory that conducts the past into the present and can contract moments of duration into a single duration.”12 Problems arise when the mathematical time so useful in its own sphere is applied to consciousness, and contact is lost with the fundamental self of intuition. Bergson’s achievement in this formulation was to acknowledge the value of scientific enquiry in its own sphere – that of intellect, the pragmatic external self that interacts with the physical world and everyday social relations – while at the same time creating a space for spirituality and creativity that was impervious to mechanistic explanation. The effort to reconcile the domains of positivistic science and mystical metaphysics continued in Bergson’s 1907 L’Évolution créatrice, which reflected the influence of Nietzsche.13 Here Bergson attempted to blend evolutionary concepts with the strong French vitalist tradition, as well as his own work on durée. Evolution is considered as the history of past change; the immediate past never explains the present, which is not a mechanistic result of its immediate precedents. Instead there is a persistence of the past in the present – in the same way that memory functions in consciousness or durée – so life is, like consciousness, a form of unceasing 9 10 11

12

NB, “Concerts Koussevitsky,” MM 32, nos. 23–4 (December 1921): 401. Butt, Playing with History, 133. See James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton University Press, 1987), 3–27, for a summary of this position and how it relates to Nietzschean antihistoricism. Wilhelm Dilthey was its most influential exponent around 1900, and Longenbach sees his influence in the work of Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset and Gadamer. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy, 55. 13 Ibid., 75–6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

198

creation. The fundamental impulse is not a deterministic or teleological progress to an end, but the élan vital or principle of life, a form of creative agency that spans gaps between generations of living organisms. Though the concept of the élan vital was rejected by many contemporaries, some of the fundamental premises of Bergson’s work proved significant for literary modernists such as T. S. Eliot, whose formulation of the past-present relationship in his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) has figured prominently in recent writing about the twentieth-century early music movement.14 The essay reflects Eliot’s studies in Paris in 1910–11, when he attended Bergson’s lectures and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.15 As Boulanger’s concerts similarly draw on French philosophical and aesthetic currents of the early decades of the century, it is no surprise that the guiding principles for her concerts of the 1930s fit neatly into the vision Eliot outlined in 1919, and that she would later find his work to be a useful pedagogical tool. Eliot’s route out of the impasse of nineteenth-century historiography applied Bergsonian concepts of intuition to the historical imagination. Eliot wrote that “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”16 Introducing new works into the collection of great art affects the meanings and relationships of all of its predecessors: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.17

Eliot’s explanation emphasizes the monumental nature of past works, implying fixity or transcendence, while simultaneously casting them as participants in a continuously shifting “order” whose relations underline unity and coherence. Contact with the new both changes the past and assures its continuity. The innovation in Eliot’s formulation, as Aleida Assmann remarks, is that “it does not simply oppose temporal history to a timeless tradition, but constructs a sphere in which they can interact in a controlled way.”18 14 15

16

17 18

Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present.” See Butt, Playing with History, 138–9, for some modifications to Taruskin’s view that are particularly helpful in understanding Boulanger’s approach. See Bernard Brugière, “French Influences and Echoes in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 75–89. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1928), 2nd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 40–1.“Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in two installments of the Egoist in 1919, after the end of the war, and reprinted in Eliot’s prose collection The Sacred Wood in 1920. It was subsequently misdated 1917 in Eliot’s Selected Essays, leading to misdating in much of the musicological literature that cites it. Ibid., 41. Aleida Assmann, “Exorcizing the Demon of Chronology: T. S. Eliot’s Reinvention of Tradition,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

199

The similarity of Boulanger’s approach is evident from her explanation of her concert programming for the BBC in 1936, when she claimed that “the past lights the present, the present the past, and they have thus created new links between them.” But it is unclear if she knew Eliot’s essay by this point. She was certainly interested in his writings, and a copy of this passage from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” figures in undated notes on music history she assembled for use in her teaching. The copy, in the hand of a secretary or student, includes underlining that suggests Boulanger read sections of the essay aloud to English-speaking audiences, probably during her wartime residency in the United States between 1940 and 1946.19 But Boulanger’s concerts of the 1930s put into practice ideas she had already broached more than a decade earlier in her concert criticism, exactly contemporary with the publication of Eliot’s essay and similarly reflecting a historiographical position characteristic of the immediate post-war years. Like the historical sense described in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Boulanger’s understanding of historical empathy relies on the listener or performer’s connection to musical works through a process she usually described in terms of desire. The wish to experience and understand is a force without which no work of art can achieve its impact. Explaining this concept in an interview late in life, she recalled conversations with Valéry about the role of readers in his own poetry: “When I had just read one of Valéry’s new books, I said to him, ‘What a marvel, what an incredible success’ and Valéry responded, ‘But it’s you that made it.’”20 She claimed that the same was true of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, whose instantiation in sound as a masterpiece cannot happen without the investment of listeners. But desire is a creative rather than recreative energy. In 1921, she cited Nietzsche’s “Art of the Past and Soul of the Present” to explain how this animating force brings historical works of music alive in new forms: it is only in giving them our own souls that we render them capable of living still; it is our blood that brings them to speak to us. A truly “historical” performance would be a phantasmagorical performance presented to ghosts. We honor the great artists of the past less by that sterile fear that leaves in place, without touching, every note,

19

20

CNLB, undated folder. The copy is in a folder marked “À ranger dans Histoire de la Musique/ (citations),” today kept together in a larger folder with copies of Boulanger’s music history materials from the École Normale, 1932–5. Although reorganization of Boulanger’s papers after her death make it difficult to be sure, it seems likely the folder represents quotes she used frequently in her teaching, and which accompanied her to the United States when she left France in 1940. Other citations in this folder include quotations from Bergson, the passage from Valéry’s Eupalinos she regularly cited to evoke the animating qualities of form, and a quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas, suggesting how the concept of history reflected in Eliot’s essay could be linked to these intellectual strands. Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 38: “Quand je venais de lire un nouveau livre de Valéry, je lui disais: ‘Quelle merveille, quelle incroyable réussite!’ Et Valéry me répondait: ‘Mais c’est vous qui l’avez fait.’”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

200

every word, than by making active efforts to procure for them without ceasing a new life.21

In the subsequent passage of Nietzsche’s essay, which Boulanger did not cite but must have had in mind, the philosopher imagined Beethoven returning from the dead to attend a performance of his own work. The composer says that while it is not exactly himself he hears, it is not something entirely different either; it is a third thing, and this blend of the historical and the modern, familiar and unfamiliar, receives his blessing, for “it is up to you to decide what you do, as it is you who must listen – and it is life that is right.”22 To explain how chronologically disjunct programming could help inspire the intuitive leap that could bring the past alive in the present, Boulanger often relied on a version of the cycle theory that figured in some nineteenthand early twentieth-century art and music histories as an alternative to models of continuous evolutionary progress. In post-World War I versions of cycle theory, language from the history of technology (innovation, breakthrough, discovery) was adapted to posit a series of phases, each with its own miniature evolution through primitive, classic and decadent stages. But rather than successively replacing a previous phase, each period was seen as transforming elements of its predecessors; instead of a steady forward march, the history of art could be constructed in overlapping and interpenetrating sequences of experimentation, maturity and exhaustion. The springboard for a new phase could be found in “accidental” elements of previous phases – sometimes far removed in time – that had not yet been fully exploited.23 In her concert criticism, Boulanger related these sequences to techniques, conceived as constantly changing through a process of discovery; underpinning this surface change were, however, the permanent conditions of human nature and emotion and the unchanging laws of form.24 She used these concepts to describe the masterpiece as simultaneously of its own time 21

22

23

24

The citation is from Human, All Too Human, from the Mercure de France translation: Nietzsche, Le Voyageur et son ombre, 82: “ce n’est qu’en leur donnant notre propre âme que nous les rendons capables de vivre encore; c’est notre sang qui les amène à nous parler. L’exécution vraiment ‘historique’ serait une exécution fantasmagorique présentée à des fantômes. On honore les grands artistes du passé moins par cette crainte stérile qui laisse à sa place, sans y toucher, chaque note, chaque parole, que par d’actifs efforts pour leur procurer sans cesse une vie nouvelle.” Ibid., 82–3: “Ce n’est pas moi que je retrouve ici, mais ce n’est pas non plus un non-moi, c’est une troisième chose – cela me semble être aussi parfait, bien que ce ne soit pas la chose parfaite. Mais c’est à vous de veiller à ce que vous faites, comme c’est vous qui devez écouter – et c’est la vie qui a raison.” Allen, Philosophies, 249–53. Pound and Eliot applied this vocabulary to literature, and it became standard in twentieth-century art history; see Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 30–3 and 91–3. Boulanger’s version of cycle theory was employed in similar forms by her first American pupil, Marion Bauer, in her music-historical writing: see Marion Bauer, Twentieth Century Music: How It Developed, How to Listen to It (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933), 5; Marion Bauer and Ethel Peyser, How Music Grew: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, 2nd, revised edn. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), ix. As she explained in 1926, “Les lois de la musique sont, par certains points, permanentes, par d’autres, tout à fait changeantes. Telle découverte existe d’abord à l’état pour ainsi dire accidental, dont son auteur ne prend pleine conscience qu’après coup.” NB, “La Musique moderne” (d’après la sténographie des cours à l’École Normale de Musique), MM 37, no. 2 (February 1926): 59. The

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

201

and the present, a quality that could be emphasized by non-chronological programming: Indeed, a certain number of immutable feelings, of perceptions that are continuously renewed, have been translated across the ages, during periods which each have their development, their climax, and their decline. These periods succeed each other, are superimposed in such a way, so that each climax calls up a new development, each decline sees an apogee. Thus, art is truly a synthesis of life. Now, if genius consists, having understood the Past, of expressing the Future while the Present unfolds, any masterpiece remains modern in relation to its own time and should remain so for us, in the highest sense of the word. The most distant juxtapositions can thus be risked on a concert program without resulting in clashes, as long as the law of movement that dictates a direction, a logic, is observed.25

Early music’s modernity rests not only on its adherence to unchanging principles, but also on its inclusion of latent possibilities that can be “discovered” and developed much later. contact with the past cannot harm that which tomorrow will be subsumed in it, and discerning attempts to bring together even very different epochs cannot create discomfort or harm modern art, except to the extent that [modern art] distances itself from the principles of harmony, balance and unity that are immutable. As for the isolated cult of the past, it is dangerous only if it is restrictive . . . most frequently, a work eminently representative of a moment in the past contains within itself the seeds that will give rise to future efforts – this is one of the most mysterious forms of the genealogy of thought.26

This notion of latency brings Boulanger’s thought close to concepts formed in early twentieth century art history, and proposed by Aby Warburg as an alternative to teleological accounts. In Warburg’s notion of artistic survival, or Nachleben, images and motifs are not simply invented or replaced, but enjoy both afterlife and metamorphosis. He rejected straightforward cycle

25

26

article is a transcript of Boulanger’s introduction to a lecture series at the École Normale de Musique, recorded by a stenographer and partly published in the February, May and June numbers of the journal. NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 30, no. 1 (January 1919): 12: “En effet, un certain nombre d’immuables sentiments, d’impressions sans cesse renouvelées, ont été traduits à travers les âges, durant les périodes qui eurent chacune leur progression, leur paroxysme, et leur déclin. Ces périodes s’enchaînent, se superposent de telle manière que tout paroxysme a appelé une progression nouvelle, que tout déclin voit une apogée. Ainsi, l’art est bien la synthèse de la vie. // Or, si le génie consiste, ayant compris le Passé, à exprimer l’Avenir, tandis que se déroule le Présent, tout chef-d’oeuvre reste moderne en regard de son époque et doit le rester pour nous, au sens le plus élevé du mot. Les plus lointains rapprochements seront donc risqués sur un programme sans qu’aucun heurt en résulte, à condition toutefois d’observer la loi de mouvement qui veut une direction, une logique.” NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 32, nos. 7–8 (April 1921): 129: “le contact du passé ne peut pas nuire à ce que demain se sera confondu avec lui et le rapprochement tenté avec discernement, d’époques même très différentes, ne peut créer de malaise et ne nuit à l’art moderne, que dans la mesure où celuici s’éloigne des principes d’harmonie, d’équilibre et d’unité qui sont immuables. Quant au culte isolé du passé, il n’est dangereux que s’il est restrictif . . . le plus souvent, l’oeuvre éminemment représentative d’un moment du passé, porte en elle les germes qui donneront naissance aux efforts futurs – c’est une des formes les plus mystérieuses de la filiation de la pensée.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

202

theory – in which a style could be born, rise to ascendency, decline and die – in favor of multiple stylistic layers, composed of elements from different moments of the past, any of which is liable to be revived in the future. Like Eliot’s understanding of artistic “order,” Warburg’s theory replaced a historical vision based on succession with one oriented around complex interactions of revival and invention.27 In the same way, Boulanger’s historical thinking resisted a past existing merely as predecessor. Her concert juxtapositions were aimed at bringing out two “present” aspects of the historical masterpiece: its timelessness (the expression of universal human emotions, adherence to immutable laws of form) and its multivalence, as a source of latent possibility. Her programs were attempts at realizing a “new order” that not only anchored contemporary music in traditions reaching beyond immediate predecessors but rendered early repertories modern. That the benefit works both ways is an essential point. Early music figures not simply to provide a historical imprimatur for departure from common-practice techniques or to signify a break with Romanticism, but is itself changed and enriched by juxtaposition with later repertories. The concert provides the frame for this encounter: a sphere in which to organize a relationship with the past that is both dramatized and controlled. galleries in the musical museum Debates in the arena of material culture played a major role in Boulanger’s approach. They provided her not only with a set of useful metaphors but with models for her concert practice, for it was at the coal face of art exhibition and museum practice that questions of juxtaposition and placement collided most sharply with competing historical visions. As Boulanger’s repeated use of the museum analogy illustrates, the musical work concept facilitated comparisons with graphic art and sculpture. Retroactively applied to music of the past, it encouraged a view of performance as an act of conservation similar to the exhibition of artifacts in museums. The museum was a relatively recent phenomenon, created through the transformation of private princely collections and cabinets de curiosités into public institutions in which the display of objects was informed by didactic goals.28 France was a leader in these developments in the wake of the Revolution: the Louvre, still considered the archetypal art museum today, opened as public gallery in 1793. The new understanding of the social 27

28

Georges Didi-Huberman, “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,” Common Knowledge 9 (2003): 273–6. On Nachleben as a useful tool for discussions of canonic practices in music, see Weber, The Great Transformation, 30–1. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–28. See also Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), 1–2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

203

function of artistic culture that conditioned the museum age affected the foundation of musical institutions, such as the Paris Conservatoire, and the formation of concert societies devoted to early music, whose directors made explicit comparisons with the Louvre in describing their role as curators of a musical heritage.29 The role that France assumed as home of great art was largely based around its collections of painting and sculpture, and a creative environment that flourished in Paris in the shadow of the Louvre; and French music-historical thinking was, to a far greater extent than in other European countries, characterized by a strong interest in the other arts.30 Where in Germany, for example, systematized formal accounts of music normally formed the background to music history (a move that allowed free play for notions of German musical supremacy), French musicians were more inclined to see music as part of larger aesthetic and historical patterns made visible in sculpture and painting and monumentalized in the museums whose architecture punctuated the Parisian cityscape. The museum achieves its didactic function through the choice and order of artifacts on display. In Krzysztof Pomian’s analysis, the museum is a semiosphere in which visible objects are attributed value through their relationship to an invisible realm of signification – “nation” or “the past,” for example – for which they are taken metonymically to stand.31 The visitor’s walk through the museum organizes the objects in a temporal sequence along an institutionally determined path, so that the museum visit functions as a kind of performance of the narratives within which the objects attain their meaning. This story-telling function was particularly prominent in European museums of natural history, anthropology and archaeology, where concepts of progress and theories of evolution began to form a single narrative backdrop to the different historical pasts represented in each. Many of the most important nineteenth-century examples of these museum types featured objects chosen for their ability to represent categories of artifact (rather than as curiosities interesting in themselves), arranged to illustrate evolution through time with the visitor and the visitor’s present as the natural end point. Such arrangements brilliantly served the educational and civilizing aims of the museum by physically propelling the visitor forward from a primitive or undeveloped past to an improved and refined present of which he was himself a member.32 The development of art history as a critical frame for museum practice allowed art museums to mimic aspects of the natural history model. Rather 29

30 31

32

Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 4–7. For further examples, including Liszt’s calls in the name of social progress for the foundation of a musical museum through performances at the Louvre itself, see Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 205–6. Allen, Philosophies, 130–40. Pomian’s position is set out in “Entre l’invisible et le visible: la collection,” first published in the Enciclopedia Einaudi (Turin, 1978), 3: 330–64 and reprinted in Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 15–59. See also Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 163–73. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 39–42 and 177–86.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

204

than placing pictures and sculpture in relationship to furniture, tapestry, mirrors and other luxurious domestic objects as was common in private settings, the new public museums of art began to organize their collections into illustrated histories of style. Each artwork was surrounded by others (whether very similar, or radically different in quality, dimensions or topic) by the same artist or from the same school or region, and the overall sequence of rooms was governed by chronology. According to Philip Fisher, the “subject” of the art museum in this arrangement – the narrative that renders the objects meaningful and valuable – is art history, whose linking forward motion is replicated physically by the movement of the visitor through the museum space. This organization both renders general tendencies more intelligible and diminishes the impact of individual works of art. As Fisher observes, “the rapid stroll through the museum is an act in deep harmony with the nature of art, that is, art history and the museum itself (not with the individual object, which the museum has profoundly hidden in history).”33 The hang encourages a walk-by viewing aimed at producing a historical account – this leads to that – rather than attentive looking at single object. And, given the progressive assumptions of much nineteenth-century historiography, the chronological hang inevitably had the potential to evoke an evolutionary understanding of the relationship between earlier and later works. It is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a timeless masterwork, complete, self-sufficient and unique. As Tony Bennett summarizes, “the script of the art museum necessarily deprives the work of art of any such [masterpiece] status in subordinating it to the effects of the technology of the series – that is, works of art placed one after the other in a sequential toil that is historicized.”34 And the historical sequence necessarily prevents any object from simultaneous occupation of multiple moments of linear time. The organization of museums, in which pedagogical goals won out over more dramatic exhibitionary impulses, broke with earlier modes of display that had emphasized qualities of individual objects rather than their status as representatives of historical trends. Stephen Greenblatt uses the terms “resonance” and “wonder” to refer to the governing principles of different exhibition styles, claiming that among all museum types the art museum has most consistently preserved practices aimed at the provocation of wonder, the “power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.”35 Critics such as Fisher, and more recently Victoria Newhouse, consider the widely adopted historical hang as an obstacle to exactly this kind of enchanted, awe-struck looking. For Fisher, even the distanced 33 34 35

Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 8; Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 44. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

205

spacing and sparse white-cube settings adopted by many art museums in the twentieth century – in reaction to the more crowded tiered hangs of the century before – cannot completely counter the attenuating effects of chronological exhibition.36 Yet a desire to preserve and even heighten the effect of wonder characteristically sought in earlier modes of display persisted into the museum age, and provided (and continues to provide) a source of dispute with historical organization. It was the thwarting of his wish for such a moment of wondrous delight that provoked Valéry, in “Le Problème des musées,” to protest against the museum practice of organizing collections according to historical categories, robbing the masterwork of its immediate force by subordinating it to the arguments of an abstract system and the constraints of mechanical time.37 As Didier Maleuvre observes, when the museum began to follow “the historicist imperative to arrange the artworks . . . like a journey through history, down a brightly lit path winding its way through schools and styles, national characters and chronological markers,” the “cultural officer” was then paradoxically forced to protect art against the very institution that made it art in the first place.38 The same imperative prompted Boulanger to complain about the lack of “silence, respect, and solitude” in the programming of the Concerts Colonne: she was speaking metaphorically of her wish for individual pieces to appear with their full impact undiminished by competition from adjacent works or the demands of overarching historical narrative, clearing the way for the emotionally engaged, wonder-struck listening she saw as ideal. Her position was that described fifty years later by Carl Dahlhaus, in his account of the implications of structuralist aesthetics for historiography: For if we consider viewing pieces of music as links in a chain to be inimical to art, an infringement of their aesthetic character, then one sole form of historical presentation remains – which is strictly speaking no form at all . . . Nor is there even anything to prevent us from dispensing with chronological order altogether if it serves to bring relations supposedly discovered in this imaginary museum of art into sharper focus.39

36

37 38

39

Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 8–23. For a review of modes of display in competition with historical order, see Victoria Newhouse, Art and the Power of Placement (New York: Monacelli, 2005), 21–37. Valéry, “Le Problème des musées,” Vol. II, 1290–3. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 88. Valéry’s essay was an early and influential critique of historical arrangement, whose impact is clear on the work of André Malraux; see Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 10–11. Dahlhaus, Foundations, 22–3. Dahlhaus notes the existence of two forms of historicality at work here, one “claiming that to link works of art in historical sequences is to trangress against the nature of art, the other opposing the aesthetic ‘presence’ of a work to its ‘history’, meaning something situated in the past and hence dead to the aesthetic faculty” (25n).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

206

That Boulanger, like Valéry, was acutely aware of the conflict between the aesthetic of the masterpiece and the technology of the series is demonstrated by her concert practice. To extend Pomian’s analysis from visual display to sound, the concert might be understood as organizing an exchange between the audible and inaudible; concerts can be distinguished from one another by the ways in which they mediate this exchange through, among other things, program choice and order. Concerts impose a succession: music’s temporal nature means that even more inevitably than the museum, the concert constructs a before-and-after in which each piece in turn becomes the “before” of the work in the frame. The chronological concert could thus be read as a mode of implicitly authorizing the values of evolutionary music history in the same way as the chronological museum hang, by aligning the forward motion of the audible sequence to the temporal progression of the inaudible historical narrative that underpins it. The concert audience listens through a condensed history just as the museum-goer walks through it. Colonne’s concerts of “musique ancienne et moderne” at the turn of the century, and the BBC’s proposed plan for Boulanger’s “Foundations of Music” programs in 1936, are two examples in which the concert selection maps onto the larger music-historical framework in this way; it is not coincidental that both had openly proclaimed educational goals.40 Boulanger’s insistent violation of chronological order in contrast disrupted the smooth forward motion of the historical narrative – and its potential for evolutionary reading – by dismantling the correspondence between audible and inaudible time, and called attention to a normally unexamined set of assumptions that privileged historical sequence over the individual presence of the artwork. For Valéry, the sense-making frame that art requires to release its meanings – the frame that the museum had disastrously replaced with historical science – was architecture: Painting and Sculpture, the demon of Explanation tells me, are abandoned children. Their mother is dead, their mother Architecture. While she lived, she gave them their place, their function, their constraints. The freedom to wander was denied them. They had their place, their well-defined light, their topics, their alliances . . . While she lived, they knew what they wanted . . .41 40

41

In the 1885–6 season, Édouard Colonne explained that the society’s concerts would provide listeners with a summary of music history, and began to include extensive historical and analytical essays in the program notes. See Jann Pasler, “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne,” in Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre), edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit and Michael Werner (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2002), 214–34. Valéry, “Le Problème des musées,” 1293: “Peinture et Sculpture, me dit le démon de l’Explication, ce sont des enfants abandonnés. Leur mère est morte, leur mère Architecture. Tant qu’elle vivait, elle leur donnait leur place, leur emploi, leurs contraintes. La liberté d’errer leur était refusée. Ils avaient leur espace, leur lumière bien définie, leurs sujets, leurs alliances . . . Tant qu’elle vivait, ils savaient ce qu’ils voulaient . . .”.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

207

It is sometimes concluded from this that Valéry advocated the return of artworks to the collectors’ homes where they were first housed. But the opposition between elitist, private exhibitions governed by notions of taste and harmony and the democratic, public museum with displays organized by reason and aimed at education is – or had become, in the first half of the twentieth century – a false dichotomy, as will become clear. And while its application to Valéry’s essay underlines the loss of meaning he saw as a consequence of the removal of art from its original contexts into the museum, it misses his broader point. As his earlier Eupalinos confirms, his concept of architecture is without necessary connections to particular physical spaces (that is, a return to original context is not the issue); it was a term referring to larger notions of meaningful form, and to the ways form can be employed to generate human experience. Complete removal of artworks from the progressive historical narrative through isolation is an extreme consequence of the desire for wonder, corresponding most fully to Valéry’s claim that the greater the work, the more important it is to present it as unique. Valerie Newhouse has traced the example of the Winged Victory (Nike) of Samothrace at the Louvre to demonstrate this concept: from its initial inclusion among other sculptures in the Salle des Caryatides in 1866, to the end of the Salle du Tibre in the late 1870s, to the landing of the Grand Stairway in 1883, each of the statue’s moves involved greater isolation and more prominent display, corresponding to increased public recognition of the Nike as a masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture.42 In 1927, all the surrounding artworks in the Grand Stairway were removed and the mosaics and colored glass of the staircase stripped away; in 1932–3 the landing was enlarged and the Nike itself moved forward so that it was the first and only work visitors saw on entering the museum, gradually floating into view at the end of the long Daru Gallery as if descending from the heavens. Valéry – who had been appointed in 1931 to the French national museum directorate, smoothly moving from museum critic to museum manager – no doubt approved: a decade after “Le Problème des musées” first appeared, the Nike’s striking solitary and elevated new placement worked with the architecture of the museum to celebrate it as timeless masterpiece, among the greatest works the Louvre possessed.43 In the case of at least one musical work – Fauré’s Requiem – Boulanger seems to have aimed at a similar effect. Whenever possible, she placed it at the end of her programs, so that no other music was heard immediately following it. In 1938, for a concert with the Boston Symphony in which she was to conduct the Requiem and play the organ solo in the Saint-Saëns Symphony no. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, under Serge Koussevitsky’s direction, she insisted on a last-minute reversal of the published program order so that 42

Newhouse, Art and the Power of Placement, 54–61.

43

Ibid., 61.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

208

the Fauré work was performed last, after the intermission.44 Similarly, for a Paderewski testimonial concert at Carnegie Hall in 1941, the program was changed so that it would end with the Requiem rather than with extracts from the Szymanowski Stabat Mater as originally announced.45 A 1938 concert engagement to direct the Requiem at a Montreal music festival fell through when the artistic director, Wilfred Pelletier, planned to conclude the concert with scenes from Wagner’s Parsifal, and refused to change the order. Boulanger’s American secretary wrote: [Mlle Boulanger] feels very strongly that it is impossible to play anything after the Fauré Requiem, and hopes it may be arranged to reverse the program – or to arrange to finish another program with the Parsifal. She asked me to be sure and have you understand that it is very purely for musical reasons that she could not do it as we believe it is now arranged.46

This example resonates with one of Boulanger’s much earlier reviews of the Concerts Colonne, where she complained about the profusion of competing works on their programs and particularly about the practice of playing fragments of Wagner, seemingly at random, at the beginning, middle, and end of concerts; the resulting jumble, she claimed, shows “The interest of a collector rather than an amateur, which misses the marvellous lesson of the Japanese, who place one single flower in a vase, one precious object all alone in a room.”47 Boulanger’s efforts to separate the Fauré Requiem from other music in a concert-hall version of the Japanese empty room is a sign of how large this work loomed in her personal musical museum. But this mode of celebrating historical works was too easily confused with fetishization of the past: the “isolated cult” Boulanger herself condemned as dangerous. The Winged Victory of Samothrace in fact became a symbol for such anti-progressive history-worship for the Futurists, whose leader F. T. Marinetti famously claimed on the front page of one of France’s leading newspapers that there was more beauty in a racing car than the Nike.48 On a purely practical level, musical isolation was possible only for relatively long works. Since Boulanger’s choice of music was also strongly characterized by retreat 44

45 46

47 48

The concert was given twice, on February 18 and 19, 1938; printed programs with the Requiem placed first are held in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 and the collection of the Fondation Internationale Nadia et Lili Boulanger. The copy in the Fondation’s collection has an insert alerting audiences to the reversal of the printed program order. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143, liasse 6, contains correspondence with the orchestra’s manager about the program. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, April 4, 1941. The dossier contains a pre-concert program flyer in which the Szymanowski appears last, and the final concert program concluding with Fauré. Barbara Lillard to Wilfred Pelletier, F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143 (16), March 9, 1938. For a French musician of Boulanger’s generation and aesthetic convictions, Wagner was a particularly appalling choice for juxtaposition with Fauré. NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 31, nos. 23–4 (December 1920): 359. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto was published in French in Le Figaro in 1909: see Marjorie Perloff, “The First Futurist Manifesto Revisited,” Rett Kopi, Dokumente Fremtiden (Manifesto Issue) (2007): 152–6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

209

from the huge dimensions of the mainstream late nineteenth-century concert repertory, her programs were more often composed of a number of short pieces whose order needed to be decided.49 And short pieces could act as stand-ins for longer works by the same composers: Fauré’s Madrigal, for instance, could provide a small-scale version of the Requiem, demonstrating the same musical language but in proportions similar to those of the Renaissance chansons with which Madrigal was paired. In these cases Boulanger’s goal became not removal from history into the realm of timelessness, but history’s re-imagination, and the construction of concerts as galleries full of “audacious juxtapositions” that simultaneously dissolved evolutionary historical trajectories and promoted new links between past and present artworks. Here the formal symmetry of her programs came into play, providing a temporal “frame” – the analogue to Valéry’s architecture – for the counterpoint of new and old that was not straightforwardly teleological. Form became the domain for dynamic interaction, providing the constraint necessary for the full release of meaning. In this too there were counterparts in the museum world, though not in the great national collections. Boulanger’s approach was closer to the practices of smaller “collection museums,” a term Anne Higonnet has used to describe museums founded by private art collectors and installed in domestic spaces.50 The heyday of the collection museum was between 1890 and 1940, the period that saw the opening of the Musée Condé in France, the Wallace Collection in London, the Gardner Museum in Boston and the Frick Collection in New York. These museums and others like them were designed from their inception to be open to the public. But many broke with the principles of organization associated with universal museums, instead adopting distinctively different aesthetic programs related to the tastes and values of their founders. Here Valéry’s museum critique, often read as a simple elitist call for the return of artworks to private ownership, reveals some broader implications. Collectors were free to ignore the art-historical imperatives of the public museum, and although some did attempt to mirror aspects of the public museum in their installations through historical groupings and hangs, others instead employed domestic architecture to construct formal and thematic links between artworks in the way Valéry advocated. As Higonnet points out, collection museums use domesticity both to idealize and to tame – to domesticate – art history.51 Boulanger’s private and salon performances might be seen as a musical analogue, which allowed her to avoid the constraints of the concert-hall-asmuseum and to bend music history toward her own aesthetic beliefs. 49

50 51

See Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. V: The Early Twentieth Century, 447–93, for a discussion of the neoclassic reaction to the aesthetic Taruskin calls “maximalist,” typified by extended length, large performing forces and intense harmonic language. Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2009), xiii–xiv. Ibid., xiv.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

210

Collection museums, like the salons that hosted private concerts, also provided more scope for female agency than did most public institutions. For wealthy women, collecting and assembling art in domestic settings could function as an important form of creativity when other modes of participation in artistic culture were obstructed for those of their gender and class. This was the case for Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose immense energy was directed toward accumulating and installing European art in her Boston mansion, Fenway Court. Gardner’s collection was principally aimed toward Old Master paintings, many by artists such as Jan Vermeer who were only beginning to be considered among the greatest painters of the past (and whose achievement of canonic status received a major boost from Gardner’s activities). A striking characteristic of her installation was the inclusion of “observation points” which combined artworks to promote her own way of seeing. The juxtapositions involved paintings of different dimensions, with smaller works on stands or tables in front of large canvases on walls, and with chairs for the viewer placed to encourage back-and-forth comparison. The pieces selected for these pairings included her most cherished masterpieces: two Raphaels, the Portrait of Inghirami (c. 1510) and a small predella panel Pietà (c. 1503) make up one observation point; Vermeer’s The Concert (c. 1658) and Gardner’s finest Rembrandt, the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (c. 1633) form another. The works are arranged so that differences in scale vanish from the observer’s viewpoint, and similarities of color and form are brought into relief.52 Although the groupings usually involve chronologically proximate art, one particularly significant example brought together works over a 500year gap. Gardner’s juxtaposition of Giotto’s Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple (c. 1320) with her own portrait by John Singer Sargent (1888) made Giotto’s altar fragment point toward the portrait in the way it would originally have functioned in relation to the large central image of a patron saint or divinity it had once accompanied. Gardner’s hieratic pose and the halo around her head formed by the textile pattern Sargent used as background echoes the figures of Giotto’s Holy Family; and the golds and maroons of the two paintings arc across the distance between them.53 Boulanger and her singers performed at Fenway Court on their visits to the United States in 1937, 1938 and 1939, and she must certainly have been struck by the analogy between Gardner’s manipulation of placement to create narratives of form, and her own efforts to combine musical works.54 52

53 54

Ibid., 48–50 (with photographs illustrating the effect of two of the observation posts). Further on Gardner and her collection, see Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149–76. Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own, 165–7. Boulanger gave concerts at Fenway Court on April 18, 1937, April 17, 1938 and March 26, 1939 (programs for 1937 and 1939 in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195; the 1938 program is held only at CNLB).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

211

When in April 1938, less than a fortnight after a concert at Fenway Court, Boulanger visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the power of juxtaposition may have been fresh in her mind. Whatever the reason, Boulanger was struck by the possibility of combining two of the Met’s paintings – by Paul Cézanne and Frans Hals – in a different way than the museum itself had done, to create an imaginary “viewing point” of her own. She jotted a note in her diary to remind herself to make the connection with music, and likely used the comparison in lectures and teaching well before she included a full account in a 1947 concert review for Le Spectateur.55 Here, her opening salvo rehearsed the same complaints about program construction that had animated her Monde musical columns a quarter-century before: Works [of music] are grouped by chance, as if preparing one’s effect had no importance. From monotony we proceed to confusion; here because everything is alike, there, because everything is in opposition. Yet everyone knows there are both rapprochements that are impossible and contrasts that are harmonious.56

And as in her earlier reviews, she went on to make analogies with museum installations before drawing further comparisons with architecture and interior décor. The difference here is that Boulanger uncharacteristically supplied a specific example of a historically motivated hang that “kills” the paintings it juxtaposes. She then imagined an anti-chronological combination that, on the contrary, would bring the artworks to life – significantly, into song: An image frequently comes to my mind. At the Metropolitan, two masterworks by El Greco, the landscape of Toledo and the portrait of Cardinal Ximenes, produce an almost intolerable effect hung side by side. You have to hide one to see the other. Their colors are mutually destructive. Yet God knows how beautiful each is on its own. In contrast, one dreams of putting Frans Hals’ Sorceress next to the still life by Cézanne that is hanging on its own a few rooms further on. There is a harmony between the two paintings: they emphasize each other, each makes the other sing.57

55

56

57

Ralph P. Locke, “Living With Music: Isabella Stewart Gardner,” in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, edited by Cyrilla Barr and Ralph P. Locke (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 115. F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102 (2), April 30, 1938: “Métropolitain / quelles splendeurs / faire les rapports avec la musique Hals sorcière / et Cézanne” [Metropolitan – what splendors – make connections with music – Hals sorceress and Cézanne]. If she had seen the Barnes collection on April 23 (see below) as well as performing at Fenway Court on April 17, questions of placement may have been a particularly active concern. NB, “Igor Markevitch, Dinu Lipatti, Jean Françaix,” Le Spectateur 3, no. 93 (March 11, 1947): 5: “Les oeuvres sont groupées fortuitement, comme s’il importait peu de préparer ou de ménager ses effets. De la monotonie on va à la confusion; ici parce que tout se ressemble; là, parce que tout s’oppose. Nul n’ignore pourtant qu’il y a des rapprochements impossibles et des contrastes harmonieux.” Ibid.: “Une image me revient fréquemment à l’esprit. Au Métropolitain, deux chefs-d’oeuvre du Greco, le paysage de Tolède et le portrait du Cardinal Ximènes sont, côte à côte, d’un effet à peu près intolérable. Il faut cacher l’un pour voir l’autre. Leurs couleurs se détruisent réciproquement. Et Dieu sait de quelle beauté ils sont pourtant l’un et l’autre. Par contre, on rève de mettre près de la Sorcière de Franz Hals, la nature morte de Cézanne, isolée quelques salles plus loin. Il y a une harmonie entre les deux tableaux: ils se font valoir, l’un fait chanter l’autre.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

212

The two El Grecos were collected by Gardner’s arch-rival Louisine Havemeyer, and bequeathed to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929 after being displayed together in the city several times in the previous decade.58 As Boulanger remarks, the violent greens and brooding greys of the View of Toledo inhabit a different color world from the warm brown and gold interior and satiny pink-scarlet robes in the cardinal’s portrait. Although Boulanger comments specifically only on color, the paintings also differ dramatically in topic and scale (intimate interior versus sweeping panorama). The painting she calls the “Sorceress” is now known as Malle Babbe, and is no longer thought to be by Hals; the Cézanne is a Still Life with Jar, Cup and Apples.59 Boulanger could only dream of seeing them side by side, but today the “My Met Gallery” tool on the museum’s website enables viewers to juxtapose the images in virtual space. Doing so emphasizes the affinities in shape and color between Cézanne’s apples and the sorceress’s face, and between the folds of her collar and headdress and the draped tablecloth in the still life. Olive, rose, and gold tones “sing” across the two paintings even on the computer screen, suggesting that juxtaposition in reality would indeed promote visual links between the paintings, executed nearly two centuries apart. Boulanger’s approach finds an even more telling material counterpart in the work of Philadelphia pharmaceutical millionaire Dr. Alfred C. Barnes, among the most important collectors of French art of the first half of the twentieth century, but a maverick in museum display whose hangs still spark controversy.60 Barnes installed his magnificent collection of Old Masters, recent French works, early American furniture and African tribal art in a neoclassical temple designed by French architect Paul Philippe Cret. In 1925, the Barnes Foundation was officially opened as an educational institution that would illustrate its creator’s philosophy of art through direct experience in the museum’s galleries. His theories were based on his conception of “plastic means,” the basic elements of color, light, line and space that great artists of any time manipulate to express broad human values through a synthesis, “plastic form.”61 In The Art of Painting, a textbook 58

59

60

61

Images and provenance information for all four paintings can be found on the museum’s digitised catalogue at www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database (consulted June 20, 2011). The cardinal’s portrait is today known as Portrait of a Cardinal, probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (c. 1600, accession no. 29.100.5) and at the time of writing it is displayed in the same room as the undated View of Toledo (accession no. 29.100.5). Malle Babbe (second quarter of the seventeenth century, accession number 71.76), was exhibited as by Hals in the early twentieth century. Still Life with Jar, Cup and Apples (c. 1877, accession no. 29.100.66) was, like the El Grecos, part of the 1929 Havemeyer bequest; it was the the only Cézanne still life to be acquired by the Metropolitan before World War II. On Barnes’s life, see Howard Greenfeld, The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector (London: Marion Boyars, 1989); William Schack, Art and Argyrol: The Life and Career of Dr. Albert C. Barnes (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960). See Richard J. Wattenmaker, “Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the Barnes Foundation,” in Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern (New

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

213

published to coincide with the opening of his Foundation, Barnes claimed the previous generation of art historians mainly practiced “a form of antiquarianism made up of historical, social, and sentimental interests.”62 Frank Jewett Mather’s analysis of Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert in The History of Italian Painting (1923), which Barnes described as “a jumble of rhetorical irrelevancies,” typified for him the flaws in their approach.63 Mather’s highly narrative account of the painting’s meaning raises topics many social historians of art today would find significant, such as urban/ rural oppositions and the purposes of Arcadian imagery. Barnes’s analysis instead concentrated on form, claiming that the work was “one of the greatest single achievements in the history of painting” because of its structural use of color and rhythmic integration of light, mass and space. Barnes presented his method as superior because it began with objective analytical observations before proceeding to evaluative judgements: as he claims in his analysis of Giorgone, assertions about the painting’s power (“charm, Arcadian quality, power, splendour, majesty, deep peace, and mystic effects”) are justifiable “because the painting has sufficient objective reference to which the mystical emotion can be rationally attached.”64 Understanding the expressive essence of painting thus involves learning how formal relationships embody universal human emotions or qualities, such as sorrow, grace, power or gentleness, independently of history or medium. And Barnes contended that attention to these vital qualities communicated by form could dissolve the obstacles of history: No tradition has ever persisted unchanged and no sound tradition has ever completely disappeared; these facts admit of no question in the history of painting. The traditions of previous ages have always been the foundation stones upon which new developments are based, even though that truth has been generally unrecognized at the time . . . . In this book an effort is made to trace in the history of painting the essential continuity of the great traditions and to show that the best of the modern painters use the same means, to the same general ends, as did the great Florentines, Venetians, Dutchmen and Spaniards.65

The highly eclectic hangs he composed for the Barnes Foundation were designed to illustrate his point. Figure 6.1 shows a wall in the collection in around 1928. It combines two small still lifes and a landscape by Renoir; Five Bathers and a still life with apples by Cézanne; Italian, Austrian and Netherlandish religious paintings from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries; a sixteenth-century portrait by Wolfgang Huber; a seventeenth-century Dutch

62 63 64

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 13–16, for a summary of Barnes’s theories. On the relationship to the work of Roger Fry and Clive Bell – both also major influences on Eliot – see Schack, Art and Argyrol, 192–206. Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 371–2. Ibid., 360. For a comparison of Mather’s account of the Giorgone with Barnes’s, see Schack, Art and Argyrol, 196–8. Barnes, The Art in Painting, 416–17. 65 Ibid., 9–10.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

214

Figure 6.1. Ensemble in an unidentified room in the Gallery, c. 1928. Photograph by W. Vivian Chappel. Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives. Photograph © The Barnes Foundation.

town view by Berckheyde; and two anonymous French pictures of peasant girls from about 1840. The ensemble provides a striking visual analogue to Boulanger’s concert juxtapositions. The heterogeneity of the paintings’ provenance and age is overridden by the strong formal symmetries of the hang, which operate at several levels: through the matching dimensions of paintings at corresponding points of the design, emphasized by the use of similar frames; through the paintings’ subjects; and through repeated shapes, colors and lines across the works – rounded fruits, outstretched arms, light through foliage, deep black robes – that rhythmically punctuate the hang as a whole. Barnes took enormous care over the design of his wall ensembles, emphasizing their importance as teaching tools. Henri Matisse, on his return to France after visiting the Foundation in 1930, claimed: One of the most striking things in America is the Barnes collection, which is installed in a very useful way for training American artists. There, the old paintings are hung next to the moderns, a Douanier Rousseau next to a Primitive, and this rapprochement helps the students to understand lots of things that academies do not teach.66

66

Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, edited by Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 110–11: “Une des choses les plus frappantes en Amérique, c’est la collection Barnes, qui est installée dans un esprit très utile pour la formation des artistes américains. Là, les tableaux anciens sont mis à coté des modernes, un Douanier Rousseau à coté d’un Primitif, et ce rapprochement aide les étudiants à comprendre bien des choses que les académies n’enseignent pas.” The text comes from an interview published serially in L’Intransigeant, October 19, 20 and 27, 1930.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

Tomb or treasure

215

That is, Barnes’s private museum – like the public museums whose conventions of installation Barnes so notably flouted – had an explicit pedagogical mission; but not, as Matisse implies, the kind that involved learning conventional history. Boulanger made assiduous attempts to see the Barnes collection when she was in the United States in 1938, using her society connections in Philadelphia to arrange a visit.67 There was much in Barnes’s work that could appeal to her sensibilities. His approach to form and meaning was strikingly similar to hers; and Barnes was keenly interested in music. In The Art in Painting, he used extended musical analogies to illustrate his points about art much in the way Boulanger used comparisons with painting to drive home her ideas about music.68 Barnes was a committed Stravinsky advocate, and in a 1933 book on Matisse he included a chapter comparing the artist’s work to the composer’s.69 But, perhaps most importantly for Boulanger, Barnes’s entire approach was motivated by a commitment to pedagogy as forceful as her own.70 Barnes’s educational crusade centered on development of the “eye”: the ability to perceive the expressive content of form.71 The “eye” – or, in 67

68 69

70

71

Details are preserved in correspondence with Katharine Wolff (F-Pn NLa 117 (100–310)), who had been Boulanger’s student in Paris in 1923–5, and who was instrumental in arranging portions of her American tours in 1925 and 1937–9. Letters preceding Boulanger’s 1938 stay in Philadelphia discuss arrangements for seeing art collections and museums there, such as the Widener Collection and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. On April 1, Wolff confirmed a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the recently purchased Cézanne Bathers, and asked if Boulanger wanted to see anything else; Boulanger apparently responded that she hoped to visit the Barnes collection, for in Wolff’s reply (April 10, pièces 138–42) she wrote, “I still have no reply to my letter to Dr. Barnes in regard to seeing his pictures but he may be away – I shall wait a few more days and if no reply comes Mrs. Drinker has told me to call on Miss Ingersoll who is a close, personal friend of Dr. Barnes and who can no doubt arrange it.” Wolff proposed that they set aside April 23 to see the collection, but I have been unable to verify whether the visit took place. Boulanger’s datebook for 1938 (F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102) has nothing written on any day between April 4 and 23, suggesting Boulanger kept track of her complex commitments during the US tour through a separate typescript schedule, as she did in 1939. She was in the Philadelphia area, and on the Main Line near the Barnes collection’s location at Meirion for a lecture at Bryn Mawr on April 24, so it seems plausible that arrangements to see the museum could have worked out; if so, her reaction to the Metropolitan’s hangs on April 30 takes on a particular resonance. As, for example, when he illustrates the distinction between “legitimate and illegitimate use of subject matter” through an extended comparison of Beethoven’s Eroica and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Albert C. Barnes and Violette De Mazia, The Art of Henri-Matisse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 218–26. Barnes engaged Stokowski to conduct the music for his Foundation’s opening in 1925, but he would later criticize the conductor for over-conservative programming: see Schack, Art and Argyrol, 202. Barnes conceived of aesthetic education for the underprivileged as a force for social action. The Art in Painting is dedicated to John Dewey, “whose conceptions of experience, of method, of education, inspired the work of which this book is a part” (Barnes, The Art in Painting, 48). Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) is dedicated to Barnes. On the notion of “the eye” and the hotly debated issues it raises for museum practice, see Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: Les Musées d’art européens et leur public, 2nd, revised and augmented edn. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 13–17. It is worth comparing with Stravinsky’s pronouncements on “the logic of my ear”: as Craig Ayrey comments, “Rhetorically, the figure is an Apollonian bid for permanence – in retrospect, as the constant that makes consistent sense of the past, in prospect, as the projection of that constancy into the future in works made into

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

The work in history

216

Boulanger’s case, “the ear” – is key to the act of empathy that connects the individual to the artwork of the past, unlocking its meanings in the present and establishing its connections to life. Like Barnes’s hangs, Boulanger’s approach allowed her not only to contextualize new music in satisfying ways but, just as importantly, to resist any implication that early music might be underdeveloped, primitive, or irreducibly remote – in either technique or spirit – from music of the present. By insisting on the “presentness” of the masterwork, Boulanger attempted to combat what she saw as history’s tendency to classify living masterpieces as obsolete relics, interesting principally as archaeology. In some ways this represents a musical analogue to the efforts of those within the museum world whose practice reflected anti-historical trends. The museographic absorption of anti-museum critique is neatly illustrated in the way Valéry became a member of the French national museum directorate less than a decade after the publication of his pointed critique of museum practice. The extent to which concern for dramatic effect had successfully challenged historical science in museographic discourse by the end of the 1930s is graphically represented in the inscriptions by Valéry that were inscribed on the very walls of the new museum at the Palais de Chaillot in 1937. Boulanger regularly quoted the first stanza of these to illustrate how a “presentist” approach to music could release its most profound meanings: – DE – CELUI – QUI – PASSE – JE – SOIS – TOMBE – OU – TRÉSOR QUE – JE – PARLE – OU – ME – TAISE CECI – NE – TIENT – QU’À – TOI AMI – N’ENTRE – PAS – SANS – DÉSIR.

IL

–

DÉPEND

QUE

[It is up to he who passes here whether I am tomb or treasure house, whether I speak or remain silent. The choice is yours: my friend, do not enter without desire.]72

72

monumental artefacts through the consistency of their aural logic.” Craig Ayrey, “Stravinsky in Analysis: The Anglophone Traditions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 220. This is the second of four stanzas; the entire twenty-line inscription figures in Valéry, Oeuvres, Vol. II: 1585 and in Shattuck, The Innocent Eye, 157. Boulanger often cited the stanza as an opening to public lectures (including, for example, her 1954 talk on The Rake’s Progress); in interviews at the end of her life, she told Bruno Monsaingeon that these lines should be repeated to children every day (Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Entretiens, 37).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.009

chapter 7

The art of assembling art

In an early Monde musical review, Boulanger used the image of a museum gallery to explain that although performance is needed to bring musical works into light, even the best performance is powerless to fully illuminate unless the work is sympathetically placed: It goes without saying that the order of presentation and the performance play an essential role. The work, without a performer, is for the majority of people like a museum gallery plunged in darkness. One knows that there are paintings there, sumptuous or exquisite, painful or joyous, sombre or radiant, but still it is night. And moreover, no light would be sufficient to illuminate them well, if they are arbitrarily brought together, if the light strikes them in any which way.1

Conditions of display are crucial to defining artifacts as anchored in specific times and places or, in contrast, as attuned to the present as much or more than to the original contexts and functions of the work. Performance choices interact with order in the way that installation details like framing and background can increase or decrease the perceived distance between works, reinforce or diminish the differences between them. Boulanger’s performance practice resonated with her commitment to the modernity of the masterpiece, but is interesting not only because of her emphasis on structure and opposition to the growing tide of historically informed early music performance practice. There was nothing new in performing all the music on a concert within a single contemporary performing style, however conservative or radical the style, however chronologically proximate or distant the works performed may have been. More striking is how Boulanger’s understanding of musical meaning, as conveyed through performance decisions, interacted with her views on history to produce a highly original concert practice. Performed structurally, the concert created a context that enabled individual pieces to speak to and comment upon one another across historical distance. The program itself became a species of 1

NB, “Concerts Colonne,” MM 31, nos. 23–4 (December 1920): 359. “Il va sans dire que l’ordre de présentation, que l’exécution jouent un rôle pour ainsi dire capital. L’oeuvre, sans l’interprète, est pour la majorité des gens comme une salle de musée plongée dans les ténèbres. On sait que des toiles sont là, somptueuses ou exquises, douloureuses ou joyeuses, sombres où rayonnantes, mais c’est pourtant la nuit. Et d’autre part, toute lumière ne suffirait pas à les bien éclairer, si elles sont arbitrairement rapprochées les unes des autres, si le jour les frappe de gauche ou de droite.”

217

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

218

composition in which works were arranged to promote Boulanger’s way of hearing and drive home her beliefs about the relationship of tradition and innovation. Calling upon on the italicizing properties of collage to emphasize what she saw as the essential qualities of works, she relied upon formally meaningful placement according to these qualities to substitute architectural construction for temporal progression as the governing concept. Boulanger’s performances not only used formal principles to control the historical diversity of the pieces’ provenance, but also allowed the entire program to be structurally heard as if it were itself a musical work, which could be understood through thematic or harmonic analysis. The palindromic and mirror forms so prominently featured in her construction of concert programs echoes the emphasis on such techniques in early twentieth-century composition, and similarly relies on new understandings of the nature of consciousness, memory and time. Her arrangements encouraged acts of listening that reproduced the function of memory in recapturing the past, forcing history to be reheard within and through the present.2 Edward T. Cone has underlined how concert program construction should be considered an act of criticism.3 In Boulanger’s case, it is possible to read it in a similar way to the art collections of women patrons, as a field offering rare opportunities for creative agency. In 1939, Boulanger’s former student Harrington Shortall wrote after hearing a pair of extraordinarily mixed concerts at the Library of Congress to thank her for “superb performances of two great masterpieces of programmaking”;4 his vocabulary underlines how, through performance, assembly could become a form of creation. This point was not lost on Paul Valéry. In the introduction to the Monteverdi recordings that launched the “Collection Nadia Boulanger,” he wrote: Chronology is not enough, nor technical considerations. It is a work of art to assemble works of art; every collection requires meditation, so that its total perfection surpasses the sum of the perfection of each of its parts. I am not enough of a musician to uphold this through examples, but I see clearly what I would choose if I were asked to give, through a collection of poems, a full and in some sense absolute idea of the power of the greatest poetry. Now, that is exactly, I believe, what Nadia Boulanger has done (and which she is almost alone in being able to do) when she has endeavored to shape, as one creates, a collection of musical 2

3 4

On the relation of Bergsonian concepts of time to the palindromic forms so prevalent in composition at this time, see David Trippett, “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme,” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 522–3. Edward T. Cone, “The Pianist as Critic,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, edited by John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 242–3. Harrington Shortall to NB, CNLB, April 25, 1939. The concerts, at the Library of Congress on April 14 and 16, were broadcast throughout North America by the NBC Blue Network and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The programs were composed of groups in which almost every adjacent piece came from a different century, and included anonymous medieval works, Palestrina, Lasso, Marenzio, Dowland, Vecchi, Purcell, Mozart, Brahms, Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc, and premieres of works by Boulanger’s current and former students, including Shortall himself and Jean Françaix.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

219

works of the first order. It was necessary to have what she possesses: the most ardent passion for her art, the most profound and sure learning, a sort of mystical devotion for the rigor of the performance, and finally the zeal that wishes to enflame the souls of others and bring them with oneself to the supreme point of knowledge of the masters and of lucidity within this joy.5

Over a decade later, the poet’s son François emphasized the notion of program construction as composition in his liner note to Boulanger’s Petit Concert recording. His reiteration of the idea is here neatly linked to the structure/surface approach that underpinned Boulanger’s antichronological concept of unity: The same rules that govern the composition of works apply when there is a question of bringing them together. The more the reasons for choice reject classifications foreign to the substance of the chosen works . . . the more the act of choosing takes its meaning, which is, starting with diversity, to create unity.6

The act of creative empathy that makes the musical past live in the present is thus essentially compositional; and, as Boulanger declared in 1947, just before making the Petit Concert discs, this compositional impulse operates whenever artful juxtaposition is necessary for the full release of meaning: “Just as one composes a room, a museum gallery, an outfit, a menu or a speech, a concert program must be composed.”7 Boulanger’s notion of “composing” a collection of music as one would “compose” a room or gallery was brilliantly illustrated in a 1954 feature for the decorating magazine Maison & Jardin. In this vividly illustrated piece, seven leading interior decorators proposed designs for a music listening space to accompany Boulanger’s selection of the best one hundred records. This “discothèque de base” or basic collection for music-lovers, is listed chronologically, beginning with Gregorian chant and continuing up to

5

6

7

Valéry, liner notes to Claudio Monteverdi, dir. by NB, Gramophone, DB 5038–5042, five 78rpm discs, 1937: “La chronologie n’y suffit pas et les considérations techniques. C’est une oeuvre d’art que d’assembler des oeuvres d’art; toute collection demande d’être méditée, de manière que la perfection de son tout atteigne quelque valeur de plus que la somme des perfections de ses éléments. Je ne suis pas assez musicien pour soutenir ceci par des exemples, mais je vois bien ce que je choisirais si j’avais à donner, par un certain recueil de pièces de vers, une idée pleine et comme absolue des puissances de la plus haute poésie. Or, c’est bien là, je crois, ce qu’a fait (et qu’elle était presque seule à pouvoir faire) Mlle Nadia Boulanger, quand elle a entrepris de former, comme l’on crée, une collection d’oeuvres musicales du premier ordre. Il y fallait ce qu’elle possède: la passion la plus ardente pour son art, la science la plus profonde et la plus sûre, une sorte de dévotion mystique pour la rigueur de l’exécution, le zèle, enfin, qui veut enflammer les âmes des autres et les conduire avec soi-même au point suprême de connaissance des maîtres et de lucidité dans ce bonheur.” Italics original. Valéry, liner notes to Boulanger, Petit concert: “Les mêmes règles qui régissent la composition des oeuvres, s’appliquent lorsqu’il s’agit de les réunir. Plus les raisons de choisir s’écartent d’une classification étrangère à la substance des oeuvres choisies . . . plus l’acte de choisir prend son sens qui est, partant de la diversité, de créer l’unité.” “Comme se composent un intérieur, une salle de musée, une toilette, un menu ou un discours, un programme de concert se compose.” NB, “Igor Markevitch, Dinu Lipatti, Jean Françaix,” Le Spectateur 3, no. 93 (March 11, 1947): 5.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

220

Stravinsky’s most recent works. But in her introductory text, Boulanger cautioned against understanding the music only in this way: It’s by the music itself and by music only that this history [of music] should be learned . . . Next to the chronological order that proceeds successively and shows the evolution of music only in one light, there is an order that proceeds by leaps; a different order, more subtle, seemingly arbitrary, allowing us to observe the permanence of certain characters and certain traditions. Oppositions and affinities find themselves revealed.8

The Maison & Jardin exercise shows that by the 1950s sound recording could be used to build an imaginary musical museum in the way that André Malraux, just a few years before, had conceived photography’s role in the collection of art.9 Recordings existed in sufficient number and variety to allow Boulanger’s choices to range widely from early to very recent music, and for her to propose using the collection to construct audible musical history just as she did in her concert programs or on the Petit Concert recording, but on a much larger scale. The Maison & Jardin feature was in some ways a culmination of the project for a “collection of musical works of the first order” that Valéry imagined in his homage to Boulanger, aimed at demonstrating “a full and in some sense absolute idea” of the power of the greatest music. Although her own collection relied on choice from existing recordings rather than commissioning new ones, it can be instructively compared with other sound museums of the period, such as the one directed by Boulanger’s nearcontemporary, the musicologist Curt Sachs (1881–1959).10 Sachs had begun working on a music history in sound in Germany in 1930, before the persecution of Jews led him to emigrate to Paris in 1934. He launched the new and even more ambitious Anthologie Sonore for Pathé-Marconi while working at the Musée de l’Homme, as an auditory counterpart to the museum’s archaeological and anthropological collections. In 1937, just as the museum moved to its new home at the Palais de Chaillot, Sachs left

8

9

10

NB, “Les 100 disques qu’il faut avoir: Nadia Boulanger les a choisis pour vous; sept décorateurs vous proposent le coin de musique dans votre maison,” Maison & Jardin 24, November 1954, 47 and 50; illustrations by Charles Sévigny: “C’est par la musique même et par la musique seule que cette histoire devrait s’apprendre. . . . À côté de l’ordre chronologique qui procède par succession et ne montre l’évolution de la musique que sous un certain aspect, il existe un ordre qui procède par bonds, ordre différent, plus subtil, d’apparence arbitraire, permettant de constater la permanence de certains caractères et de certaines traditions. Les oppositions et les affinités se trouvent alors mises en évidence.” André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire, revised edn. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965; reprint, 2010), 88–176; Malraux himself makes the comparison between art photography and recording on p. 123. Malraux’s text was first published in 1947, and builds considerably on Valéry’s writing on art in the interwar period. Martin Elste, “Bildungsware alte Musik: Curt Sachs als Schallplattenpädagoge,” Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 13 (1989), 207–47; see also Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 205. Several Anthologie Sonore discs figure in Boulanger’s choice for Maison & Jardin.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

221

France for the United States, and continued the project while teaching at New York University and then Columbia. On its completion in the mid 1950s, the collection included more than 150 discs. Devoted to littleknown music from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, it reflected the same principles of organization underlying universal art musems. The records each concentrated on one or two genres or composers, just like museum rooms devoted to painters and schools, and their titles (Ballades italiennes et Chants religieux italiens du 14e siècle, Chansons franco-flamandes du 15e siècle or Antoine Dornel & Jean Nicolas Geoffroy: Musique française pour clavecin au temps de Couperin) echoed the style of room labels in public galleries. Similarly, Music for Eye and Ear, a smaller British project produced by Columbia and compiled by Percy Scholes between 1930 and 1939, contained five volumes of eight 78rpm discs, going from plainchant to the present in groups by period, exactly as the BBC had proposed that Boulanger organize her five concert programs of French vocal ensemble music in 1936.11 Listeners could, of course, mix and shuffle pieces from different discs if they so chose; but the construction of the series and the assumptions underpinning their accompanying texts discouraged such practices. Boulanger’s article instead argued for the use of sound recording to construct music history according to the alternative principles that animated her concerts. The visual component provided by the Maison & Jardin illustrations adds a further dimension to the exercise, allowing the sound museum’s setting to emphasize themes suggested by the content and arrangement of the musical works it contained. Here the range of attitudes toward innovation and tradition displayed by the seven designers is intriguing: the contributions range from the completely futuristic (Marcel Gascoin’s smoothly cool mix of black, white and chrome) to the totally nostalgic (Jacques Soubrier’s twiddly Louis XVI interior, where the record player is mounted inside an antique square piano case); from those in which technology dominates the room (Raphael) to those where record player and television are hidden away (Robert and Michel Carlhian). Several designs attempt to blend references in various ways. In two of them – by Madame Klotz-Gilles and John Devoluy – the rooms include space for musical instruments as well as housing the record player, mixing the new medium with the traditional practice of domestic music-making, for which it becomes an extension rather than a replacement. Devoluy’s interior creates a domestic concert hall where the piano occupies center stage, flanked by symmetrical rows of paintings and record cabinets (figure 7.1). The

11

Timothy Day, Gwendolyn Tietze and Hannah Vlček, “Histories in Sound: Disseminating Medieval Music” (paper presented at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, Graz, April 15–18, 2004).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

222

The work in history

Figure 7.1. Nadia Boulanger et al., “Les 100 disques qu’il faut avoir,” Maison & Jardin 24 (November 1954), 51. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

223

accompanying blurb presents this as a neoclassical “reconstitution” of the traditional aristocratic music room. The Maison & Jardin project was not only an extension of Boulanger’s principles of collection into the realm of sound recording. It was also an offshoot of her attempts from the mid 1930s onward at the integration of sound and setting in her work. Not only did she regularly use the metaphor of the museum gallery to describe and justify her concerts; frequently, she attempted to bring visual art into counterpoint with her performances to condition her listeners’ reception of both early and modern masterworks. The concert for Étienne and Édith de Beaumont with which I began this book offered one such opportunity. The tableaux vivants of religious paintings and sculpture provided a form of living slide-show that was animated and commented upon by Boulanger’s musical performance, in the manner of a melodrama or film. The “soundtrack” effect was further emphasized by Boulanger’s tonal planning for the sequence and by her composition of organ passages for the transitions between the tableaux.12 The use of linking music allowed sound to bridge the gaps between different visual components, while the artworks in turn provided an anchor for the sequence of musical works that sounded during each tableau. The organ links functioned like those that Boulanger, just as other church organists then and now, used to join events and musics in the celebration of the liturgy. In this way the Beaumont salon concert acted like a Mass, while at the same time its tableaux vivants evoked charades and other party games. Other efforts to link sound and visual culture in performance involved actual paintings and galleries. Boulanger’s visits to American collection museums such as Fenway Court and the Barnes Foundation in the late 1930s may have inspired her most ambitious project to bring together art, architecture and music. The plan – in the end unrealized – was conceived for the Phillips Collection in Washington, which had opened to the public in 1921 as America’s first museum of modern art. The gallery housed the private collection of Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, whose home was progressively altered to accommodate its display. Although famous for its recent works, the collection also contained significant older paintings. In 1942, Boulanger was engaged to present a lecture-recital on Stravinsky, and wrote to Duncan Phillips to ask for specific artworks to be moved to the Lower Gallery where her talk would take place so that she might use them as illustrations. The hang she wanted involved the juxtaposition of paintings by El Greco, Goya, Daumier, Delacroix and Manet, with Cubist and later works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Dufy. Although Phillips was 12

Manuscript sketches for these connecting passages, which were played by Annette Dieudonné, are held at F-LYc with the rest of the performing material for the Beaumont event. Planning notes for the concert (held among uncatalogued notes in CNLB) show how Boulanger constructed the tonal trajectory of the entire concert.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

224

enthusiastic about the idea, he pointed out in his response that her request – which entailed the transfer of fifty-four paintings in total, with attendant adaptations to wiring and lighting fixtures – “would require a drastic revision of the walls in almost every room of the building.”13 Had the rehang happened, the effect may well have been similar to that achieved in the Barnes collection. But the scale of the changes, and the impossibility of executing and then reversing them before the opening of a new exhibition later in the month, prevented Phillips from completely fulfilling Boulanger’s wishes. He was able only to move some recent paintings into the room adjoining the Lower Gallery, where several of the Old Master pictures were already in place, so that the audience would see at least some of Boulanger’s intended juxtapositions before the lecture began.14 collecting past and future at dumbarton oaks The meaningful integration of sound and space did not always remain an imaginary goal, however. Boulanger’s thinking on history, art and music was in many ways summed up in the May 1938 concert in which she directed the premiere of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in E♭. The piece was commissioned to celebrate the thirtieth wedding anniversary of Washington art collectors Mildred Barnes Bliss and Robert Woods Bliss. The couple had lived in Paris between 1912 and 1920, during Robert’s diplomatic posting to the American Embassy. There they immersed themselves in French literary and artistic life, cultivating figures such as Proust and Bergson, and frequenting the expatriate American circle around Edith Wharton. Mildred, herself a competent violinist and pianist, attended society concerts and hosted private musical evenings in the Blisses’ apartment near the Quai d’Orsay. Paderewski played there in 1913; the following year Enrique Granados gave the private premiere of his Tonadillas – songs based on the paintings of Francisco Goya – in the Blisses’ salon.15 From the onset of World War I, Mildred became deeply engaged in war charities, providing funding for ambulances and organizing the distribution of medical supplies. Boulanger was probably first introduced to her around 1915, in the context of her own wartime aid work, by Blair Fairchild, 13 14

15

Duncan Phillips to NB, F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 148 (24), May 3, 1941. Ibid. As Phillips explained, “the room through which the audience will pass on the way to the lecture and where the overflow from that room will sit is already hung with just the paintings of your choice, at least some of them. I will do the best I can to conform with your suggestion by hanging Cezannes and perhaps some Rouaults and small Braques to supplement the El Greco, Chardin, the big Daumier, which are in a way the key pictures of that room.” On the Blisses’ cultural activities in Paris, see James N. Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss: A Brief Biography,” in A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 11. Mildred is mentioned several times in Proust’s correspondence (p. 21) in terms that suggest he was impressed with her intellect. A June 1920 letter from Bergson, accepting an invitation to lunch, refers to an ongoing conversation with Mildred that he anticipates resuming with pleasure (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 60).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

225

whom the Blisses had known long before arriving in Paris.16 Through Fairchild, Mildred would become an important supporter of the Conservatoire Américain when it was founded after the war. This patronage soon extended to the École Normale: from 1920, Mildred funded a scholarship for Harvard students to attend the school, and both she and her mother contributed to the support of individual pupils identified by Boulanger.17 After Robert’s diplomatic career took them away from Paris, Mildred continued to make regular return trips; on at least one occasion, in 1928, Boulanger participated in a concert at their apartment (which they continued to maintain until 1933).18 When Fairchild rescued Boulanger’s pupil Beveridge Webster from a family crisis in 1927–8 and began to launch his professional career, Mildred became a major supporter.19 For the rest of Mildred’s life, the friendship followed similar patterns: Boulanger identified deserving pupils and projects, and the Blisses provided both financial support and a huge network of influence with other patrons and concert organizers.20 Their relationship was marked not only by musical connections, but other shared intellectual interests including art and philosophy; they exchanged books and reading suggestions, and their correspondence refers to conversations about Bergson and Eliot, for example. Stravinsky’s connection with the Blisses was more distant and, before the premiere of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, largely mediated through mutual acquaintances. During World War I, the Blisses were frequently together not only with their friend Blair Fairchild but also with his ward, the PolishAmerican violinist Samuel Dushkin. Dushkin regularly played for private concerts at the Blisses’ Paris home between 1915 and 1919, and they were indefatigable supporters after he began to tour professionally. Dushkin lived with Fairchild when in France, and, after Fairchild adopted a similar guardian role for Beveridge Webster in 1928, Dushkin and Webster were frequently together. They sometimes performed as a duo, including at the École Normale: for example, in early 1932, when they presented a sonata series commented by 16

17

18 19 20

Fairchild’s earliest extant letter to Mildred Bliss dates from December 1902 (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 16); the content indicates they were by then already good friends. Fairchild’s letter of September 30 [1920] indicates that Bliss knew Boulanger by this time, although the earliest extant letter from Boulanger herself to Bliss dates from February 1923 (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 9). HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 16, includes correspondence between Auguste Mangeot and Fairchild about the École Normale scholarship (August 1920–October 1921); Fairchild’s letter of August 6, 1920 also mentions a check from Mildred’s mother, which “has come at just the right moment – the same mail brought a letter from Mlle Boulanger telling me of several cases.” In 1923–4 Mildred financed Melville Smith (who for the two previous years had been on the Harvard studentship); in 1925–6 she supported Howard Hinners, and in 1927 Israel Citkovitz. Correspondence regarding all three is in HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 9. Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss,” 5–7. Fairchild’s letters to Mildred between 1928 and 1933 (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 16) are largely occupied with Webster’s situation. During World War II, Mildred helped Boulanger to maintain four students (Jack Lessard, Paul Des Marais, Winifred Johnstone and Gerald Cook) in rented accommodation in Cambridge (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 9, letters of November 19, 1941 and January 9, 1942).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

226

Boulanger.21 By this time, Dushkin had begun to collaborate with Stravinsky on both compositions and performances. In 1930, Willy Strecker of Schott, the composer’s German publisher, suggested that he should produce a violin concerto, and that Dushkin could advise on the technical aspects of the solo part. The Violin Concerto was finished the following summer with substantial input from Dushkin, and after the successful premiere in Berlin in October 1932, Stravinsky and the violinist began to appear as a recital duo, performing the composer’s earlier works in arrangements for violin and piano and working together on new repertoire.22 Mildred Bliss followed these developments closely: Fairchild wrote to her from Berlin with a detailed account of the rehearsals and first performance of the Violin Concerto, promising to send the score.23 After Fairchild’s death in 1933, Stravinsky and Boulanger conducted a memorial concert in the Salle Gaveau to benefit a Franco-American charity supported by the Blisses, at which both Webster and Dushkin, the principal beneficiaries of Fairchild’s will, performed.24 A photograph of Stravinsky with a 1936 dedication to Mildred Bliss testifies to continued contact later in the decade, but Dushkin and Boulanger would remain the main conduits for their relationship until after Stravinsky moved to the United States in 1939.25 Mildred had been a connoisseur and collector since her teenage years, but it was not until their posting in Paris that the Blisses began sustained acquisition of art and antiquities. Although they had particular interests in medieval, Byzantine and pre-Columbian art, their collecting was heterogeneous and wide-ranging, and they applied masterpiece values to a strikingly wide range of objects.26 Their purchases included major paintings by Dégas and other recent figures as well as historic works, along with ritual 21 22 23

24

25

26

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, programs of January 16, 22 and 28. Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 501–2 and 507–11. Fairchild to Mildred Bliss, HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 16, October 23, 1931: “Strawinsky is here at this hotel with us, & is a fascinating companion; Strecker is also here, & very many critics, leaders, composers, violinists & other musicians have come from everywhere to hear it. . . . The piano & violin score is out and I will send you a copy in a few days – it will interest you to look it over. Sam, as you know, has the monopole of performance for 2 seasons. Hindemith was at the rehearsal last night – enthusiastic – said he thinks it is the best thing Strawinsky has done in years, & marks an epoch in his oeuvre; I think so too. E.S. [the pianist Ernest Schelling, a close friend of Mildred’s] heard Sam rehearse it in Paris, but I think it is too far from his temperament for him to really like it, for he spoke mostly of Sam’s playing – everyone speaks of that I am happy to say.” The concert, on May 18, 1934, featured works by Fairchild, Stravinsky and Bach, conducted by Stravinsky and Boulanger. Profits were donated to the Maison Franco-Américaine de Convalescence pour Tuberculeux, a charity presided over by Edith Wharton. The program does not survive in Boulanger’s archives, but a copy exists in HUA, HUG (FP) 76.8, Box 16. Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, identifies the photograph as a 1934 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huene; the dedicated Dumbarton Oaks copy is reproduced in Jeanice Brooks, “Collecting Past and Present: Music History and Musical Performance at Dumbarton Oaks,” in A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 76. Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own, 70–7. The collections are catalogued in Gudrun Bühl, ed., Dumbarton Oaks: The Collections (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

227

objects, jewellery, sculpture and textiles not only from Europe but also from the Far East and South America. Returning to the United States in 1920 when Robert accepted a post in the Department of State, they sought to establish a permanent home in Washington that could accommodate their growing collections. They purchased a Federal mansion, rechristened it Dumbarton Oaks, and began a complete rebuilding of house and garden that would occupy the rest of the decade. The reconstruction culminated in 1929 with the addition of a large Music Room at the rear, giving out onto the garden.27 Designed to incorporate architectural elements salvaged from historic interiors, the room featured a sixteenth-century stone chimneypiece from the Château de Théobon (southwest France) and two sixteenth-century red Verona marble arches from Italy (figure 7.2). The arches were installed on the east side of the room, and their carving was mirrored in the surround of the

Figures 7.2–7.3.

27

Dumbarton Oaks Music Room, c. 1931–5. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, AR.PH.MR.009–010. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss,” 23–37; Robert S. Nelson, “Private Passions Made Public: The Beginnings of the Bliss Collection,” in Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, edited by Asen Kiren (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005), 39–51.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

228

The work in history

Figures 7.2–7.3. (cont.)

newly constructed Palladian bay on the opposite wall (figure 7.3). The floor and ceiling were commissioned from the Parisian designer Albert Armand Rateau, famous for his freewheeling assimilation of a wide range of historical references into his style moderne interiors. For the Music Room, he produced a French Renaissance-style painted ceiling and a Versailles-pattern parquet floor, modeled at the Blisses’ demand on those in the Loire Valley château of Cheverny. The artworks chosen to complete the room demonstrate the strong preference for block colors, hieratic and sculpted forms that provided a unifying thread through the Blisses’ extremely varied collecting interests. Sacred works were particularly prominent, showing how the religious objects that made up a large portion of their acquisitions were absorbed into the secular interior. The walls were hung with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, including a late Gothic Christ and the Virgin purchased to celebrate the Blisses’ marriage in 1908. Among the artworks chosen were a fourteenth-century altarpiece by Bernardo Daddi and a stunning El Greco Visitation, as well as medieval French and German sculptures of the Virgin and Child. The Music Room organized these objects in ways not easily encompassed by straightforward opposition with public museum practices. There is no

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

229

systematic chronological or geographical order to the display. At the same time, the incorporation of the artworks into the setting testifies to a historicizing desire to make the house a museum in which the new context for exhibition has strong echoes of the past. The boundary was further blurred when the Blisses decided to donate their house and collections to Harvard University to found a museum, a gift they began to prepare as early as 1932. And while the Blisses seem to have deliberately excluded the really new from the décor of the room, they repeatedly urged the architect in charge of the project to aim for “simplicity, broad lines, large space” – note the catchwords of neoclassical aesthetics in play – and the disparate architectural and decorative elements were incorporated into an overall design of strong formal symmetry and balanced dimensions. The newly commissioned murals by Allyn Cox that decorate the staircase walls leading to the Music Room depict classical architectural ruins and classically inspired Italian Renaissance buildings, surrounded by trompe l’oeil baroque-style frames. James Carder suggests that these were intended to match four late eighteenth-century paintings of ruins that the Blisses intended to hang in the corridor leading to the stair.28 At the same time, they can be read as gestures toward the creative possibilities offered by the recombination of historical fragments and forms. Robert Bliss described the Music Room at Dumbarton Oaks as “a delightful medley of Italian renaissance, French eighteenth century, Georgian and American!,”29 underlining how the room was an experiment in the consolidation of European material culture in a new American context, the construction of an architectural “frame” that would bring the historical treasures it displayed into new relationships with each other and with the present.30 The project to commission a new work from Stravinsky whose first performance would take place in this room was apparently Boulanger’s idea, brought to fruition in spring 1937 when both she and the composer were in the United States.31 Stravinsky had arrived just before Christmas, 28

29 30

31

James N. Carder, “The Architectural History of Dumbarton Oaks and the Contribution of Armand Albert Rateau,” in A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 93–115. Robert Bliss to Lawrence Grant White, January 20, 1927, cited in Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss,” 27. This approach extended to the display of all of the objects, including pre-Columbian and Byzantine works, that the Blisses collected. When Dumbarton Oaks opened its doors to the public in 1941, both the essentially domestic character of the space and the aesthetically driven presentation of material drew comments; according to Hanns Swarzenski, “[Dumbarton Oaks] is the first museum in the history of collecting to emphasize in its presentation the purely artistic importance of material which the old historic museums arranged so unattractively in dusty, overcrowded cases that it would tend to frighten and bore any visitor except the scientific specialist” (“The Dumbarton Oaks Collection,” Art Bulletin 23 (1941): 77, cited in Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss,” 26). On this tour see Asen Kiren, “Sacred Art, Secular Context,” in Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, edited by Asen Kiren (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005), 17.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

230

and in January began a lengthy tour that finished with the New York premiere of his Jeu de cartes on April 27. Boulanger was on a shorter visit – the first since 1925 – from April 5 to May 4, mainly based in New York. She saw Stravinsky there, attending the premiere of his ballet and the reception afterward, before traveling to Washington two days later to visit the Blisses.32 Boulanger, Stravinsky and Dushkin sailed back to Europe together on May 5 on the Paris, and during the voyage the details of the commission were confirmed with the composer.33 On her arrival home, Boulanger telegrammed Mildred Bliss to communicate Stravinsky’s acceptance and to propose an instrumental chamber work of Brandenburg Concerto dimensions.34 The choice of model had a particular resonance for Boulanger. The fifth Brandenburg Concerto had featured on the first full concert she had directed for her main Parisian patron, the princesse de Polignac; the princess gave her a silver letter-opener engraved with the opening two bars of the music and the date to commemorate the event.35 The commission came at exactly the right time, when Stravinsky was in considerable financial difficulty, as Boulanger well knew. And whether or not she and the composer had discussed the idea of a Stravinskian take on the baroque concerto grosso before she approached the Blisses, the outlines of the project were congenial, fitting squarely into his compositional preoccupations at the time. Building on his initial neoclassic experiments of the previous decade, Stravinsky’s works of the 1930s engaged even more deeply with historical styles and forms in ways that explicitly drew attention to the continuities and discontinuities wrought by his transformations, and to his own position within the European tradition.36 Mildred Bliss – perhaps encouraged by Boulanger – hoped that her cherished house and garden might figure in this creative process. In the summer of 1937, she used Dushkin as messenger to send dozens of photographs to the composer, mainly of the building’s exterior and extensive gardens but including images of the Music Room. In a joking letter to Stravinsky, Dushkin asked if Bliss thought the new work was going to be 32

33

34 35 36

A letter to Stravinsky from Boulanger’s pupil Mary Havemeyer (Ch-Bps, Box 28, April 1937) mentions meeting the composer in Boulanger’s company at the reception. Mildred Bliss’s 1937 appointment book (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.32, Box 8) notes that Boulanger visited Dumbarton Oaks April 30 to May 1. On April 30, they had dinner with several other guests; the evening of May 1 is marked “(Stravinsky) X / Boulanger music,” suggesting that Boulanger and the Blisses dined alone to discuss the commission. On May 7, Stravinsky, Boulanger and the Dushkins dined together at the captain’s table; the printed guest list and menu (including caviar, consommé, sole, asparagus, capon, salad and dessert) is preserved in Ch-Bps, Box 72. Telegram NB to Mildred Bliss, Ch-Bps, [May 1937]. Paris, Musée de la Musique, E981.3.8.256; a photograph figures in Laederich, ed., Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger, 246. Martha M. Hyde, “Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114–36; see also Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 56–66. As Walsh points out, the consolidatory mode was particularly characteristic of Stravinsky’s works written for America: Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 162.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

231

played all over the grounds.37 Firmly rejecting any whiff of a romanticized inspirational role that an interest in the photos might have suggested, Stravinsky replied in a similar vein, saying he wished that Bliss had sent him a check instead.38 The episode invites a gendered reading: Dushkin and Stravinsky assert their masculine professional bond by mocking Bliss’s feminine concerns for maison et jardin. But despite his disparaging response, Stravinsky may well have paid some attention to the Music Room’s architecture and décor. Although the garden photos are preserved in the Bliss file in the composer’s archive, the Music Room images referred to in the letters are missing, suggesting that they may have been kept separately and consulted during the composition of the new work. It is also likely that Boulanger and Dushkin, who had both performed in the Music Room, described it to the composer. In any case, Stravinsky wrote more diplomatically to Mildred herself in October. He told her that he had now finished the first movement, and confirmed that the piece would use no more instruments than she had specified, hoping that “their dynamism will suit the acoustic properties of the room in your beautiful house.”39 In the same letter, he declared that since he would be unable to come to the United States before the winter of 1939, he could not direct the concerto’s first performance. In his absence he wished for Boulanger to conduct. A few weeks later, Mildred Bliss asked Boulanger for advice on two draft concert programs for the new work’s premiere.40 The choice is slightly different in each draft, but both were for all-Stravinsky concerts, aiming to show the composer’s range through music from different moments of his career. Stravinsky’s reputation as a conductor was based principally on authoritative renditions of his own works, and the programs may reflect a moment in the planning when Bliss still hoped he could be persuaded to direct the Dumbarton Oaks premiere. But, in any case, such retrospectives, conducted by others as well as Stravinsky himself, had become common by the 1930s. It was on just such an all-Stravinsky program, with the composer on the podium, that the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto received its European premiere at the Salle Gaveau in June 1938.41

37

38 39

40 41

Dushkin to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, August 6, 1937: “Puisqu’elle vous envoie non seulement la photo de la ‘pièce’ où votre concert sera exécuté, mais aussi des bosquets, des fontaines, un parc très beau, des allées ombragées et non ombragées – peut-être desirera-t-elle qu’on joue votre oeuvre un peu partout?” After the premiere Dushkin made similar jokes about Mildred Bliss’s garden, her cat (whose collar had a bell that disturbed rehearsals) and the flock of earnest Boulanger students that attended the event (Bliss’s secretary Dorothy Kingsford to Dushkin, Ch-Bps, August 6, 1938, forwarded to Stravinsky with ms. additions by Dushkin). Stravinsky to Dushkin, Ch-Bps, August 8, 1937. Stravinsky to Mildred Bliss, carbon copy, Ch-Bps, October 25, 1937. At the time of the premiere he was apparently still unaware the house was called Dumbarton Oaks, however, which suggests any interest in the setting was relatively minor. Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 76. Mildred Bliss to NB, F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 143, December 13, 1937. As part of La Sérénade’s “Festival Igor Strawinsky”; see Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 330.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

232

However, for the world premiere at Dumbarton Oaks a month earlier, Boulanger instead persuaded Bliss to accept a program in which Bach’s music would not only echo in the fabric of Stravinsky’s work but also act as its frame. The concert would alternate Stravinsky’s new concerto and his Duo concertant for violin and piano with extracts from the cantatas (figure 7.4). The Duo concertant was a piece close to the hearts of both the Blisses and Boulanger. Stravinsky created it for duo performances with Dushkin, and the violinist’s important contribution to the work was acknowledged in a note to the printed score.42 Boulanger had tried to organize the first Paris performance in 1932 for the SMI, and, as a pianist, she performed both the entire work and extracts from it on her own concerts of the 1930s, usually juxtaposing it with Bach.43 For the Dumbarton Oaks concert, Dushkin would be joined in the Duo concertant by his fellow Bliss protégé, Beveridge Webster. The cantata extracts would be sung by Doda Conrad and Hugues Cuénod, members of Boulanger’s vocal ensemble who accompanied her on her 1938 US tour, while American musicians led by the violinist Sascha Jacobsen were engaged for the new concerto and the Bach accompaniments. Boulanger’s choices for Dumbarton Oaks were not only designed to highlight the Bach-Stravinsky comparisons that had characterized her teaching since the early 1920s. Her program was built on a series of interlocking textual and musical cycles, assembled into an entire “work” that resonated strongly with the concert’s setting. In earlier programs she had arranged extracts from Bach cantatas to form textual narratives, often around themes of suffering, death and redemption. Her first concert for the princesse de Polignac, for example, ended with a set made up of “Ach Gott, wie manches Herzelied,” in which the speaker asks God for help in enduring earthly pain, followed by “Liebster Gott, wenn will ich sterben,” which appeals for a good end to life, and “Es ist genug,” in which the speaker goes joyfully into death in the knowledge of divine grace.44 Boulanger also created narratives by combining Bach with other composers. At the Salle Gaveau in 1936, she used the entire cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 60, which ends with “Es ist genug”) as a prelude to her performance of Schütz’s oratorio on the Resurrection, the Historia der 42 43

44

See Igor Stravinsky [Strawinsky], Duo concertant pour violon et piano (Berlin: Édition Russe de Musique, 1933), 1: “Partie de Violon avec la collaboration de Samuel Dushkin.” See NB to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, June 19, 1932, on behalf of the SMI, attempting to organize a program at the École Normale that would include the first Paris performance of the Duo concertant along with other Stravinsky works. The concert did not take place during the 1932–3 season, the SMI’s last, perhaps for economic reasons: Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale, 326–7. Boulanger played the Eglogue II and Dithyrambe from the Duo concertant, with violinist Paul Makanowitsky, for concerts at the Interallié and the École Normale in 1935–6, juxtaposing them with a Bach Adagio (not identified but probably from the sonata in C major, BWV 1005). At the Salle Gaveau in January 1937, Boulanger and Makanowitsky played the complete BWV 1005 and complete Duo concertant in succession. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, June 30, 1933.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

Figure 7.4. Program, Dumbarton Oaks, May 8, 1938. Collection of the Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger. © Répertoire de Programmes de Concert en France.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

234

Auferstehung. Bach’s cantata was composed for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity, when the Gospel reading includes the miracle of Jairus’s daughter, whom Jesus raised from the dead (Matthew 9:18–26). The unknown poet of the cantata text presents this episode as a prefiguration of Jesus’s resurrection; and by juxtaposing Bach’s setting with Schütz, Boulanger reinforced the exegetical point. The sinner’s path through suffering and fear to acceptance, as traced in the cantata, acted as prelude to the oratorio’s presentation of Christ’s journey through the same stages, ending in the redemptive sacrifice that the cantata’s text had invited listeners to contemplate. This was a particularly resonant choice for a Lenten concert to benefit the semaine de bonté, a large-scale charity drive.45 The event also coincided with Boulanger’s annual period of mourning for her sister, which culminated each March with the emotional memorial service at the Trinité. In 1936 the Mass was even more intensely freighted with meaning, for it was the first year after her mother Raïssa’s death in March 1935, the first Requiem in which Raïssa was memorialized along with Lili, and Nadia was forcefully reminded she was now alone. The coincidence of the dates of these painful anniversaries with the church calendar meant that in her mind the death and resurrection of her loved ones mapped roughly onto the death and resurrection of Christ in the Lenten and Easter cycles of Catholic liturgy; and it could be argued that through commemoration and religious ritual, Boulanger herself yearly plunged into despair and emerged revived and consoled. Thoughts of this kind seem to have guided her selection of the cantata extracts that surrounded the performance of Stravinsky’s new concerto at Dumbarton Oaks. Preparation of the score with the composer in Paris in March 1938 coincided with the twentieth anniversary of Lili’s death. Boulanger had been in the United States since early February, teaching at Radcliffe and conducting a variety of university and professional concerts, including her first appearance with the Boston Symphony. Her American engagements stretched until June, but she nevertheless made a brief return to Paris in late March not only for the memorial Mass at the Trinité, but also for a special concert at the Interallié devoted to Lili’s works.46 Notes in Boulanger’s datebook reveal her struggle to find consolation in religion for the wave of grief and loneliness brought on by contemplation of her loss. She set aside March 19 to remember her mother and sister, and on the 20th 45

46

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195, March 18, 1936. The printed program begins with the invocation “To Christ Redeemer, Praise, Honor and Glory for all the centuries” and it was decorated with reproductions of Dürer woodcuts on the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Her datebook, F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102, makes it clear that she was in Paris by March 16, and sailed for the US again on the Normandie on March 23, arriving in Boston on the 29th. She met with Stravinsky on March 20 and 21, and conducted Lili’s works at the Interallié on the 22nd (program in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195). Léonie Rosenstiel (Nadia Boulanger, 295) was unaware of this return trip, and Doda Conrad erroneously states that she spent the anniversary of Lili’s death in retreat in New England (Conrad, Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe, 116–17).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

235

she wrote a passage from the King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 5:20, in her diary, linking it to her mother’s memory: “For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart. (Maman).” Continuing in French with her own reflections, she noted how the beauty of the day surrounding her and the evidence of the divine it provided was able to comfort her even if it could not erase her sorrow, and wishing she could always retain this sensation of the presence of God in life.47 Later that day she had the first of two meetings with Stravinsky to prepare the performance of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. The textual narrative traced by her Bach selection for the Washington concert begins with “Wie will ich mich freuen,” in which the speaker rejoices at the thought of death, when mortal sorrows will cease and she will shine like a star in divine joy. The sequence continues with three consecutive numbers from BWV 105, Herr gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht. In “Mein Gott, verwirf mich nicht,” the speaker freely confesses her sins and asks God not to turn her away; in “Wie zittern und wanken,” she then reflects on the torments of anxious conscience before concluding, in “Wohl aber dem, der seinen Bürgen weiss,” that the truly repentant are redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. Although their bodies will become dust their souls will be welcomed into the eternal court. The section ends with “Lass, Seele, kein Laden,” in which the speaker exhorts her soul to remain close to Christ to gain this reward through faith, once she is freed from bodily bonds. The second set of Bach extracts retraces the same curve toward divine union in even more dramatic terms. It begins with the bass aria “Beglückte Herde,” which like “Lass, Seele, kein Laden,” is an exhortation, this time directed toward the community of the faithful. Here the hope of faith’s reward makes life on earth bearable; Boulanger’s score is annotated “For the souls of believers the kingdom of God is close.”48 Completing the section are the two final numbers from O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, a cantata featuring solo parts for three characters: Fear, Hope, and a voice from Heaven. In the first of Boulanger’s extracts, a dialogue between Fear and the voice from Heaven, Fear’s passages describe the thoughts that prevent the soul from calmly and joyfully walking the path of death. These evocations of the soul’s anxieties are answered by the Voice from Heaven’s repetitions of a line from Revelations 14:13, expanded each time until the 47

48

F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102 (1), March 20, 1938: “Un de ces matins où on voit Dieu, la vérité – où l’on sait – le jardin est plein d’oiseaux, le ciel bleu, les clochers sonnent – et le coeur est triste – mais le coeur est gai. La vie – mais Dieu – vivre ainsi – tout serait juste, bien, facile, doux.” (One of those mornings when one sees God, the truth – when one knows – the garden is full of birds, the sky blue, the church bells ring – and the heart is sad – but the heart is joyful. Life – but God – to live that way – everything would be right, good, easy, sweet.) Boulanger was staying with her friends the Loudons during her short trip back from the US. F-LYc U Mon Bac 23 UFNB, Joh. Seb. Bach’s Kirchenkantaten, Vol. XXIII (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1876]), 112: “Pour les âmes croyantes le royaume de Dieu est proche.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

236

full verse, “Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord, from henceforth,” is complete. The heavenly voice is scored for bass, like the previous number in Boulanger’s sequence, “Beglückte Herde”; their juxtaposition resulted in a continuous role for the bass singer, Doda Conrad, as the source of divine assurance. Boulanger’s annotation of the solo line in her score, “idea of confident death / held notes in the Bass” further associates the voice with unwavering certainty through the musical characteristics of its line.49 Confidence restored, the soul resummons Hope; she will rest without fear in sleep. In the final number, “Es ist genug,” the speaker wishes the world good night and asks God for release, claiming “I go to heaven’s house / I go securely in peace / My suffering remains behind.” Thus, in each of the two Bach sections, an exploration – first of sin and repentance, then of doubt and fear – yields to certainty and redemption. Stravinsky’s Duo concertant and Dumbarton Oaks Concerto figure as the culminations of the narrative trajectory in each half, as wordless continuations during which listeners may imagine the realization of the speaker’s hopes for a merging with the divine. This reiterative narrative plan was underpinned by a musical arrangement employing Boulanger’s trademark formal symmetries (see table 7.1). Each half began with Bach and ended with Stravinsky, with the Duo concertant closing the first half and the new concerto providing a climactic finish to the second. The Bach selections were arranged to form a logical flat-side sequence in the first half, and a sharp-side sequence in the second. The symmetrical first group included three consecutive solo numbers from BWV105 – two recitatives and a central aria – framed by two duets to form a palindrome. The shorter second group is a sequence of solo, dialogue and chorale. The first Bach set closed on C minor, connecting smoothly to the cembalo-like repeated Cs that open the Duo concertant’s first movement. (The link Boulanger imagined toward the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the second half is even neater, as I will show.) Musical resonances and returns regularly punctuated not only the Bach sequences but also the alternation between Stravinsky and Bach. The opening duet from BWV146 features a lengthy instrumental ritornello with a fugato opening, a way of starting with Bach’s vocal music that looked forward to Stravinsky’s instrumental works later in the program. The Duo concertant, on the other hand, was an instrumental piece designed to evoke vocal music, as Stravinsky claimed in 1935 shortly after the work’s completion.50 And both the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and the Duo concertant are, of course, full of generic and specific references to Bach. The Dumbarton Oaks Concerto was designed from its inception as a modern-day Brandenburg: it features near-quotations of the third Brandenburg Concerto in its first 49 50

The annotation “idée de la mort confiante / notes tenues de la Basse” appears in the margin of “Beglückte Herde” at the close of the B section of the aria (ibid., 115). “Mon but était de faire une composition lyrique”: Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie, Vol. II: 177.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

Table 7.1. Bach cantata extracts performed at Dumbarton Oaks, May 8, 1938. Extract title

Source cantata

BWV

Genre

Key

Notes

Wie will ich mich freuen

Wie müssen durch viel Trübsal

146

Duet (tenor/bass)

F

Mein Gott, verwirf mich nicht Wie zittern und wanken Wohl aber dem, der seinen Bürgen weiss Lass, Seele, kein Leiden

Herr gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht

105

Recitative (alto)

B♭

2 oboes and strings; da capo F/d/F; lengthy instrumental introduction, fugato opening Secco recitative

00 00

105 105

Aria (soprano) Recitative (bass)

E♭ E♭

Oboe, 2 violins and viola (no cello); “layered” rhythms Accompanied recitative

Arg’re dich, o Seele, nicht

186

Duet (soprano/alto)

c

Two oboes, tenor oboe, strings; instrumental ritornello at beginning and end

Du Hirte Israel, höre O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort

104 60

D D

Secco recitative

00

60

Aria (bass) Recitative in dialogue (alto/bass) Chorale (SATB)

A

Chorus, strings

[Stravinsky, Duo concertant] Beglückte Herde, Jesu schafe Der Tod’ bleibt doch – Selig sind die Toten Es ist genug

[Stravinsky, Dumbarton Oaks Concerto] Notes: 1) BWV numbers and source cantatas were not identified in the program (see figure 7.4 above). In some cases an incipit could refer to more than one of Bach’s works (for example, “Mein Gott, verwirf mich nicht,” the incipit for two different recitatives from BWV 105 and BWV 33). In these cases the texts and translations distributed with the program confirm which piece was performed. 2) Boulanger had only two singers (tenor and bass) at her disposal, and used octave transposition for the duets and solo arias where necessary to accommodate them. The concluding chorale may have been performed by instruments alone.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

238

movement and the second Brandenburg in its finale, and more broadly adapts Bachian techniques and sonorities to Stravinsky’s style.51 Boulanger’s cantata choices aimed to bring out such similarities: for example, Bach’s combination of continuous throbbing sixteenth notes in the violins with lyric melody in “Wie zittern und wanken” helped prepare listeners for Stravinsky’s combination of motor rhythms in the piano with long-breathed violin lines in the Duo concertant. At the same time, the reiterative structure of the program and the return to Bach in the second half, after Stravinsky, meant that Bach could be heard in a new way. O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort features some of Bach’s most adventurous harmonic writing, and “Es ist genug” is among his most striking chorale settings. The melody’s emphasis is on the tritone A–D♯ – the focus of the first section of the chorale tune – and Bach’s highly chromatic harmonization brings the cantata to a close in A major, a fifth higher than its start (example 7.1). Alfred Dürr noted that the tritone melodic motif is a reworking of the final four notes of the chorale “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” with which the cantata opens. He interpreted the replacement of that chorale’s original D♮ with D♯ as a figure representing the soul’s passing from life to death. Eric Chafe points out that this upward trajectory matches the harmonic movement of the cantata’s penultimate movement, the recitative, “Der Tod’ bleibt doch,” which modulates by whole tones through E minor and F♯ minor to G♯ minor (in Chafe’s words, “an exceeding of the E major that Bach commonly associates with salvation, and with which the bass gives its answering message of comfort”) before finally arriving at A major in the closing chorale.52 Boulanger frequently chose “Es ist genug” for juxtaposition with contemporary works, to show how melodic and harmonic elements commonly associated with new music are already present in Bach. And its emphasis on A–D♯ provided a brilliant introduction to Stravinsky’s new concerto, which opens with repeated peals of its tonic pitch, so that the join between the two pieces – the A major final cadence of “Es ist genug” followed by the E♭ opening of Dumbarton Oaks – replicated the tritone melodic movement that opens the chorale tune. The juxtaposition creates the same effect as Boulanger’s imagined pairing of Frans Hals with Cézanne, promoting Bach’s credentials as modern master and rescuing his music from the museum at the same time as it anchored Stravinsky’s in history. 51

52

As Walsh notes, “The harmonically motionless first page . . . brilliantly translates the embroidered pedal harmonies of the Third and Sixth Brandenburg Concertos into a Stravinskian language of colliding wind and string timbres.” Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky, 162. Further on Bach references in the concerto and the Duo concertant, see Angelo Cantoni, La Référence à Bach dans les oeuvres néoclassiques de Stravinsky (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998), 287–96 and 340–1. Eric Chafe, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 194–5. The strangeness of “Es ist genug” was a draw for more than one twentieth-century composer (most notably Alban Berg, who used the melody for the finale of his Violin Concerto of 1935, a Requiem “to the memory of an angel”).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

239

Example 7.1. J. S. Bach, “Es ist genug” from BWV 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (after Johannes Sebastian Bach’s Werke, Vol. XII.2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1863), p. 190).

Like the biblical exegesis that provided one of its narrative threads, Boulanger’s concert constructed a story that emphasized the renewal of the past in the present and the presence of the future in the past. It was a demonstration of neoclassical aesthetics and of mystical religious sensibility

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

240

that was both highly characteristic of French cultural trends of the 1930s and deeply personal, strongly connected to Boulanger’s own life and her approach to ritual, memory and loss. And just as the formal symmetry of the Dumbarton Oaks Music Room provided an architectural frame for the diversity of its artworks – including the medieval and Renaissance religious art that imbued the room with sacred tones – the form of Boulanger’s program provided a frame for this complex commentary on the interaction of tradition and innovation in music, art and life. the work in performance and treasuring art Boulanger’s work turned the aristocratic salon into a classroom, just as she had done for her own salon on the rue Ballu. In her concert criticism she had emphasized that musical performance should be a source not only of pleasure to listeners, but also of progress; and Dumbarton Oaks not only represents the roots of her authority in pedagogy, but also became an intensely idealized space where music, performers, listeners and setting could all work together to produce the “communion in beauty” she conceived as ideal. A few days before the Dumbarton Oaks concert, Mildred Bliss wrote to Stravinsky describing how Boulanger approached the rehearsals: The big day is near and the intensity of our enthusiasm would make even you happy. Nadia will have five rehearsals and brings to them a spirit of religious vocation. She considers herself the herald of your great light, and very humbly, as only the great can do, approaches her task.53

When she wrote again shortly after the premiere, she exclaimed, “Nadia had an inspired idea when she proposed to have Bach performed in your company. Never has the apostolic succession had such a striking demonstration.”54 The word “demonstration” is key to the function of the event, as it was to all of Boulanger’s interwar work in performance; and the Dumbarton Oaks concert was a performative enactment of her aesthetic convictions, of the type she had been making in her lectures, lessons and classes since the early 1920s and in her concerts since 1933. But there is no remaining evidence in sound of the concert at Dumbarton Oaks, and Boulanger never recorded the concerto or any of the cantata extracts. In fact, although she performed Bach more than perhaps any other composer, she issued no recordings of his music in her lifetime, almost as if Bach’s 53

54

Mildred Bliss to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, May 4, 1938: “Le gd. jour approche & l’intensité de notre enthousiasme vs. ferait plaisir, même à vous! Nadia aura 5 répétitions & y apporte un esprit de sacerdoce. Elle se considère le porte-fanion de votre gde lumière & très humblement, comme seule le peut les grands – elle approche sa tâche.” Mildred Bliss to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, May 21, 1938: “Nadia eut une idée géniale quand elle nous proposa de faire chanter du Bach en votre compagnie. Jamais la succession apostolique n’eut elle une démonstration plus éclatante.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

241

music was so overwhelmingly monumental that to preserve it on record required far greater interpretive genius than she believed she possessed.55 She also still harbored a distrust of recording, despite the success of her own recent efforts – referring in her diary to studio sessions with “La Voix de Son Traître” (The Voice of his Traitor)56 – and may have felt that Bach, at least, should be spared the indignity of a medium that would always be second best to live performance. Boulanger also never recorded Stravinsky; here the authority of the composer as interpreter of his own music provided a further disincentive for any efforts of her own. But some deductions about how she performed the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto can be made from the score she used to conduct the premiere. During her brief return to France in March 1938, she met Stravinsky twice, and must have read sections of the score with him at the piano then, if she had not already done so in meetings just prior to her departure for America in late January.57 When she sailed back to Boston, she was holding the first two movements in corrected first proof, which had been returned from Stravinsky’s publishers at Schott.58 The following weeks saw a frenetic exchange of correspondence and music, as Boulanger and Stravinsky scrambled to get proofs of the piece’s third and final movement back from Strecker and to the United States in time for the premiere.59 Boulanger conducted from the proofs, and after the performance treasured the bound proof copy in the same way she did her score of Fauré’s Requiem, noting her performances of the piece on the inside cover and using it for later concerts even after Stravinsky had given her the final, much more legible, printed full score.60 As well as Stravinsky’s corrections, the proof copy features extensive annotations in Boulanger’s hand, including many added dynamics, articulations and other interpretive marks. 55

56 57

58 59

60

Boulanger did record Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) at the salon of Marcelle du Jarric de la Rivière, June 2, 1937; but the recording was never produced, perhaps because she was unhappy with the quality of the performance. The test pressings in Boulanger’s possession (now in F-Pn) were used posthumously for the collection Les Introuvables: Le Baroque avant le baroque, 4 CDs, EMI Classics 946351904 2 (2006). For example, F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 102 (1), entry for January 13, 1938, where Boulanger includes this pun on the French name of the label His Master’s Voice (La Voix de son Maître). Boulanger met Stravinsky on December 29, 1937 and again on January 22, just before she left for the United States (noted in her datebooks, F-Pn Rés. Vmf ms. 101 (1937) and 102 (1938). By this time Stravinsky had finished the first two movements of the concerto (Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 72). Stravinsky to NB, F-Pn NLa 108 (125), April 6, 1938, makes clear that Boulanger had taken the corrected proof from movements 1 and 2 with her after seeing him in Paris. Stravinsky sent a corrected proof for the third movement to Boulanger on April 6 and 11 (F-Pn NLa 108 (125–6)). In his letter of April 25, he confirmed that Strecker was sending the orchestral material on the same boat (pièces 128–9). Pièces 302–3 are supplementary corrections sent with the letter of April 11. Boulanger’s bound corrected proof is held at F-Pn Rés. Vma 315; F-Pn Vmg 22935 is her copy of the print, inscribed “À Nadia Boulanger, que j’aime et qui dirigea à Dumbarton Oaks pour la 1ère fois cette musique. IStrawinsky Paris juillet / 38.” Stravinsky also gave Boulanger the autograph of the two-piano arrangement (today at F-Pn ms. 17945).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

242

The concerto works through the juxtaposition of linear blocks, thrown into striking relationships through metric play. As is characteristic of Stravinsky’s later neoclassical works the lines – including the bass, which in these largely tonal pieces directs the harmonic movement – work independently, and come into alignment only to mark sectional divisions.61 The performance markings in Boulanger’s hand help to emphasize such formal and technical aspects of the piece right from the beginning (figure 7.5). Walsh describes the opening of the concerto as “bell-like,” calling it “one of the notable moments of pure sonority in Stravinsky.”62 The pealing effect is created by the E♭s and other diatonic notes that are repeated against the main thematic material, comprising two simultaneously sounding baroque-style figures. Boulanger included sfp markings designed to percussively emphasize the E♭ iambic strokes, which are split between the parts and metrically displaced through the page, starting further apart and progressively telescoping to shorter intervals. This arresting material returns at figure 11, the beginning of the development section of a loosely conceived sonata form. Just before its arrival, Boulanger added an mf marcato at the unison string passage, then a cresc and crescendo hairpin to build anticipation for the return. Where the E♭ material then arrives at 11, she wrote over the printed f markings, adding a series of sfp indications like those at the beginning, to reinforce both the formal division and the connection between the opening and the reprise (figure 7.6). In other places, Boulanger’s markings link linear or motivic entities, particularly where they contrast with the barring or are dislocated against the metric groupings of the underlying pulse. In movement 1, her phrasing in the string parts after rehearsal 9 articulates the successive octave and larger leaps over the bar line beginning on B♭, C and E♯ in the violins, before concentrating on the dolce rendition of the downward arc of the phrase, which is emphasized with an added slur in the cello and bass lines as well as the verbal marking (figure 7.7). These markings are exactly like those she used to bring out lines in Bach, as a comparison of the Dumbarton Oaks proofs with annotations to her cantata scores demonstrates, and underlines how her outlook to the performance of both was essentially the same, reflecting the structuralist approach she brought to the creation of the masterwork in sound. Mildred Bliss’s letter to Stravinsky after the concert suggests how Boulanger’s performance conveyed such an understanding of the concerto. Bliss first praised Boulanger’s analytical powers, then

61

62

Walsh comments (The Music of Stravinsky, 167) that the meter fragments “to a degree not heard in 3 5 his music since the Symphonies of Wind Instruments,” and that Stravinsky’s use of 16 and 16 bars to connect the linear entities puts them “into an oblique relationship that . . . suggests an analogy to cubism.” See also Hyde, “Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism,” 107. Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky, 166–7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

Figure 7.5. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 1. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; © 1938 Schott Music GMbH & Co. KG Mainz – Germany, worldwide rights except USA; © 1938 Chester Music Ltd., worldwide rights except the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and all so-called reversionary rights territories where the copyright is held jointly by Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG and Chester Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

244

The work in history

Figure 7.6. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 7. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; © 1938 Schott Music GMbH & Co. KG Mainz – Germany, worldwide rights except USA; © 1938 Chester Music Ltd., worldwide rights except the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and all so-called reversionary rights territories where the copyright is held jointly by Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG and Chester Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

commented on how hard the orchestra had to work to master Stravinsky’s “polyphonie serrée” (“tight polyphony”). She concluded with an appreciation that suggests Boulanger’s own vision of the piece: “I find [the Concerto] one of your most important works because of its design, whose purity of construction makes the variety and subtlety of the rhythms stand

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

245

Figure 7.7. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, annotated proofs of Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi♭ pour petit orchestre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), p. 6. F-Pn Rés. Vma 315. © Centre Nadia et Lili Boulanger and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; © 1938 Schott Music GMbH & Co. KG Mainz – Germany, worldwide rights except USA; © 1938 Chester Music Ltd., worldwide rights except the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and all so-called reversionary rights territories where the copyright is held jointly by Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG and Chester Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission. The correction of the misplaced slur in viola 2 is Stravinsky’s; the black pencil slurs are Boulanger’s.

out in the most fascinating way.”63 When the piece was included in a New York charity concert in March 1940, organized by Bliss on Stravinsky’s behalf, almost exactly the same words were used to present the piece to readers of the Times.64 63

64

Mildred Bliss to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, May 21, 1938: “je la trouve une de vos oeuvres les plus importantes par son dessein, dont la pureté de la charpente fait ressortir la variété et la subtilité des rythmes de la façon la plus intéressante.” “The concerto is said to differ from other works of its composer in character, revealing a new facet of his inventive powers. It has been mentioned as ‘distinguished by purity of form and almost classic simplicity, with a multiplicity of rhythms’.” “Benefit by Stravinsky,” New York Times, February 11, 1940. The unattributed quote is almost certainly from Bliss, who led the Committee for Relief in Allied Countries that the concert would benefit and who supplied the press releases to newspapers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

246

To judge from these comments and Boulanger’s markings, the effect of her performance of the concerto may well have been similar to Stravinsky’s own 1947 recording, which conveys the sense of distinct sections as well as the impression of complete linear entities layered above the underlying pulse.65 But by imagining Boulanger’s performance as similar to Stravinsky’s, I seem to engage in a rhetorical move that legitimates her interpretation by awarding a stamp of approval based on compositional authority: Boulanger’s work is Stravinsky’s work, therefore it is THE work. This is what Boulanger herself did, when using the composer’s prestige to promote her own approach to the performance of his music. But it is equally possible that resemblances between Stravinsky’s rendition and Boulanger’s went both ways. In fact, many of Boulanger’s interventions as the concerto’s first conductor became fixed in the notated score of the work itself, so that any performance of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto now reflects something of her interpretation. A large number of her markings to the proof copy appear in the published full score, produced in July 1938, though they do not figure in the first proofs or in Stravinsky’s corrections to them.66 Some of her annotations certainly resulted from work together, when Boulanger was in France in March; that this work occurred seems to be confirmed by her tempo notes based on both her own and Stravinsky’s metronomes.67 On some pages, particularly in the first movement, which were done in time for them to work on together in Paris, the interaction of their hands suggests simultaneous annotation. (For example, between rehearsals 6 and 11, where they seem to be exchanging red and black lead pencils in a more hastily done layer after the carefully drawn markings and comments in German that Stravinsky had written earlier, before sending the proof corrections to Schott). The first movement is the most heavily annotated with performance marks that were not included in either the first proofs or Stravinsky’s initial corrections. Most notably, these include virtually all of the sfps and marcato indications that characterize both the opening of the concerto and the return of the opening material at rehearsal 11.

65

66

67

Bliss wrote to Stravinsky after the concert (Ch-Bps, March 15, 1940) that she received from the concerto’s performance “the joy of an exquisite and sophisticated polyphony in a framework of great purity of line” – words that could have come right out of Boulanger’s mouth. Igor Stravinsky (cond.), Dumbarton Oaks Festival Orchestra, New York, Reeves Beaux Arts Studios, April 28, 1947, released on Classic C 2032/2033 and currently available on Igor Stravinsky: Composer and Performer, Vol. 2 (1930–1950), Andante Sc-A-1100 (2003). Schott had the autograph manuscript while the score was being engraved; Stravinsky wrote to Mildred Bliss on August 26, 1938 (carbon copy in Ch-Bps) that he had just received it back, and that he was having it bound before sending it to her. Since the autograph now at Dumbarton Oaks contains most of the dynamic markings that are not in the first proofs or Stravinsky’s initial corrections, he must have done further work on this score to bring it into alignment with the final print (which had been issued in July), before sending the autograph to the Blisses. Movement 2 is marked in NB’s hand “mt IS c. 120” and the original printed ♩ = 112 is crossed out and replaced by 108; the final printed score features the corrected tempo (p. 16). Movement 1 is marked “mon metronome 152”, matching the printed marking of ♩ = 152 in both the proofs and the final score.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

247

Boulanger continued to work on the score right up to the performance and afterwards, when she had returned from the United States. This is evident from passages where she made changes to pitches, but included question marks as a reminder to check the corrections with the composer (for example, in accidentals in the wind and violin parts in movement 2, in the four bars leading to rehearsal 38). She also noticed anomalies in rhythmic groupings: for example, in the build-up to the final cadence of the first movement. The passage is built on overlapping, asymmetrical ascending scales that alternate between upper strings and winds, and was originally presented as two bars of 9 5 16 followed by a bar of 8. Boulanger annotated the bar to show the beat pattern but wrote a query in the margin “58?”; in the final score the measure is printed as 11 16, with the added indication “battre à 5,” a clearer way of indicating the relationship to the preceding bar. In a letter to Stravinsky just after the premiere, she wrote that she had identified a number of remaining errors and problems, involving among other things notation and “repliques insuffisantes” (that is, musical repetitions or replies whose relationships were not adequately brought out in the score), and that she hoped he could wait until her return to France in June before sending the final version to the printers.68 Boulanger used her role as the first performer to participate in the notated text of the Concerto in a way she had never done before when helping with Stravinsky’s publication projects. Though she was accustomed to working through his music at the piano, with her performing groups and, in at least one case, had used comparison of recorded performance with the score to identify notational problems, she had never been so extensively involved at such an early stage in the production of a Stravinsky score.69 Her name does not appear on the printed piece as Dushkin’s did for Duo concertant, and I am not arguing that their role is the same. She did not provide the kind of detailed technical instrumental advice that Dushkin supplied for the earlier work. At the same time, her participation almost literally as a “sounding board” in the final phase of the work’s production was important. Her annotations conveyed a particular reading of the work’s formal, linear and rhythmic properties and were aimed at producing that understanding through performance. And incorporation of some elements of her approach

68

69

NB to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, May 15, 1938. Boulanger was back in France by Stravinsky’s birthday on June 18, which she notes in her datebook, but she recorded no meetings with him that month. The composer came to Fontainebleau in July and participated in a performance of the concerto there (FPn Rés. Vmf ms. 102, entries July 20, 22 and 28) though this was possibly too late for any further corrections. Some corrections still did not figure in the final print of the orchestral score in July, such as the D♭ in the flute, movement 3, one before 65, beat 2. Francis, “A Dialogue Begins,” describes Boulanger’s use of the recording to identify inconsistencies in the score. Throughout the 1930s she used performances with her students and vocal ensemble as a tool for correcting proofs of new compositions (see for example Igor Markevitch’s Paradis perdu in 1934, discussed in Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” 451–2).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

248

to the work into the final printed score preserved aspects of her analysis for reproduction in future interpretations. It was perhaps some sense that her interpretation had become part of the work itself that conditioned Boulanger’s intense personal identification with the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. This was strong enough for her to make a bid to control performances in America following the premiere. Shortly before the concert, she wrote to Stravinsky asking for exclusive rights to conduct the piece in the United States for a year, whenever he was unavailable to direct it himself: It seems that having so associated my life with your work here this year, that I would give anything – if you do not come yourself – to have the extraordinary privilege of making the Concerto known here. Forgive me if you find this request indiscreet; understand that only my deep attachment to that which you are for us all, and not dumb ambition, guides me. It comes from a sort of pride in knowing what this concerto represents.70

Boulanger wrote to Stravinsky’s publisher Willi Strecker at the same time to air her request. Horrified at the potential loss of income that would result from refusing performances to Stokowski, Koussevitsky, Klemperer and other star conductors who might wish to take up the new piece, Strecker immediately wrote to Stravinsky to squelch the idea. Unlike Dushkin, who had a monopoly on performances of the Violin Concerto for two seasons, Boulanger would not be given any rights, however temporary, over the work. Her gallery in sound, designed to display the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in a particular light, was never repeated in the same way, and there was little public discussion of her role in the genesis and first performance of the piece. The same cannot quite be said about Mildred and Robert Bliss. From soon after its completion, the concerto’s reception navigated a contradictory path between images of the self-sufficient artist as genius (stressing independence and originality) and visions of a pre-Romantic world of beneficent patrons and artisan musicians. The final publication of the orchestral score in July 1938 included a cover by Stravinsky’s artist son Theodore, featuring a neo-baroque decorative motif that combined musical instruments in the manner of the gilded medallions embellishing the boiseries of historic French interiors (figure 7.8). By this time the work’s title had changed: what had appeared in the proofs as a concerto “pour petit orchestre” had become the more traditionally aristocratic-sounding “pour orchestre de chambre” and the place and date of the premiere were enshrined in the title: Dumbarton Oaks 8-V-38.71 In an interview preceding the first 70

71

NB to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, April 19, 1938: “il me semble avoir tant associé ma vie à votre oeuvre cette année ici que je donnerais je ne sais pas quoi pour, si vous ne venez pas, avoir l’insigne privilège de faire connaître le Concerto ici. Pardon si vous trouvez cette demande indiscrète, seul mon attachement profond à ce que vous êtes pour nous tous, et non une stupide ambition, me guide, sentez-le. Il s’agit d’une sorte de fierté de savoir ce que ce concerto représente.” At Mildred Bliss’s request: see her letter to NB of May 6, 1938 (F-Pn NLa 56 (240–1)).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The art of assembling art

249

Figure 7.8. Front cover, Igor Stravinsky, Concerto en mi♭ pour orchestre de chambre (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1938), copy with dedication to Nadia Boulanger, F-Pn Vmg 22935. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France; © 1938 Schott Music GMbH & Co. KG Mainz – Germany, worldwide rights except USA; © 1938 Chester Music Ltd., worldwide rights except the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and all so-called reversionary rights territories where the copyright is held jointly by Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG and Chester Music Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

European performance, Stravinsky presented himself as in the same relation to the Blisses as Bach to Frederick the Great – that Frenchified collector of art and music – for the Brandenburgs. Though Stravinsky got the patron wrong, the intent to align himself in relation to a noble benefactor is clear.72 72

La Scène, June 7, 1938 (clipping in Ch-Bps); Stravinsky also evoked Frederick the Great in a letter to Strecker (Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 77). Bach’s concerti are dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg. Though negative reactions were mainly motivated by dislike for Stravinsky’s musical directions of the late 1930s, some sense that he was abandoning his compositional prerogatives and catering to patrons’ tastes may have contributed to the critical slating the concerto received after the European premiere. See Walsh, Second Exile, 77–9, for a discussion of how critics’ views differed from the enthusiastic reception by the socialite audience for the concert.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

The work in history

250

In the American reception of the piece, interest in the autograph score of the work often borrowed museum and collector vocabulary to describe its significance. In February 1940, Stravinsky conducted a benefit concert at New York’s Town Hall, organized by Mildred Bliss and including a performance of the concerto; the article in the New York Times noted the circumstances of its origins and commented, The original score [of the concerto], which belongs to the Dunbarton Oaks [sic] library, is now on loan at the Library of Congress and ultimately will become the property of Harvard University, as will the other art treasures of the Dunbarton Oaks library collection.73

And Mildred Bliss understood Stravinsky’s work itself as part of the collection she and her husband were assembling, intimately connected to the place she conceived as that collection’s home. In her letter to the composer after the premiere, she thanked him “very sincerely and warmly for having increased the yield in beauty of Dumbarton Oaks”; she told him that its gardens were “a charming prelude to all that subtle and varied polyphony, which stretches the ear, the sensibility and the awakened soul.”74 But in an interesting further extension of the collector mentality that inspired these comments, Bliss included Boulanger and her performance as part of the “yield in beauty” at which her patronage was aimed, writing after the premiere that “It is sweet to me to know that from now on you are part of Dumbarton Oaks, there where my heart will always be.”75 Bliss’s letter gestures toward the interpretive work essential to the production of Stravinsky’s concerto, which not only brought the piece into being at a particular time and place and in a particular way, but was in an important sense essential to the treasure of art that it would become. 73 74

75

New York Times, February 11, 1940, “Benefit by Stravinsky.” Mildred Bliss to Stravinsky, Ch-Bps, May 21, 1938: “Merci très sincèrement et très amicalement d’avoir augmenté le rendement de beauté de Dumbarton Oaks;” “Vous m’avez écrit que vous aviez de la joie à travailler cette oeuvre. Cela se sent. Il y va d’une sérénité de joie de vivre – mais de vivre par l’intelligence et l’esprit – et les jardins de Dumbarton Oaks sont un prélude charmant à toute cette polyphonie subtile et variée qui exerce l’oreille, la sensibilité et l’esprit éveillé.” Mildred Bliss to NB, F-Pn NLa 56 (240–1), May 16, 1938: “Il m’est doux de savoir que dorénavant vous faites partie de Dumbarton Oaks, là où sera mon coeur à tout jamais.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.010

Conclusion

Shortly before the premiere of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto Boulanger wrote to Stravinsky to express the feelings her work on the piece inspired. Confirming her belief in the musical masterwork as an article of faith, she told the composer: Thank you? My thoughts go further than that – because the work of art, to a certain degree, is an image of God. (I cannot explain, but I know so well what proof flows from what is beautiful, from what is.)1

But many of Boulanger’s certainties would soon be severely tested. After her brilliantly successful tour of the United States in spring 1939, she spent the summer at Fontainebleau with her American students as usual, despite the increasingly tense international climate.2 At the end of August she traveled to England, giving concerts at Canterbury Cathedral and the Chapter House just days before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Under the ancient cathedral’s stained glass, Doda Conrad sang Poulenc’s poignant setting of the Renaissance poet Charles d’Orléans’s “Priez pour paix” (Pray for peace), completed only the year before at the height of the Munich Crisis.3 Less than a week later, France and Germany were at war. Boulanger tacked between Fontainebleau, Paris, and her country house in Gargenville, helping her foreign students to leave and packing for her own retreat from the city. Her BBC and London concert appearances that had been planned for the autumn were canceled. Several of her Paris students took refuge at her country house in Gargenville, where some of her summer pupils were still staying. In early September Stravinsky arrived 1

2

3

CH-Bps, NB to Stravinsky, April 19, 1938: “Vous remerciez? Ma pensée va plus loin – car l’oeuvre d’art, à un certain degré, est une image de Dieu. (Je ne peux pas dire, mais je sais si bien quelle évidence découle de [ce] qui est beau, de ce qui est.)” For a first-hand account of the summer and early autumn by one of Boulanger’s Fontainebleau students, Elizabeth Saylor, see Kendra Leonard, The Conservatoire Américain: A History (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 39–48. The concerts took place on August 26 and 27, according to ms. notes in Boulanger’s concert program archive at F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195; she described the moving setting in F-Pn NLa 37 (113), NB to Poulenc, October 6, 1939. For Doda Conrad’s contrasting account (he found the ambiance of the concert sinister, and felt that the impending war meant that neither performers or audience had their hearts in it; and he says that the concert was moved to the crypt because so few listeners came), see Conrad, Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe, 140–1.

251

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

252

unannounced, gas mask in hand, driven out of Paris by the nightly air raids. The Valéry family, staying at their nearby house in Juziers, were regular visitors. For a few weeks, Gargenville became a haven where discussion of Stravinsky’s upcoming lectures for Harvard or conflicting opinions on Wagner could distract the inhabitants at least somewhat from the chaos.4 Poulenc, who was still young enough for military service, awaited his marching orders at his own country house in Noizay. In late September he wrote a somber letter to Boulanger, imagining the effect of the war on music and telling her that he had left a letter for her in case he did not survive.5 Her response described her own state of mind: “I am, as we all are, especially those of us who are old, stupefied by fatigue, by interior disarray, by anxiety spread over such an expanse that we don’t even know.”6 But the rest of her letter seems aimed at comforting both Poulenc and herself through insistence on the enduring value of art and artistic creation. She told him of the performance of his prayer for peace at Canterbury, which she presented as a deep and significant event that confirmed the power of ideas. And she described how the presence of Stravinsky and Valéry brought luminous days to Gargenville, as if in her mind the surrounding menace acted only to intensify their brilliance.7 Stravinsky left Gargenville on September 21 to embark from Bordeaux, and was shepherded to the United States by Boulanger’s pupil Katharine Wolff in time to take up his Harvard appointment.8 Though Boulanger had begun to consider leaving herself, she stayed on through the winter. Despite frequent illnesses and the strain of looking after her little group at Gargenville, 4

5

6

7

8

Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 312–13; Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 102–3. See also Paul Valéry’s letter to Poulenc, October 5, 1939, edited in Poulenc, Correspondance, 84–5: “Je parle souvent, très souvent de vous avec Nadia, notre voisine de Gargenville, qui me voiture très gentiment. Elle hébergeait Stravinsky jusqu’à son départ pour l’Amérique, d’où quantité de conversations entre nous 3, sur . . . la musique!” [I speak of you often, very often, with Nadia, our Gargenville neighbor, who is very kindly driving me around. She was putting up Stravinsky until his departure for America, leading to many conversations and discussions between the three of us, on . . . music!” Boulanger was by this time regularly driving Valéry for his trips back into Paris. F-Pn NLa 95 (100–1), Poulenc to NB, [September 26, 1939], edited in Poulenc, Correspondance, 482–3. It seems likely that Poulenc wanted Boulanger to act as a literary executor for some of his music in the event of his death. F-Pn NLa 37 (113), NB to Poulenc, October 6, 1939: “Or, je suis, comme nous sommes tous, surtout ceux d’entre nous qui sommes agés, hébétée de fatigue, de désarroi intérieur, d’angoisse répandue sur de telles étendues qu’on ne sait plus.” Ibid. Boulanger describes the concert, then continues: “I assure you, one measures then the grandeur of things, the value of ideas – their reach, their power. You are such a great musician, Francis, and a great heart.” [Je vous assure, on mesure alors la grandeur des choses, la valeur des pensées – leur portée, leur pouvoir. Que vous êtes un grand musicien, cher Francis, et un grand coeur]. She closed the letter, “I am leaving in a minute for Gargenville – I’ll write again from there – and will tell you of Stravinsky, of Valéry, of those extraordinary hours inscribed against the turmoil, luminous, bearers of the future – I’ll tell you of what seems far away already, separated from life, gone into that world of oblivion and presence.” [Je pars dans un instant pour Gargenville – je vous récrirai – vous parlerai de Strawinsky, de Valéry, de ces heures extraordinaires s’inscrivant dans le drame, lumineuses, porteuses d’avenir – je vous dirai qui est loin déjà, séparé de [l]a vie, entré dans ce monde d’oubli et de présence.] F-Pn NLa 117 (185–6), Katharine Wolff to NB, September 23, 1939. See also Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 103.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

253

she returned to the energetic involvement with wartime charities that had characterized her life during World War I. Now an established concert director, she was able not only to collect funds by correspondence as before, but also to mount performances. These often had emotional and moral as well as monetary goals. Her concerts for the Union Interalliée in the spring of 1940 highlighted themes of prayer and peace; at the Dutch Embassy in Paris she gave an all-Bach concert in aid of Finland, using her by now wellestablished practice of productively combining extracts from different cantatas to construct a narrative of prayer for relief from suffering.9 With Mildred Bliss and other wealthy American patrons on the ground in the United States, Boulanger helped to organize a Stravinsky concert in New York in aid of French musicians in distress, to be conducted by the composer and including a performance of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, and whose proceeds would be distributed in Europe by Boulanger.10 She mounted a series of benefits with Marie-Blanche de Polignac, including an early April concert in which Boulanger directed the Orchestre de l’Armée in Haydn and Mozart, and an unnamed soldier played the flute solo in Fauré’s “Nocturne” from Shylock. Later in the month she conducted a similar concert with the symphony of the army’s cultural center, the Orchestre symphonique du Centre musical et théâtral d’armée, where Olivier Messaien had just taken up a post.11 When German forces invaded France in May, Boulanger decided to drive her elderly friend Loulou Gonet south to safety in Uzerches, where Boulanger’s friends the Sachses had a family house, and she was prevented from returning to Gargenville by the massive June 1940 civilian exodus from Paris. Throughout the winter of 1939–40, Mildred Bliss had been negotiating for teaching positions in American institutions on Boulanger’s behalf. After a nerve-wracking stay in Vichy in July and August, during which she frantically disbursed the large sums of charity money she had raised in the spring, Boulanger was able to obtain an exit permit to the United States. A post awaited her there at the Longy School in Cambridge, directed by her former pupil and suitor, Melville Smith. In mid October she and her American student Ethel Thurston managed to travel via Barcelona and Madrid to Lisbon, where they joined the crowds of refugees awaiting ships.12 Finally arriving in New York in November 1940, Boulanger would remain in America until after the end of World War II. Boulanger’s wartime exile was very different from her trip in 1925 as an exciting new musical personality, or her returns in the late 1930s as an established master figure. She was now one among a flood of expatriate Europeans, a refugee where formerly she had been a cherished guest. 9 10 11 12

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (March 13, 1940). Correspondence between Bliss and Boulanger and the program for the all-Stravinsky concert, which took place at Town Hall on March 14, 1940, are in HUA, HUG (FP) 76.32, Box 9. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (April 12, 1940). On Boulanger’s final months in France, see Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 314–16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

254

Compared to many emigrés, Boulanger was in a comfortable position. She had been welcoming Americans to France for decades, and had spent significant amounts of time since 1936 strengthening her ties with US institutions; she had both the English language ability and the connections to land on her feet. Wealthy friends opened their homes to her, she had regular income from teaching, and she was able to charge further fees for lectures and performances. Though she sent large amounts of money to Europe in an attempt to help friends and students there, enough remained for her to live reasonably well. At the same time, she was desperately worried about her friends, and particularly about her students. The lack of news, especially from occupied and battle zones, only heightened her apprehension. Not only did she fear for their lives and health – especially for the many young men she knew to be in military service or prison camps – but she also mourned the wartime disruption to their musical training and the growth of their careers, which to her represented a tragic waste of promise and talent. And she dreaded the destruction of everything that for her represented home, in the personal, material and broader cultural senses. Boulanger’s anxiety was compounded by guilt over leaving France when many of her closest friends and most beloved students had remained. During World War I, she had shared the distress, and had been able to work in what she felt was a meaningful way toward alleviating suffering and defending French culture and institutions. During World War II, in contrast, her departure seemed to her to represent a form of cowardice or, worse, betrayal. Boulanger’s wartime letters express these overwhelming feelings of fear, guilt and self-recrimination.13 She suffered from migraines and other seemingly stress-induced conditions, and soon became volatile and difficult, alternating unpredictably between authoritarian declaration of her wishes and vacillation about her plans in a way that caused endless problems for the former students who employed her or helped to organize her courses, lectures and performances. In her biography of Boulanger, Leonie Rosenstiel suggested that Boulanger’s irascibility stemmed from inability to adapt to the loss of control over the people who had obeyed her without question when she was still their teacher.14 More recently, Kimberly Francis has argued compellingly that the situation was far more serious, and that Boulanger’s instability resulted from the extreme emo13

14

Letters to Marcelle de Manziarly (F-Pn NLa 289) to Mildred Bliss (HUA, HUG (FP) 76.32, Box 9) and to Doda Conrad (cited in Conrad, Grandeur et mystère, 154–5) from 1941 and 1942 convey with varying levels of intimacy Boulanger’s distress and shame. Kimberly Francis, “A Most Unsuccessful Project: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphony in C, 1939–45,” Musical Quarterly 94 (2011): 250–1, cites a letter to Stravinsky from March 1941 which conveys particularly sharply Boulanger’s sense of having failed her country. In 1944, Boulanger wrote to Winifred Johnstone that her absence during the worst of the struggle and for the liberation of Paris was unforgivable (Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 327). Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 321.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

255

tions and survivor guilt she experienced as unwilling exile, and in particular from the impossibility of assimilating to American life without feeling this to be the ultimate betrayal of herself and her home.15 While Boulanger battled her demons, she transferred the kind of musical charity work that had marked her last winter in Paris to her new context. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, she wrote to Mildred Bliss, “The weightier the events are around us, the more we must seek out those things they cannot destroy . . . You can’t be mad at me for what may be an illusion, but one to which I would like to dedicate my last active years.”16 Her concerts became for her a mode of realizing this illusion: and she presented centuries of music and art as evidence that higher human values would somehow prevail. Although her persistence often caused frustration among more pragmatically minded patrons who wanted to direct their resources and efforts toward more direct relief, Boulanger continued to push her American sponsors to invest in the musical future and the preservation of the musical past by supporting individual composition students and mounting musical events.17 In some cases Boulanger conducted some of her most heterogeneous programs ever, as if trying to represent the entire European tradition as a precious whole. For example, in May 1942 she mounted a highly mixed program in New York to benefit French relief societies. The concert was organized within the same upper-crust circle in which Boulanger had moved in Paris, hosted by the French Institute and coordinated by the couturière Elsa Schiaparelli; the singers were now mainly American, however, though Doda Conrad – who had recently joined the US Army – was able to perform before being posted abroad.18 Similarly, her pre-war connections facilitated a War Savings Victory Concert at Harvard in April 1943 with members of the Boston Symphony, featuring a heterogeneous program that included the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (“contributed for this special performance by the composer, Igor Strawinsky, and the publishers”) and a series of Bach extracts chosen for their message.19 Motives of nationalism and solidarity with France often guided concert organizers who called on Boulanger’s skills. Richard Wragley, a Baltimore church musician who arranged for Boulanger to lecture on Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbanden during a sacred music festival in May 1941, wrote to her: 15 16

17

18

19

Francis, “A Most Unsuccessful Project,” 245–51. NB to Mildred Bliss, December 6, 1940 (HUG (FP) 76.32, Box 9): “Plus les évènements sont lourds, plus il faut chercher ce qu’ils ne peuvent pas détruire . . . Vous ne pouvez m’en vouloir de ce qui peut être illusion, mais à quoi je voudrais consacrer mes dernières années actives.” Even the ever-faithful Mildred Bliss had to remind Boulanger that her own full-time work for the Red Cross and Robert Bliss’s crucial role in international diplomacy meant that their support for musicians was bound to be spasmodic (Mildred Bliss to NB, June 5, 1940 (HUG (FP) 76.32, Box 9). The program is held in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (May 7, 1942); documents concerning the concert are in Rés. Vm dos. 147. On Conrad’s military service see Doda Conrad, Dodascalies: Ma chronique du XXe siècle (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 220–83. F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (April 22, 1943).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

256

Our hearts are filled with the sadness of your position and your countrymen’s and we rejoice that we can give you the small comfort of a haven in our land. Our sympathies are in one direction alone and we pray that the great French nation will soon be restored to its rightful freedom and happiness.20

When Elliott Carter, working in the US Office of War Information, was charged with organizing radio broadcasts and stocks of recordings for American troops in Europe in 1944, he naturally turned to Boulanger: French music was needed – the more comprehensively recorded German symphonic and Italian operatic repertory was obviously less suitable – and he asked for her help in making recordings of a whole range of historical and recent music from France.21 For Boulanger herself the situation was more complex. Her performances were part of her struggle to transform her personal losses as well as those of her country into something with higher meaning. Her commitment to the musical work became a way to combat the disintegration of her sense of self in exile, and to maintain the connection to her own past. In a 1941 letter to Conrad, she wrote: I drag with me the shame of having left (and though I couldn’t have done otherwise, that doesn’t change anything at all). I carry around my old incurable wounds, whose healing would make me despair: they are all that remains to me of a past that was so sweet, so dear and so beautiful, that, if I were allowed to choose [whether or not to heal], my decision would be without hesitation. Nevertheless other duties call, and we have to find again our enthusiasm and our energy. . . . We will set ourselves to work, and we will run up against obstacles that we will end up, if not vanquishing, at least diminishing; we will be touched to the bottom of our souls by the music of a poor man, as miserable as we are, in fact, and however sad and miserable he was (after all, just like us), because it was given to him to encounter God, and to make us encounter Him, everything – even our most profound and legitimate distress – will take on a different color. And between friendship and art, we will quickly find again the real meaning of life, its beauty and our love for it.22

20 21

22

F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 146, W. Richard Wragley to NB, December 23, 1940. F-Pn NLa 59 (289–90), Elliott Carter to NB, February 1, 1944. Carter explains that the French catalogue needs music by Fauré, Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Duparc, Poulenc, Milhaud, and Lili Boulanger, but also Couperin, Lully and Rameau; more unexpectedly perhaps, he asks her for help recording opéras comiques by Auber, Boieldieu, Hérold, Chabrier and Messager, which he remembers reading with her in the evenings at Gargenville. NB to Doda Conrad, March 18, 1941, edited in Conrad, Grandeur et mystère, 154–5: “Moi, je traîne avec la honte d’être partie (et je ne pouvais rien faire d’autre, je le sais, ce qui ne change rien à rien). Je promène de vieilles blessures inguérissables que je serais désespérée de guérir: elles sont tout ce qui me reste d’un passé si doux, si cher et si beau, et, à bien choisir, ma décision serait sans hésitation, je crois. Mais enfin, d’autres devoirs sont là, et nos enthousiasmes, nos énergies, il faut les retrouver. . . . Nous allons nous mettre à travailler, à nous heurter à des difficultés que nous finirons, sinon par vaincre, du moins à diminuer; nous serons touchés jusqu’au fond de l’âme par la musique d’un pauvre homme, aussi misérable que nous, en somme, et assez misérable et triste celui-là (après tout, comme nous encore) et, parce qu’il lui aura été de rencontrer Dieu, et de nous le faire rencontrer, tout, même nos plus profondes et légitimes détresses, changera de couleur. Et entre l’amitié et l’art, nous aurons vite retrouvé le sens réel de la vie, sa beauté et notre amour pour elle.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

257

Boulanger’s letter ties her musical work to her sense of loss, viewed not as trauma to be overcome or forgotten but as pain that can be transformed by music into a renewal of life. The epigraph that had always accompanied invitations to the Mass in memory of Lili Boulanger – “I offer to God all my sufferings so that they may fall again upon you as joy” – seems to encapsulate Nadia’s understanding of the musical work, and her own work in interpreting it. Boulanger’s wartime performances of Fauré seem especially meaningful in this context. Her first concert on arriving in the United States, at the National Cathedral in Washington in November 1940, mixed prayers and readings with performances of the Bach Magnificat and Fauré Requiem. The program reprised portions of Boulanger’s 1925 Rice lecture on Fauré, claiming that Bach and Fauré were “inspired by a similar, mystical view of religion and death, a view so high and serene that differences of creed and dogma fade into insignificance” and insisting that “If, as in the Requiem, [Fauré] sings of the grief which death inspires, it is a grief so near to God as to be wholly free from vain revolt or lamentation.”23 In April 1941, the Requiem and the Schütz Historia der Auferstehung (billed as the “First Performance in New York”) featured on her concert with the New York Philharmonic, aimed at Polish war relief. In the program, Boulanger expanded her comments on Fauré: “The music tells of the sorrow that is left behind by those who depart without return, a sorrow so near to God that it is without revolt, cry, or gesture. And if grave utterances are made, if grief-laden song unfolds itself, they are dominated by the assurance of forgiveness and the serene promise of eternal peace.”24 After the United States entered the war in December 1941 such messages of consolation became increasingly important to American audiences. Among the last concerts she directed before returning to France were performances of the Requiem in Boston, Toledo and Potsdam, New York, which were understood by many – and in at least one case expressly organized – as memorials for American war dead.25 When Boulanger returned to France, it was into and as an institution. In 1946 she finally obtained a post at the Paris Conservatoire. Her years in the United States had only broadened her networks there, and the yearly pilgrimage of students to her classes at the Conservatoire Américain resumed; in 1949 she became the school’s director. Once back in Paris, she rapidly took stock, and by August 1946 she was writing for American 23 24 25

Program in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (November 14, 1940). Program in F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (April 4, 1941). Conrad and Mildred Bliss were the principal organizers of the event. The president of the Friends of Toledo Music wrote to her in July 1945 to ask her to conduct the Requiem “as a Memorial for all the Toledoans who died in this war” (F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 150, Emma Endres Kountz to NB, July 15, 1945). The program is marked “Memorial Concert in Honor of Toledo War Dead.” F-Pn Rés. Vm dos. 195 (December 9, 1945).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

258

Vogue about the amazing creativity of French composers – both familiar names and new – during the war years, and exhorting her readers to support French musical culture as it looked toward the future.26 She took up a post as concert reviewer for Le Spectateur, and produced regular columns in 1946 and 1947 as the Parisian concert scene began to regenerate. But her place was very different from the role she had played as a young woman in the aftermath of World War I. The polarization between the neoclassical camp she was thought to represent, especially as a passionate defender of Stravinsky’s works, and the “flèches” around Messaien soon became acute: where before the war an American journalist had described her as “the representative of young France in music” the group Jeune France had as little to do with her as possible. In new music circles, neoclassicism was out of favor, its logic misrepresented or conflated with earlier forms of historicism; the avant-garde of the post-war years did not share the approach to tradition of many earlier modernists. Stravinsky himself was increasingly traveling new paths in the United States, paths Boulanger did not always find easy to endorse. The early music world became even more specialized, and historically informed performance practice was increasingly an undisputed norm. Analytical methods moved toward the abstract and scientific, especially in anglophone contexts, and music theorists became less tolerant of mystery, ineffability, and subjective language, all essential components of Boulanger’s approach. Further interpretive problems arose as the interwar brand of conservative modernism that provided the context for Boulanger’s work began to appear tainted with outmoded class baggage or, worse, fascist associations.27 At the same time, post-war ideologies of performance and listening confirm the significance of Boulanger’s work. Elements of her approach to understanding the masterwork continued to resonate even as her role in shaping new trends in composition was arguably diminished. Writing by her students – such as Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music, Arthur Mendel’s articles on temporal proportions in Bach, and pedagogical texts by former students such as Walter Piston and Jacques Chailley – disseminated views on the relationship of musical structure to listening and performance and to history that were consistent with Boulanger’s own. For example, Chailley’s Traité historique d’analyse musicale, published in 1947 and furnished with a flattering introduction by Boulanger herself, is a handbook to music history via analysis of musical techniques, from the Greeks to the twentieth-century avant-garde; and it came with a publisher’s blurb that explained, “This treatise is aimed at all musicians who wish to have a perfect 26 27

NB, “Music in France,” Vogue (August 1946), 174–5 and 219–22. The post-war work of Adorno was particularly influential in branding neoclassicism a product of elitist aesthetics. More recently, Richard Taruskin has written extensively on the fascist elements of interwar neoclassicism; see especially Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” 19th-Century Music 16 (1993): 286–302.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

259

understanding of the works they perform or listen to.”28 Chailley was also among the influential early music activists who worked with Boulanger; later students would include Joel Cohen and John Eliot Gardiner. Performers such as Hugues Cuénod, whose views on early music performance had been shaped by Boulanger’s direction, enjoyed important post-war careers in historical performance. The post-war work of performers such as Dinu Lipatti, Clifford Curzon, Igor Markevitch and performance teachers such as Soulima Stravinsky – among many others partially trained by Boulanger – would reward investigation, to trace the further development of interwar musicking practices in the post-war climate. But questions of how the approaches Boulanger promoted in the interwar years were adapted and transformed in post-World War II musical culture are for another study. Here my goal has been to show how Boulanger’s work between the wars brought together a powerful set of interpretive strategies to the construction of the modernist masterpiece in sound. She brought to this project a distinctive performance style, rooted in a particular strand of French training, that was taut and rhythmically energized, cerebral rather than dramatic, and concerned with structure and contrapuntal clarity rather than poetic effect. Preaching the uncoupling of speed and dynamic, she cultivated a monometric and “anti-interpretive” interpretation that emphasized steady tempi, clean attacks, restricted dynamic range and silvery timbres. She was remarkably successful in harnessing this performance style to the aesthetic turn toward form and technique that marked the interwar “retour à l’ordre,” and which was central to both neoclassical compositional aesthetics and structural music analysis. And she brought her performances to bear on a characteristically modernist historical understanding, concerned with creating time out of time, and (like neoclassical composition) with exploiting the creative potential of connections and oppositions to tradition. Her considerable achievement was to do all this compellingly in a range of contexts from homes and schools to the concert stage. The interwar years were some of the most exciting and influential of Boulanger’s career. Her beliefs were disseminated in great variety of media: public talks, broadcasts, classroom lectures, lessons, journalism, and musical performances of all kinds. Her ideas and practices were less notable for their originality (although Boulanger could be highly creative in her use of them) but for the way they intersect with broader trends in understanding art and music. They were perhaps characteristically or especially French, but they were not limited to France in their derivation or their impact. Nor do any of

28

Jacques Chailley, Traité historique d’analyse musicale (Paris: Leduc, 1947): “Ce traité s’adresse à tous les musiciens qui veulent avoit une parfaite compréhension des oeuvres qu’ils interprètent ou qu’ils écoutent. L’auteur étudie les gammes, modes (antiques, liturgiques, etc. . .) pour aboutir, après les polyphonistes de la Renaissance, de l’époque classique et de l’époque contemporaine, aux écoles ultra-modernes de la polytonalité, de l’atonalité et de l’écriture dodecaphonique.”

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Conclusion

260

her positions represent a carefully elaborated theory of music. Boulanger’s ideas are interesting not as a philosophical system, but as a basis for action and for work. Her concert activity of the 1930s was generally a performingout of concepts that had been thoroughly discussed in her concert criticism and applied to lessons, classes, coaching sessions and private musical performances in the 1920s, and which were given a highly public and international face in the decade before World War II. Like the religious conviction with which it shares important common ground, her faith in the transcendent capacity of music was a source of consolation for Boulanger herself, and provided a bridge between her and her audiences. This utter commitment to the work and works that moved her, with its evangelical character that meshed with other aspects of Boulanger’s personality, was a significant component of her success. Boulanger was an effective champion of the ideology of “the music itself,” which Suzanne Cusick has argued is a category that excludes women’s experiences and points of view from the discourse of music history and analysis in favor of a normative masculine universal.29 Paradoxically, examining this ideology and Boulanger’s role in promoting it both brings Boulanger herself more sharply into focus as an agent of musical culture, and helps to restore a broader women’s perspective – through the possibilities and limits represented by her career – to the narrative of twentieth-century music history. 29

Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford University Press, 1999), 471–98.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.011

Bibliography

ARCHIVAL AND MANUSCRIPT SOURCES caversham, uk, bbc written archives centre (gb-cabbc) Nadia Boulanger Artist File I Doda Conrad Artist File I london, british library (gb-lbl) Clifford Curzon Collection National Sound Archive p a r i s , b i b l i o t h e` q u e n a t i o n a l e d e f r a n c e ( f - p n ) Département de la Musique (Louvois) Nadia Boulanger papers. I have relied especially on the following large series of documents, as well as on individual scores and documents cited in the notes: Nouvelles lettres autographes (NLa), volumes 50–118: correspondence Rés. Vm dos. 119–98: papers and administrative correspondence, concert programs Rés. Vmf ms. 60–109: personal agendas and datebooks, 1907–79 Bibliothèque François-Mitterand (Tolbiac) Nadia Boulanger sound archives Département des Arts du Spectacle (Richelieu) Programs of the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris paris, centre nadia et lili boulanger (cnlb) Uncatalogued teaching and concert material, draft writings, lecture notes, letters, press cuttings, concert programs and memorabilia

261

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

262

Bibliography l y o n , c o n s e r v a t o i r e n a t i o n a l s u p e´ r i e u r d e m u s i q u e e t danse (f-lyc) Fonds Nadia Boulanger (principally teaching and performance material, including annotated scores) cambridge, pusey library, harvard university archive (hua) Papers of Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss washington, dc, library of congress (us-wc) Old Correspondence 1937–47, unalphabetized files basel, paul sacher stiftung, bibliothek (ch-bps) Sammlung Igor Stravinsky WRITINGS OF NADIA BOULANGER le monde musical “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux.” MM 30, no. 1 (January 1919): 12–15. “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux.” MM 30, no. 2 (February 1919): 42–3. “Simples réflexions” and “Colonne-Lamoureux (Salle Gaveau).” MM 30, no. 3 (March 1919): 68–70. “La Tragédie de Salomé de Florent Schmitt” and “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux.” MM 30, no. 4 (April 1919): 100 and 102–4. “Concerts Colonne-Lamoureux.” MM 30, no. 5 (May 1919): 136–7. “Pierre Menu” and “Concerts Colonne.” MM 30, no. 11 (November 1919): 321 and 326–8. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 30, no. 12 (December 1919): 350–3. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 31, nos. 1–2 (January 1920): 16–17. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 31, nos. 5–6 (March 1920): 89–91. “Concerts Colonne” and “Walter Damrosch et le New-York Symphony Orchestra à Paris.” MM 31, nos. 9–10 (May 1920): 154–5 and 156–7. “Le Jubilé de W. Mengelberg.” MM 31, nos. 11–12 (June 1920): 182–3. “À propos d’Antoine et Cléopatre” and “Concerts Colonne.” MM 31, nos. 19–20 (October 1920): 292–3 and 304–5. “Salle Erard, Cella Delavrancea.” MM 31, nos. 21–2 (November 1920): 334. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 31, nos. 23–4 (December 1920): 358–62. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 32, nos. 1–2 (January 1921): 4–16. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 32, nos. 5–6 (March 1921): 86–7. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 32, nos. 7–8 (April 1921): 129–30. “Concerts Colonne” and “Salle Gaveau: Flonzaley Quartet.” MM 32, nos. 19–20 (October 1921): 315–16 and 317. “Concerts Colonne” and “Concerts Koussevitsky.” MM 32, nos. 21–2 (November 1921): 347–50 and 353–4. “L’Heure espagnole” and “Concerts Koussevitsky.” MM 32, nos. 23–4 (December 1921): 382–3 and 400–1.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

263

“Concerts Colonne.” MM 33, nos. 1–2 (January 1922): 23–6. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 33, nos. 7–8 (April 1922): 137–41. “Concerts Colonne.” MM 34, nos. 19–20 (October 1923): 323–6. “Concerts Koussevitsky.” MM 34, nos. 21–2 (November 1923): 365, 367. [Untitled funeral address], contribution to “Hommage à Gabriel Fauré.” MM 35, nos. 21–2 (November 1924) [Also published in Comoedia 4339 (November 18, 1924).] le spectateur “Le Miracle de Toscanini.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 55 (June 18, 1946), 3. “Voici revenue la saison des concerts.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 70 (October 1, 1946), 1 and 7. “Concerts symphoniques: Premières auditions.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 72 (October 15, 1946), 7. “Les Grands Concerts: À propos de choses et d’autres.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 73 (October 22, 1946), 7. “Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 74 (October 29, 1946), 6. “Premières auditions.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 77 (November 19, 1946), 6. “La Symphonie d’Igor Strawinsky”, Le Spectateur 2, no. 78 (November 26, 1946), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 79 (December 3, 1946), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 80 (December 10, 1946), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 81 (December 17, 1946), 6. “Premières auditions: Harnasie de Carol Szymanowski.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 82 (December 24, 1946), 9. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 2, no. 83 (December 31, 1946), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 84 (January 7, 1947), p. 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques: Orphée, de Jean-Louis Martinet.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 85 (January 14, 1947), 6. “Les Premières Auditions.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 86 (January 21, 1947), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 87 (January 28, 1947), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 88 (February 4, 1947), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques: Un nouveau chef-d’oeuvre d’Igor Strawinsky.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 89 (February 11, 1947), 6. “Igor Markevitch, Dinu Lipatti, Jean Françaix.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 93 (March 11, 1947), 5. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 95 (March 25, 1947), 6. “Karol Szymanowsky” and “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 96 (April 1, 1947), 6. “Les Concerts symphoniques.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 97 (April 8, 1947), 6. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 98 (April 15, 1947), 4. “Les Grands Concerts: Béla Bartok.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 99 (April 22, 1947), 6. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 101 (May 6, 1947), 4. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 103 (May 20, 1947), 6. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 104 (May 27, 1947), 7. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 105 (June 3, 1947), 6. “Les Grands Concerts: Figure humaine de Francis Poulenc.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 106 (June 10, 1947), 4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

264

Bibliography “Les Grands Concerts: À Strasbourg et ailleurs.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 107 (June 17, 1947), 7. “Les Grands Concerts.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 108 (June 24, 1947), 6. “Fin de saison.” Le Spectateur 3, no. 109 (July 1, 1947), 6. other publications “Semaine théâtrale.” Le Ménestrel 4277 (March 15, 1913), 82–3. “La Musique religieuse.” La Revue musicale 4, no. 11, special number on Gabriel Fauré (1922): 104–11/296–303 (double pagination). “L’Oeuvre théâtrale d’Albert Roussel.” La Revue musicale 10, special double number on Albert Roussel (April 1929): 104–12, continued in 10 (May 1929): 37–52. “Le Professeur.” In Auguste Chapuis, edited by René Dommange et al., 45–8. Paris: Durand, 1934. “La Musique et la vie quotidienne.” The Listener (November 24, 1938): 1153. “Gabriel Fauré.” Amérique Française 21 (January 1943), 9–12. “Music in France.” Vogue (August 1946), 174–5 and 219–22. “Préface.” In Jacques Chailley, Traité historique d’analyse musicale. Paris, Leduc, 1951, pp. ii–iii. [Untitled contribution]. In Hommage à Dinu Lipatti, edited by Madeleine Lipatti. Geneva: Labor & Fides, 1952, 3–34. “Les 100 disques qu’il faut avoir: Nadia Boulanger les a choisis pour vous; Sept décorateurs vous proposent le coin de musique dans votre maison.” Maison & Jardin 24 (November 1954): 47–51 and 104–7. published transcriptions of lectures by nadia boulanger Lectures on Modern Music. Delivered under the auspices of the Rice Institute Lectureship in Music, January 27, 28 and 29, 1925. Rice Institute Pamphlet 13, no. 2 (1926). “La Musique moderne” (d’après la sténographie des cours à l’École Normale de Musique), MM 37, no. 2 (February 1926): 59–61. “Les Cours de Mlle Nadia Boulanger, à l’École Normale de Musique.” MM 37, no. 5 (May 1926): 201. “Les Cours de musique moderne de Nadia Boulanger.” MM 37, no. 6 (June 1926): 242–4. “Cours d’interprétation de Mlle Nadia Boulanger: Mozart.” MM 47, no. 7 (July 1936): 211–12. other sources Abondance, Florence. “Nadia Boulanger au futur Musée de la Musique.” ReM 353–4, special issue on Nadia and Lili Boulanger (1982): 93–4. Adorno, Theodor W. Besammelte Schriften, Vol. X: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

265

Aitken, D. F. “A Distinguished French Teacher.” The Radio Times 53 (November 13, 1936). Allen, Warren Dwight. Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music 1600–1960. New York: Dover, 1962. Ansermet, Ernest. “L’Oeuvre d’Igor Stravinsky.” La Revue musicale 9 (1921): 3. Assmann, Aleida. “Exorcizing the Demon of Chronology: T. S. Eliot’s Reinvention of Tradition.” In T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 13–25. Ayrey, Craig. “Stravinsky in Analysis: The Anglophone Traditions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 203–29. Bailey, Walter B. “Ima Hogg and an Experiment in Audience Education: The Rice Lectureship in Music (1923–33).” Journal of the Society for American Music 5 (2011): 395–426. Baltensperger, André. “Strawinskys ‘Chicago Lecture’ (1944).” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 5 (1992): 19–23. Barnes, Albert C. The Art in Painting. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Barnes, Albert C. and Violette De Mazia. The Art of Henri-Matisse. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. Barr, Cyrilla. “The Musicological Legacy of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.” Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 250–68. Bauer, Marion. Twentieth Century Music: How It Developed, How to Listen to It. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933. Bauer, Marion and Ethel Peyser. How Music Grew: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day. 2nd, revised edn. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds (1982). Updated and expanded 25th anniversary edn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Bent, Ian, ed. Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bergson, Henri. Oeuvres. Edited by André Robinet, Introduction by Henri Gauthier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Berry, Wallace. Musical Structure and Performance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre and Alain Darbel. L’Amour de l’art: Les Musées d’art européens et leur public. 2nd, revised and augmented edn. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969. Brande, Émile. Notes musicales. Dunkirk: Éditions du Nord Maritime, 1925. Brochand, Christian. Histoire générale de la radio et de la télévision en France. 2 vols. Paris: La Documentation Française / Comité d’Histoire de la Radiodiffusion, 1994. Brock-Nannestad, George. “The Development of Recording Technologies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 149–76. Brooks, Jeanice. “Collecting Past and Present: Music History and Musical Performance at Dumbarton Oaks.” In A Home of the Humanities: The

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

266

Bibliography Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder and Robert S. Nelson. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010, 74–91. “Les Écrits de Nadia Boulanger.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 451–4. “The Fonds Boulanger at the Bibliothèque Nationale.” Notes 51 (1995): 1127–37. “Mildred Bliss Tells Nadia Boulanger to Think of Herself For Once.” In Women Patrons and Activists in American Music, edited by Cyrilla Barr and Ralph P. Locke. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 209–13. “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 415–68. “‘Noble et grande servante de la musique’: Telling the Story of Nadia Boulanger’s Conducting Career.” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 92–116. Brugière, Bernard. “French Influences and Echoes in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.” In T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 75–89. Bühl, Gudrun, ed. Dumbarton Oaks: The Collections. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2008. Burkholder, J. Peter. “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream of the Last Hundred Years.” Journal of Musicology 2 (1983): 115–34. Burnham, Scott. “Form.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen. Cambridge University Press, 2002, 880–906. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Butt, John. “Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener? Towards a Theory of Musical Listening.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (2010): 5–18. Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Camard, Florence. Suë et Mare et la compagnie des arts français. Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 1993. Cantoni, Angelo. La Référence à Bach dans les oeuvres néo-classiques de Stravinsky. Hildesheim: Olms, 1998. Carder, James N. “The Architectural History of Dumbarton Oaks and the Contribution of Armand Albert Rateau.” In A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010, 93–115. “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss: A Brief Biography.” In A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, edited by James N. Carder. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010, 1–25. “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.” In Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

267

Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, edited by Asen Kiren. Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005, 23–37. Caron, Sylvain and Michel Duchesneau, eds. Musique, art et religion dans l’entredeux-guerres. Lyons: Symétrie, 2009. Carr, Maureen A. Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Carter, Chandler. “The Rake’s Progress and Stravinsky’s Return: The Composer’s Evolving Approach to Setting Text.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 (2010): 553–640. Cassedy, Steven. “Paul Valéry’s Modernist Aesthetic Object.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 77–86. Cauchie, Maurice. “La Pureté des modes dans la musique vocale franco-belge du début du XVIe siècle.” In Theodor Kroyer-Festschrift zum sechzigsten Geburtstage am 9. September 1933, edited by Hermann Zenck, Helmut Schultz and Walter Gerstenberg. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1933, 54–61. Chafe, Eric. Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Chailley, Jacques. Traité historique d’analyse musicale. Paris: Leduc, 1947. Chimènes, Myriam. Mécènes et musiciens: Du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République. Paris: Fayard, 2004. “Nadia Boulanger et ses mécènes: Connivences sociales.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 99–109. Cianci, Giovanni and Jason Harding, eds. T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cone, Edward T. Music Form and Musical Performance. New York: Norton, 1968. “The Pianist as Critic.” In The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, edited by John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 1995, 241–53. Conrad, Doda. Dodascalies: Ma chronique du XXe siècle. Arles: Actes Sud, 1997. Grandeur et mystère d’un mythe: 44 ans d’amitié avec Nadia Boulanger. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1995. Cook, Nicholas. “Analysing Performance and Performing Analysis.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist. Oxford University Press, 1999, 424–51. “The Conductor and the Theorist: Furtwängler, Schenker and the First Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” In The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, edited by John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 1995, 105–25. “Methods for Analysing Recordings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 221–45. “Schenker’s Theory of Music as Ethics.” Journal of Musicology 7, no. 4 (1989): 415–39. “Squaring the Circle: Phrase Arching in Recordings of Chopin’s Mazurkas.” Musica Humana 1 (2009): 5–28. “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky.” In The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 176–91.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

268

Bibliography “Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music.” In Approaches to Meaning in Music, edited by Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 107–34. Cook, Nicholas, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Copland, Aaron. Aaron Copland, A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–72. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Routledge, 2004. What to Listen For in Music. 2nd edn. Foreword and Epilogue by Alan Rich, Introduction by William Schuman. London: Signet Classics, 1988. Copland, Aaron and Vivian Perlis. Copland: 1900 through 1942. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Cortot, Alfred. Cours d’interprétation. Edited by Jeanne Thieffry. Paris: Librairie musicale R. Legouix, 1934. “Igor Strawinsky, le piano et les pianistes.” La Revue musicale 191, special number on Igor Stravinsky (1939): 24/264–68/308. Costeley, Guillaume. Musique. In Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française, edited by Henry Expert. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1897. Cross, Jonathan. The Stravinsky Legacy. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist. Oxford University Press, 1999, 471–98. Dahlhaus, Carl. Foundations of Music History. Translated by J. B. Robinson. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Damrosch, Walter. My Musical Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924 (first US edn. 1923). Davis, Mary E. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Day, Timothy. A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Day, Timothy, Gwendolyn Tietze and Hannah Vlček. “Histories in Sound: Disseminating Medieval Music.” Paper presented at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, Graz, April 15–18, 2004. Debussy, Claude. Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans. Paris: Durand, 1908. Dell’Antonio, Andrew, ed. Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. DeNora, Tia. “How is Extra-Musical Meaning Possible? Music as a Place and Space for ‘Work’.” Sociological Theory 4 (1986): 84–94. Derenne, Jacqueline Paul. Une vie en duo. Rouen: Éditions Médianes, 1992. DeVoto, Mark. “Melville Smith: Organist, Educator, Early Music Pioneer and American Composer.” In Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, edited by Michael Saffle. New York: Garland, 2000, 265–99. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time.” Common Knowledge 9 (2003): 273–85. Dreyfus, Laurence. “Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century.” Musical Quarterly 69 (1983): 297–322. “Musical Analysis and the Historical Imperative.” Revista de musicologia 16 (1993): 407–19.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

269

Duchesneau, Michel. L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939. Liège: Mardaga, 1997. Dufour, Valérie. “La Poétique musicale de Stravinsky: Un manuscrit inédit de Souvtchinsky.” Revue de musicologie 89 (2003): 373–92. Stravinski et ses exégètes: 1910–1940. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006. Dunsby, Jonathan. Performing Music: Shared Concerns. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. “Thematic and Motivic Analysis.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen. Cambridge University Press, 2002, 907–26. Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood. 2nd edn. (1928). London: Faber & Faber, 1997. Ellis, Katharine. Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Elste, Martin. “Bildungsware alte Musik: Curt Sachs als Schallplattenpädagoge.” Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 13 (1989): 207–47 Emmanuel, Maurice. Histoire de la langue musicale. 2 vols. Paris: Renouard, 1911. Reprint, facsimile edition, n.p.: Éditions Henri Laurens, 1981. Epstein, David. Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance. New York: Schirmer, 1995. Evans, Edwin. “Igor Stravinsky: Contrapuntal Titan.” Musical America (February 12, 1921): 9. Expert, Henry, ed. Trente et une chansons musicales (Attaingnant 1529). Vol. V, Les Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1897. Fauquet, Joël-Marie and Antoine Hennion. La Grandeur de Bach: L’Amour de la musique en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 2000. Fauré, Gabriel. 13 Nocturnes for Piano. Preface by Roy Howat. London: Peters, 2006. Requiem Op. 48, edited by Jean-Michel Nectoux. Concert version (1900). Paris: J. Hamelle / distribution Alphonse Leduc et Cie, 1998. Requiem pour soli, choeurs & orchestre. Partition d’orchestre. Paris: J. Hamelle, [1901]. Fauser, Annegret. “Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger and the Making of an ‘American’ Composer.” Musical Quarterly 89 (2006): 524–54. “Comment devenir compositeur? Les Stratégies de Lili Boulanger et ses contemporaines.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 273–97. “La Guerre en dentelles: Women and the Prix de Rome in French Cultural Politics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 83–129. Fink, Robert. “Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 102–37. Oxford University Press, 1999. “‘Rigoroso (♪ = 126)’: ‘The Rite of Spring’ and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 299–362. Fisher, Philip. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Flint de Médicis, Catrina. “Nationalism and Early Music at the French fin de siècle: Three Case Studies.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1, no. 2 (2004): 43–66.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

270

Bibliography Foreman, Lewis. “Revisiting Concert Life in the Mid-Century: The Survival of Acetate Discs.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 140–8. Francis, Kimberly. “A Dialogue Begins: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphonie de psaumes, 1930–1932.” Women and Music 14 (2010): 22–44. “A Most Unsuccessful Project: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphony in C, 1939–45.” Musical Quarterly 94 (2011): 234–70. “Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky: Documents of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.” Revue de musicologie 95 (2009): 137–56. Frouin, Lisa. Les Écoles de l’avenir, écoles régénératrices. Paris: I. Rirachovsky, 1916. Fulcher, Jane F. The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914– 1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Fuller Maitland, J. A., and W. Barclay Squire, eds. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899. Gallois, Jean. Les Polignac, mécènes du XXe siècle. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1995. Gavoty, Bernard. Alfred Cortot. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1977. Giuliani, Elizabeth. “Discographie.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 403–44. “Les Enregistrements de Nadia Boulanger: Une conception et une pratique originales de l‘interprétation musicale.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 191–202. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford University Press, 1994. “Writing Music History.” History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992): 182–99. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 42–56. Greenfeld, Howard. The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector. London: Marion Boyars, 1989. Grogin, R. C. The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914. University of Calgary Press, 1988. Hahn, Reynaldo. “Les Théâtres: Les Premières.” Excelsior (May 17, 1920): 4. Hamilton, Kenneth. After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Higonnet, Anne. A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2009. Hunter, Mary. “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005): 357–98. Hyde, Martha M. “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 200–35. “Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, edited by Jonathan Cross. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 98–136.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

271

Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Ivry, Benjamin. Francis Poulenc. London: Phaidon, 1996. Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Joseph, Charles M. Stravinsky Inside Out. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Kahan, Sylvia. “La Collaboration entre Nadia Boulanger et Marie-Blanche de Polignac.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 85–98. Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. University of Rochester Press, 2003. Kendall, Alan. The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger. Wilton, CN: Lyceum Books, 1977. Kenyon, Nicholas, ed. Authenticity and Early Music. Oxford University Press, 1988. Kiren, Asen. “Sacred Art, Secular Context.” In Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, edited by Asen Kiren. Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005, 13–21. Koechlin, Charles. Écrits: Esthétique et langage musical. Edited by Michel Duchesneau. Liège: Mardaga, 2006. “Le Public et les programmes de concerts.” Le Ménestrel 83, no. 48 (1921): 473–4. “Le ‘Retour à Bach’.” La Revue musicale 8 (1926): 1–12. “Le Temps et la musique.” La Revue musicale 7, no. 3 (1926): 45–62. “D’une vaine dispute: La Musique plaisir de l’esprit ou jouissance sensuelle.” La Revue musicale 2 (1921): 219–41. Laederich, Alexandra. “Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Nadia Boulanger.” In Nadia et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 345–6. “Au clavier et au pupitre: Les concerts de Nadia Boulanger de 1901 à 1973.” In Nadia et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 173–89. “Les Fonds Nadia Boulanger: Un héritage complexe.” Bulletin du Groupe français de l’AIBM hors série (2005): 39–48. “La Première Audition à Londres des Litanies à la Vierge noire par Nadia Boulanger (novembre 1936).” In Francis Poulenc et la voix: Texte et contexte, edited by Alban Ramaut. Lyons: Symétrie, 2002, 153–67. Laederich, Alexandra, ed. Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007. Landormy, Paul. “Les Cours d’interprétation d’Alfred Cortot.” Le Ménestrel, June 15, 1934, 221–2. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Languin, Laurence. “Le Fonds de la médiathèque Nadia-Boulanger du Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et danse de Lyon.” Bulletin du Groupe français de l’AIBM, no. hors série (2005): 49–52. Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances. London: CHARM, 2009. “The Limits of Authenticity.” Early Music 12 (1984): 13–16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

272

Bibliography The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2002. “Recordings and Histories of Musical Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel LeechWilkinson and John Rink. Cambridge University Press, 2009, 246–62. Lefébure, Yvonne. “Cortot, le poète du clavier.” Revue internationale de musique 1, nos. 5–6, special number on the piano (1938): 903–5. Leonard, Kendra. The Conservatoire Américain: A History. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. Lesure, François. “A travers la correspondance de Nadia Boulanger.” Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 5 (1982): 16–22. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Liu, Catherine. “Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno’s Museum.” Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 217–44. Locke, Ralph. “Living With Music: Isabella Stewart Gardner.” In Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, edited by Cyrilla Barr and Ralph P. Locke. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 90–121. “Music Lovers, Patrons, and the ‘Sacralization’ of Culture in America.” 19thCentury Music 17 (1993): 149–73. Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton University Press, 1987. McCarthy, Kathleen D. Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830– 1930. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Maleuvre, Didier. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. Stanford University Press, 1999. Malraux, André. Le Musée imaginaire. Revised edn. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Reprint, 2010. Marcel, Gabriel. “Bergsonisme et musique.” La Revue musicale 6 (1925): 219–29. Maritain, Jacques. Art et scholastique. Paris: Librairie de l’Art Catholique, 1920. Markevitch, Igor. Être et avoir été. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Marmontel, Antoine-François. Les Pianistes célèbres, 2nd edn. Paris: Heugel, 1888. Martin, Peter. “Over the Rainbow? On the Quest for ‘the Social’ in Musical Analysis.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127 (2002): 130–46. Massip, Catherine. “Nadia Boulanger et ses réseaux à travers sa correspondance.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 51–64. Matisse, Henri. Écrits et propos sur l’art. Edited by Dominique Fourcade. Paris: Hermann, 1972. Mauclair, Camille. Idées vivantes. Paris: Librairie de l’Art Ancien et Moderne, 1904. Messing, Scott. Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. Monsaingeon, Bruno. Mademoiselle: Entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger. Paris: Van de Velde, 1981. Translated as Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. Translated by Robyn Marsack. Manchester: Carcanet, 1985. Mademoiselle: Nadia Boulanger. Paris: Éditions du Léonard, 1987. Video, black and white.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

273

Musgrave, Michael. “Early Trends in the Performance of Brahms’s Piano Music.” In Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, edited by Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 302–26. Mycielski, Zygmunt. “La Visite de l’École Normale de Musique de Paris.” Conferencia 27 (1933): 641–3. Myers, Rollo H. “Fauré’s Piano Music.” The Listener 17, no. 418 (January 13, 1937): 94. Nectoux, Jean-Michel. “Nadia Boulanger: La Rencontre avec Gabriel Fauré.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich, 33–47. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007. Neighbour, O. W. “The Curzon Collection.” The British Library Journal 11 (1985): 60–6. Nelson, Robert S. “Private Passions Made Public: The Beginnings of the Bliss Collection.” In Sacred Art, Secular Context: Objects of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, edited by Asen Kiren. Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005, 39–51. Newhouse, Victoria. Art and the Power of Placement. New York: Monacelli, 2005. Nichols, Roger. Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Nietzsche, Frédéric [Friedrich]. Le Voyageur et son ombre: Opinions et sentences mêlées. Translated by Henri Albert, Humain, trop humain, deuxième partie. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902. Olivier, Philippe. “Grande Histoire et petits souvenirs.” In Musique: École Normale de Paris Alfred Cortot, edited by Catherine Laulhère-Vigneau. Paris: Plume, 2002, 110–27. Pasler, Jann. “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne.” In Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre), edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit and Michael Werner. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2002, 209–38. Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. “Concert Programs and their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology.” International Journal of Musicology 2 (1993): 249–308. “Experiencing Time in the Quartet for the End of Time.” In “La la la . . . Maistre Henri”: Mélanges de musicologie offerts à Henri Vanhulst, edited by Christine Ballman and Valérie Dufour. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009, 477–86. “Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents and the Dialectic of Discontinuity and Continuity in Debussy’s Jeux.” Musica Scientiae 3, special issue, Aspects of Time in the Creation of Music, edited by Max Paddison and Irene Deliège (2004): 125–40. Perloff, Marjorie. “The First Futurist Manifesto Revisited.” Rett Kopi, Dokumente Fremtiden (Manifesto Issue) (2007): 152–6. Perloff, Nancy. Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

274

Bibliography Philip, Robert. Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900–1950. Cambridge University Press, 1992. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Philipp, Isidore. “Souvenirs sur Anton Rubinstein, Camille Saint-Saëns et Busoni.” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 907–12. Phillips, Edward R. “Fauré, through Boulanger, to Copland: The Nature of Influence.” Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the MidAtlantic 4, no. 1 (2011) http://trace.tennessee.edu/gamut/vol4/iss1/9. Pickering, Robert. “À la recherche des rapports Nadia Boulanger – Paul Valéry: Les Ressorts d’une affinité privilégiée.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich, 157–70. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007. Pilkington, A[nthony] E[dward]. Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Potter, Caroline. “Nadia Boulanger’s and Raoul Pugno’s La ville morte.” The Opera Quarterly 16 (2000): 397–406. Nadia and Lili Boulanger. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. “Review of Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1998).” Music & Letters 80 (1999): 315–17. Potter, John. “Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing.” Music and Letters 87, no. 4 (2006): 523–50. Poulenc, Francis. Correspondance 1910–1963. Edited by Myriam Chimènes. Paris: Fayard, 1994. Entretiens avec Claude Rostand. Paris: Julliard, 1954. La Revue musicale 353–4, special issue on Nadia and Lili Boulanger (1982). Rink, John. “Review of Wallace Berry, Musical Structure in Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).” Music Analysis 9 (1990): 319–39. Rink, John, ed. The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Roger-Ducasse, [Jean]. Lettres à Nadia Boulanger. Edited by Jacques Depaulis. Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999. Rosenstiel, Léonie. Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music. New York: Norton, 1982. La Saison musicale 1931–32 de Maria Modrakowska. Paris: Bureau International des Concerts Kiesgen & Ysaye, [1932]. Samson, Jim. “The Musical Work and Nineteenth-Century History.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, edited by Jim Samson. Cambridge University Press, 2002, 3–28. Schack, William. Art and Argyrol: The Life and Career of Dr. Albert C. Barnes. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960. Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. University of Toronto Press, 2005. Schmidt, Carl B. The Music of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963): A Catalogue. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Schubert, Franz. Complete Works: Breitkopf & Härtel Critical Edition of 1884– 1897. Vol. XVI, series 20, Lieder and Songs for One Voice. Edited by

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

275

Eusebius Mandyczewski. New York, Dover and Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1965. Segal, Erich. Love Story. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Segond[-Genovesi], Cédric. “36, rue Ballu: Les ‘Appartements’ de Nadia Boulanger.” In La Maison de l’artiste: construction d’un espace de représentations entre réalité et imaginaire (XVIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Jean Gribenski, Véronique Meyer and Solange Vernois. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007, 203–15. Segond-Genovesi, Cédric. “Une génétique de l’interprétation chez Nadia Boulanger: Enjeux méthodologiques et bibliothéconomiques.” Fontes Artis Musicae 54 (2007): 100–14. “Lili Boulanger par Nadia Boulanger, 1918–1993: disques, partitions et normes interpretatives.” In Les Musiciens et le disque, edited by Elizabeth Giuliani. Lyons: AFAS-AIBM, Atelier Blaise Adilon, 2009, 25–38. Shattuck, Roger. The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984. Silver, Kenneth. Esprit de corps. Art of the Parisian Avant-garde and the First World War, 1914–1925. Princeton University Press, 1989. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Souvtchinsky, Pierre. “La Notion du Temps et de la Musique.” La Revue musicale 191, special number on Igor Stravinsky (1939): 70/310–80/20. Spycket, Jérôme. Un diable de musicien: Hugues Cuénod. Lausanne: Payot, 1979. Nadia Boulanger. Lausanne: Payot, 1987. (English translation by M.M. Shriver, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992). À la recherche de Lili Boulanger. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Squire, W. H. Haddon. “Nadia Boulanger as Conductor.” Christian Science Monitor, December 29, 1936. Stein, Erwin. Form and Performance. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. Stimpson, Brian. “Nadia Boulanger et le monde littéraire.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 139–56. Stravinsky [Strawinsky], Igor. Chroniques de ma vie. 2 vols. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935. Concerto en mi♭ pour orchestre de chambre. Mainz: Schott, 1938. Duo concertant pour violon et piano. Berlin: Édition Russe de Musique, 1933. Poétique musicale: Sous forme de six leçons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons. Edited by Myriam Soumagnac. Paris: Flammarion, 2000. The Rake’s Progress. Piano-vocal score. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1951. “Some Ideas about My Octuor.” The Arts [Brooklyn, NY] 4–6 January 1924. In Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, edited by Eric Walter White. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966, 528–31. Stricker, Rémy. “La Critique de Nadia Boulanger: À la recherche d’une passion objective.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 131–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

276

Bibliography Suarès, André. “Vues sur Beethoven.” La Revue musicale 2, no. 8 (June 1921): 193– 201 [parts I–V]; 3, no. 1 (November 1921): 1–7 [parts VI–IX]; 3, no. 5 (March 1922): 193–200 [parts X–XII]. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Süe, Louis and André Mare, eds. Architectures. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1921. Talbot, Michael, ed. The Musical Work: Reality or Invention. Liverpool University Press, 2000. Taruskin, Richard. “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology.” 19th-Century Music 16 (1993): 286–302. “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance.” Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 338–49. The Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. Oxford University Press, 2005. “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past.” In Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, edited by Nicholas Kenyon. Oxford University Press, 1988, 137–207. Reprint, with commentary, in Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford University Press, 1995, 90–154. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford University Press, 1995. Taruskin, Richard, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Temperley and Robert Winter. “The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion.” Early Music 12 (1984): 3–25. Thacher, John. Music at Dumbarton Oaks, 1940 to 1970. Glückstadt: privately printed, 1977. Thomson, Virgil. Music Reviewed, 1940–1954. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Trippett, David. “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme.” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 522–80. Valéry, Paul. “L’Âme et la danse.” La Revue musicale 3, no. 2, special number Le Ballet au XIXe siècle (December 1921): 3–32 / 99–128. “Nadia Boulanger.” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 607–8. Oeuvres. Edited by Jean Hytier. 2nd edn. 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1992–3. van den Borren, Charles. “La Pureté du style et l’interprétation de la musique du Moyen Age.” Revue internationale de musique 1 (1938): 96–102. Vançon, Jean-Claire. “Inventaire du fonds de correspondance reçue par Nadia Boulanger conservé au département de la Musique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 485–530. Vergo, Peter, ed. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, 1989. Waeber, Jacqueline. “Notre Dame de la Chanson: Yvette Guilbert’s American Career,” paper presented at the American Musicological Society annual conference, Quebec City, November 2007. Walsh, Stephen. Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882–1934. London: Pimlico, 2002. The Music of Stravinsky. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America 1934–1971. London: Pimlico, 2007 (paperback edn.; originally published New York: Knopf, 2006).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

277

Walters, Teresa. “Nadia Boulanger, Musician and Teacher: Her Life, Concepts, and Influences.” DMA diss., Peabody Conservatory of Music, 1981. Wangermée, Robert. André Souris et le complexe d’Orphée: Entre surréalisme et musique sérielle. Liège: Mardaga, 1995. Watkins, Glenn. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Wattenmaker, Richard J. “Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the Barnes Foundation.” In Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, PostImpressionist, and Early Modern. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 3–27. Weber, William. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wellek, René. Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukaćs and Ingarden. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Whitehill, Walter Muir. Dumbarton Oaks: The History of a Georgetown House and Garden, 1800–1966. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967. Woldu, Gail Hilson. “Nadia Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré et le Conservatoire: Visions d’une esthétique musicale au début des années 1900.” In Nadia Boulanger et Lili Boulanger: Témoignages et études, edited by Alexandra Laederich. Lyons: Symétrie, 2007, 265–72. DISCOGRAPHY RECORDINGS BY NADIA BOULANGER Lili Boulanger, Introduction et Cortège; Nocturne. Yvonne Astruc, violin; Nadia Boulanger, piano. Columbia LF 15. One 78rpm disc (1930). Mozart, Concerto for two pianos in D major, K 448, and works by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, and Lennox Berkeley. Nadia Boulanger and Clifford Curzon, pianos. Concert, recorded for Radio Paris. Seven Pyral discs, F-Pn B 28132819 (1936). J. S. Bach, Cantata BWV 4, Christ lag in Todesbanden. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger. Two takes yielding test pressings of six 78rpm discs each, not released. F-Pn SD 78-7499 (first take); SD 78-7500 (second take) (1937). Jean Françaix, Concerto pour Piano et Orchestre. Jean Françaix, piano; Orchestre Philharmonique de Paris, directed by Nadia Boulanger. Gramophone DB 5034-35. Two 78rpm discs (1937). Claudio Monteverdi. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger. Gramophone DB 5038-5042. Five 78rpm discs (1937). Johannes Brahms, Liebesliederwalzer, Op. 52; Valses, Op. 39 [also includes vocal chamber works Op. 31, no. 3; Op. 60, no. 1; Op. 66, no. 2; and Op. 22, no. 3]. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger, with Dinu Lipatti, piano. Gramophone 5057-5061. Five 78rpm discs (1938). Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48. The Musical Union, A Cappella Choir, and Conservatory Orchestra of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, directed by Nadia Boulanger. Recorded for WJZ Radio, New York, not released. Private collection (1939).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

278

Bibliography Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48. Gisèle Peyron, soprano, Doda Conrad, bass, Maurice Duruflé, organ; Chorale Yvonne Gouverné and Orchestre Philharmonique de Paris, directed by Nadia Boulanger. Gramophone, four takes yielding test pressings of twenty 78rpm discs, not released. F-Pn SD 78 30-5363 (first take, seven discs); SD 78 30-9055 (second take, eight discs); SD 78 30-9056 (third take, four discs); SD 78 30-9054 (fourth take, one disc) (1948). Petit concert sous la direction de Nadia Boulanger. La Polyphonie vocale française à travers les siècles. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger. Éditions de la Boîte à Musique BAM 79–82. Four 78rpm discs (1949). “Petit Concert” of French Vocal Music from 12th–20th Century. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger. Vox Turnabout PL 6380. One 33rpm disc (1950). Musique chorale française / French Renaissance Vocal Music. Ensemble Nadia Boulanger. Decca UMT 233102 and New York Decca DL 9629. One 33rpm disc (1952). Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48. Reri Grist, soprano; Donald Gramm, baritone; Vernon de Tar, organ; The Choral Art Society and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Nadia Boulanger. Concert, recorded for broadcast (1962). Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48; Lili Boulanger, Pie Jesu; Psaume 24; Psaume 130. Janet Price, soprano; Bernadette Greevy, contralto; Ian Partridge, tenor; John Carol Case, bass; BBC Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, directed by Nadia Boulanger. Concert for the 50th anniversary of the death of Lili Boulanger, recorded for broadcast (1968). Fauré: Requiem – Monteverdi: Madrigali e Arie profane. EMI Références, CDH 761025 2. Compact disc (1988). [Digital release of Fauré 1939 and Monteverdi 1937, above.] Brahms Walzer and Liebeslieder Walzer. EMI Classics Références 5664252. Compact disc (1997). [Includes digital release of Brahms, above] Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48. New York Philharmonic: The Historic Broadcasts, 1923–1987. Vol. 4. New York Philharmonic Special Editions 9708/09. Compact disc (1997). [Includes digital release of Fauré 1962, above.] Great Performers of the Twentieth Century: Boulanger. BBC Legends BBCL 4026-2. Compact disc (1999). [Digital release of Fauré/Boulanger 1968, above.] Hommage à Nadia Boulanger: Enregistrements réalisés à Paris, 1930–49. Cascavelle VEL 3081. Two compact discs (2004). [Digital release of all Boulanger recordings above, 1930–49.] Les Introuvables: Le Baroque avant le Baroque. EMI Classics 0946 351904 2. Four compact discs (2006). [Includes digital release of Bach 1937, above.] OTHER RECORDINGS L’Anthologie sonore. Directed by Curt Sachs. Disc 7, Clément Janequin. La Chanterie de la Renaissance Française, directed by Henry Expert. One 78rpm disc (c. 1935). Bartók: Recordings from Private Collections 1. Hungaroton Classic HCD 12334-35. Compact disc (1995). Alfred Cortot. EMI Classics, 50999 2 17304 2 9. Master Pianists series. Seven compact discs (2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Bibliography

279

Clifford Curzon: Decca Recordings 1949–1964. Vol. 1. Decca Original Masters 473 116-2. Four compact discs (2003). Guilbert, Yvette. La Chanson d’hier et aujourd’hui. Gramophone K7064-7068. Six 78rpm discs (c. 1933). Le Jeune, Claude. La Belle Aronde; Anthoine de Bertrand, Las je m’y plains. La Chanterie de la Renaissance, directed by Henri Expert. Columbia DFX 54. One 78rpm disc (1930). Legendary Piano Recordings: Complete Recordings of Grieg, Saint-Saëns, and Pugno. Marston 52504. Compact disc (2006). Dinu Lipatti. EMI Classics, 50999 2 07318 2 3. Master Pianists series. Seven compact discs (2008). Stravinsky, Igor. Concerto in E flat for Chamber Orchestra. Dumbarton Oaks Festival Orchestra, directed by Igor Stravinsky. Keynote DMI K2001 A-B, K2002 A-B. Two 78rpm discs [1947]. Igor Stravinsky: Composer and Performer. Vol. 2, 1930–1950. Andante Sc-A-1100. Compact disc (2003). [Includes digital release of concerto, 1947, above.]

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 02 Dec 2018 at 02:49:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646.012

Index

Adorno, Theodor 59, 195 Aeschylus: The Libation Bearers 173 Ansermet, Ernest 73 Anspach, Frédéric 34, 36 art and sculpture see galleries in the musical museum under tomb or treasure art of assembling art 217–50 collecting past and future at Dumbarton Oaks see Dumbarton Oaks Concerto performance practice 217–24 composing a collection of music illustrated in Maison & Jardin article 219–23 concerts creating context for pieces to speak across historical distance 217–18 integration of sound and setting in Boulanger’s work 223–4 program construction as composition 218–19 tableaux vivants 1–4, 223 see also musical work Assmann, Aleida 198 Astruc, Yvonne 39, 119 Auric, Georges 147 Bach, Johann Sebastian in Boulanger’s concerts 4, 81–2, 88, 118, 143, 154, 156, 160–1, 253 Dumbarton Oaks premiere concert 235–6, 237 Brandenburg Concertos 147, 236–8, 249 Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 100, 133, 230 cantatas analyses 46–50, 51, 57, 120, 131–2, 174, 175 in Boulanger’s concerts 133, 147, 151–4 Christ lag in Todesbanden 76, 133, 255–6 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht 235 O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort 133, 232–4, 235–6, 238–9 Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal 46–7 classical qualities of masterworks 169 and Fauré 56, 57 form and feeling, relationship between 65 Magnificat 257 prelude and fugue 145–7 St. John Passion 174

St. Matthew Passion 199 The Well-Tempered Clavier 131 Backhaus, Wilhelm 93 Barnes, Dr. Alfred C. 212–16, 223, 224 The Art of Painting 212–13, 215 Bartók, Béla Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta 194 playing Mozart’s K 448 with Ditta Pásztory Bartók 81, 82, 86, 89, 98 Bathori, Jane 24 Bauer, Marion 25 Beaumont, Étienne and Édith de 1–4, 14, 26, 34–5, 143, 220 Beecham, Thomas 154 Beethoven, Ludwig van 41–2, 75, 88 Missa solemnis 41–2 Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor 98–100 Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major 19 Symphony no. 3 (Eroica) 90–1, 101 Symphony no. 5 101–2, 119 Bennett, Tony 204 Bérard, Christian 1 Bergson, Henri 60–2, 72, 111, 197–8, 224, 225 durée concept 197–8 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 60, 197 L’Évolution créatrice 197–8 Berkeley, Lennox 81–2, 88–9, 167 between the wars 19–40, 259–60 Boulanger’s repertoire see under concerts, problem of path to the podium 32–40 concertizing as a pianist again 36–7 developing conducting career see conducting developing forms of mass media 37–9 performing in pedagogical contexts 32, 130–2 recording 39 toward new life 20–31 illness and death of Lili Boulanger 22 reconfiguration of career in the 1920s see under career relationship with Pugno 21–2 Biggs, E. Power 140 Binchois, Gilles de 174

280

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index Bliss, Robert Woods and Mildred Barnes 224–9, 253, 255 art/antiquities collection in Dumbarton Oaks 226–9 Music Room 227–9, 230–1, 240 charity work 224–5, 226, 253 Dumbarton Oaks Concerto commissioning 229–30, 240 Mildred Bliss writing to Stravinsky 240, 242–5 Stravinsky’s work as part of Bliss collection 248–50 relationship with Boulanger 225 relationship with Stravinsky 225–6, 248–50 Blitzstein, Marc 32 Blyth, Alan 95 Boieldieu, François-Adrien La Dame blanche 141 Bordes, Charles 11, 157 Boulanger, Lili 9, 21, 22 charity work/founding Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire de Paris 25 as composer 28, 29, 32, 139–40, 156, 157–8, 163, 188, 194 Cortège 119, 145–7 Nocturne 39 Pour les funerailles d’un soldat 28, 29 Psalm 129 and Psalm 24 32 illness and death 21, 22, 72, 234–5 grief and reaction of Nadia Boulanger 23 memorial service held annually 22, 234, 257 winning Premier Grand Prix of the Prix de Rome 22, 29 Boulanger, Nadia career see career charitable work see charitable works as a composer see composing/compositions documents/archive material 9–10, 26 family 9, 21 see also Boulanger, Lili; Mychetsky, Raïssa Lectures on Modern Music 54–5 musical work/approach to music see musical work Paris Conservatoire training 24, 57, 90 performing see under career personality and character 7 doubts about ability as a player 29 guilt and anxiety during US exile 254–5, 256–7 loneliness, depression 234–5 self-redemption through musical work 14–15 self-assurance boosted by US reception 30 views on United States 30–1 religious beliefs see religion/religious beliefs significance and success 7–8, 10, 24, 258–60

281

teaching see teaching in the US see under United States (US) wars, effect and consequences of see war Boult, Adrian 114 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis 172–3 Boyce, William 143 Brahms, Johannes 81–2, 142, 156 Boulanger’s approach to 91–6, 117 Liebeslieder-Walzer, Op. 52 92–3 Piano Concerto in D minor, Op. 15 95 Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 91–2 Waltzes, Op. 39 92–4 Bret, Gustave 157 broadcasts 1–3, 10, 37–9, 163–4, 165–7, 181–2, 199 Buxtehude, Dieterich 4 Byrd, William 183 Cahuzac, Louis 147 Campbell, Jane 132 Canby, Edward Tatnall 118–19, 143, 157–8, 190–1 Carder, James 229 career as a conductor see conducting as a performer 28–30, 32, 160 appearances with major orchestras 28, 29, 32 Bach 118 Brahms, with Lipatti 92–3 career as keyboard player not flourishing 32 chamber music performances 28–9 concert tour of US see under United States (US) concertizing as a pianist again 36–7 Couperin 118–19 Fauré 102–9 in years immediately following the Great War 42 Mozart, with Curzon 81, 82–8, 89, 92, 98 as organist 28, 29, 30, 51, 89–90, 119, 145–6, 157, 207 performance style 88–90, 97, 102–10 performing in pedagogical contexts 32, 130–2 Pugno, with 21–2, 32, 39–40, 90 in salons see salons, music in Schumann, with Curzon 88 Stravinsky 116, 119 prizes 22, 24 and Pugno 21–2, 32, 37, 39–40, 90 reconfiguration of career in the 1920s 24–31 concert tour of the United States 29–30 institutional teaching see under teaching offers of US teaching/lecturing posts 30 revival of career as keyboard performer 28–30 recording see recordings

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

282

Index career (cont.) in US see under United States (US) see also concerts, problem of; musical work; performing the work; teaching Carissimi, Giacomo 174 Jephte 133 Carlian, Robert and Michael 221 Carter, Elliot 133, 256 Casadesus, Henri 24 Casals, Pablo 24 Caussade, Georges 25 Chafe, Eric 238 Chailley, Jacques 258–9 Traité historique d’analyse musicale 258–9 Chailley-Richez, Céliny 112 charitable works 14, 224–5, 254 donating performances and organizing concerts 26, 27, 252–3 founding Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire de Paris 25 and US 25–6, 255–6 Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craon, Prince 33–4 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 141, 163 Médée 133 Pestis Mediolensis 133 Citkowitz, Israel 58, 132 Clurman, Harold 45 Cocteau, Jean: Le Coq et l’Arlequin 73 Cohen, Jean 259 Colonne, Edouard 19 Combarieu, Jules: Histoire de la musique, des origines au début du XX siècle 172 composing/compositions 8, 28, 32 Airs populaires flamands 145 Les Heures claires (with Pugno) 21 Rhapsodie 21 Symbolist writers’ poetry in 42 Vers la vie nouvelle 23 La Ville morte (with Pugno) 22 Concerts Colonne 19, 28, 159, 160, 206 Boulanger’s reviews 19–20, 41–2, 75, 91–2, 101, 127, 144, 205, 208 concerts, problem of 127–62 audacious juxtapositions 144–62, 166–8, 209 chronologically disjunct programming / cycle theory 200–2 diverse concerts 147 early music 157–9 early and recent music 159–60 new pieces together with earlier music 147–52 recording 156–7 trend toward more consistent groupings resisted by Boulanger 160–2 US tour 144–7 Boulanger’s repertoire between the wars 130–44 as a conductor see conducting

concert principles / historical empathy relying on connection to music 198–200 importance of choice and order to Boulanger 127–8, 129–30, 181 establishing the presence of historical works 195 nature of concert halls 127 conducting 21, 32–6, 39–40, 133–44 ambassador for French music 140–2 Bach 113–14 Brahms 95, 97, 133 career launched 32–4, 133–4 Désormière, with 34 differing from male colleagues 39–40, 143–4 early music lesser-known works of seventeenth century 133–6 Monteverdi 136–7 engagements with wider range of performers / large orchestras 36–7 Fauré 207 international dimensions 154–5 move to more public venues 34 new music 137–40 Françaix 137 Lili Boulanger 139–40 Poulenc 137, 138–9 Stravinsky 138 see also Dumbarton Oaks Concerto Stravinsky, with 34, 113–14, 226 unfamiliar works, promoting 143–4 in US see under United States (US) vocal ensemble created / growth in conducting work 34–6 Cone, Edward T. 218 Conrad, Doda 34, 251, 256–7 Boulanger accompanying 36 in Dumbarton Oaks Concerto concert premiere 232, 236 joining US Army 255 recordings by Boulanger 39, 102, 157, 165–6 in vocal ensemble 40 Conseil, Jean chanson “L’autre jour” 185–7 Conservatoire Américain 25–6, 35, 114, 225, 257 Conservatoire Femina-Musica 24 Cook, Nicholas 109, 116, 168 Copland, Aaron 10, 29, 45, 96, 137, 143, 144, 154 Boulanger as teacher 11, 26, 132 Symphony for Organ and Orchestra 29 What to Listen for in Music 258 Cortet, Roger 133 Cortot, Alfred 19, 24, 33, 75, 111, 171–2 Cours d’interprétation 77, 78 founding École Normale de Musique 24 interpretation as a poetic matter 77–8, 79 on Stravinsky 80

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index Costeley, Guillaume “Las je n’yray plus” 187–8 Couperin, François 163 Petit Concert 118–19 Soeur Monique 145–7 Cox, Allyn 229 Crosti, Roger 76 Cuénod, Hugues 34, 36, 40, 89, 232, 259 Curzon, Clifford 37, 109–10, 112, 259 Lucille Wallace, marrying 81 recordings of Boulanger 88, 97 as soloist 37, 81–2 performing Mozart 81–8, 89, 92, 98 Cusick, Suzanne 260 Dahlhaus, Carl 205 Dalcroze, Jacques 24 Damrosch, Walter 25–6, 29, 90–1, 101, 144 My Musical Life 90 Davies, Fanny 93 de Falla, Manuel 4 “Piece in B minor” 145 Debussy, Claude 56, 88, 157–8, 174, 194 “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” from Trois Chansons 188 Dent, Edward 142 Derenne, Paul 14, 34, 89 Désormière, Roger 34, 151, 160–1 Devoluy, John 221 D’Indy, Vincent 11, 136 Symphonie sur un chant montagnard 100 d’Orléans, Charles 139, 188, 251 Dowland, John 143 Dreyfus, Laurence 168 Dumbarton Oaks Concerto 138, 224–50, 251, 253, 255 Boulanger’s bid to control performance after the premiere 248 Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, modelled on 230 commissioned 229–30 European premiere conducted by Stravinsky 138, 231 proof copy kept by Boulanger 241 US premiere conducted by Boulanger 113–14, 137, 138, 224, 231, 232–40 Bach extracts 235–6, 237 musical arrangement 236–40 rehearsals 240 the score and performance of concerto 241–8 the work in performance and treasuring art 240–50 Dupré, Marcel 4 Dürr, Alfred 238 Duruflé, Maurice 151 Dushkin, Samuel 225, 226, 230–1, 232, 247, 248

283

École Normale de Musique concerts conducted by Boulanger 33, 35 establishment/teachers 24–5, 77, 79 scholarships provided by Mildred Bliss 225 sponsoring public lectures 32, 170 students attending Boulanger’s “Wednesdays” 27, 174 Eibenschütz, Ilona 93 Eliot, T. S. 225 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 198–9 Ellis, Katherine 11 Emmanuel, Maurice 172–3 Histoire de la langue musicale 172, 173 Evans, Edwin 169 Expert, Henri 11, 24, 120, 185–7 Fairchild, Blair 25, 224–5, 226 memorial concert 34, 226 Fauré, Gabriel 90 and Bach 56, 57 Boulanger on 62–3 Boulanger speaking at funeral 48 in Boulanger’s concerts 147–8, 151, 154, 157–8, 163, 167, 194 Madrigal, Op. 35 185, 209 as mentor to Boulanger 89–90 nature of music 116–17 as organist 28, 89–90 Pavane 159 Pénélope 117, 142 Quintet 45–6, 56, 58 Requiem 48–56, 57, 102–9, 120, 141, 142–3, 185, 209, 257 Kyrie 51–3, 102–9 placed at end of programs 207–8 Shylock 253 wartime performances 257 Fauser, Annegret 10 Févin, Antoine de 163 Fink, Robert 58–9, 82–6, 98, 117 Fisher, Philip 204–5 Forbes, Edward 114, 115 Françaix, Jean 11, 112 in Boulanger’s concerts 151, 154 Boulanger conducting premieres of works 137, 147–8 Le Diable boîteux 137 at Paris Conservatoire 172–3 performing with Boulanger 37 Piano Concerto 37, 39, 137, 156 Trois Duos 137 in US with Boulanger 37, 82 Francis, Kimberly 10, 57, 111–12, 113, 254–5 Franck, César 19, 28 Rédemption 19 Variations symphoniques 110 Frederick the Great 249

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index

284 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 97–8 Futurists 208

Gardiner, John Eliot 259 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 143, 209, 210 Gascoin, Marcel 221 Gemblaco, Johannes Franchois de 174 Gervais, Claude 139 Goehr, Lydia: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works 13 Goethe 44, 62–3 Gonet, Loulou 253 Gounod, Charles-François: Faust 141 Granados, Enrique: Tonadillas 224 grande ligne, la 45–57, 62, 78, 80–1, 98, 100, 101 Greenblatt, Stephen 204 Grétry, André: Richard Coeur de Lion 141 Grogin, R.C. 197 Grünfeld, Alfred 93 Guilbert, Yvette 121 Guilmant, Alexandre 96 first symphony 145–7 Hahn, Reynaldo 169–70 Handel, George Frideric 90, 159 Concerto in G, Op. 4, no.1 160 Hanslick, Eduard 44, 61 Harris, Roy: Sextet 32 Havemeyer, Louisine 212 Haydn, Joseph 154, 253 Herbage, Julian 118 Higonnet, Anne 209 Hindemith, Paul 142, 143, 147–8 O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod 154 Honegger, Arthur 151 Hotter, Hans 93 Iturbi, José 98–100 Jacobsen, Sascha 232 Janequin, Clément 163 Le Chant des oyseaux 120–1 Jeune France 258 Johnson, James: Listening in Paris 68–9 Josquin des Prez 163 Kédroff, Irène 34 Kédroff, Nathalie 34 Klemperer, Otto 248 Klotz-Gilles, Madame 221 Kochanski, Paul 133 Koechlin, Charles 25, 29, 61–2, 65, 131 Koussevitsky, Serge 29, 101–2, 119, 207, 248 Krasinki, Jean 74 Laederich, Alexandra 10 Landormy, Paul 77–8, 79 Histoire de la musique 172

Landowska, Wanda 24, 86, 88, 118 Lassus, Orlande de 163 Laurencin, Marie 1 Le Jeune, Claude La Belle Aronde 120 Revecy venir le printemps 120–1 Lederman, Minna 117 Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel 117, 118 Leirens, Charles 156, 165, 194 Levi-Alvarès, Jacques 157–8 Lewis, Anthony 137, 166 Lipatti, Dinu 37, 92–3, 112, 194, 259 Lizst, Franz: Prelude and Fugue on B–A–C–H 145–7 Long, Marguerite 24 Lully, Jean-Baptiste de 147–8, 159 Machaut, Guillaume de 151, 163 Maison & Jardin article by Boulanger 219–23 Makanovitsky, Paul 36–7 Maleuvre, Didier 130, 205 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 136 Malraux, André 220 Mangeot, Auguste 24, 25, 89, 171–2 Manziarly, Marcelle de 133, 137, 147–8 Boulanger letters 21, 45–6, 56, 58, 59, 73–4, 100–1 Marcel, Gabriel 61 Mare, André 43 Architectures (with Suë) 43 Marinetti, F.T. 208 Maritain, Jacques 72–4 Art et scholastique 72–3 Markevitch, Igor 33, 137, 259 Psaume 147–51 Mather, Frank Jewett: The History of Italian Painting 213 Matisse, Henri 214–15 Mauclair, Camille 69, 70 “La Religion de l’orchestre” 69 Maurras, Charles 62–3 Médicis, Catrina Flint de 11 Mendel, Arthur 258 Mendelssohn, Felix 142, 154 Ménéstrel, Le 76, 77–8, 79, 170 Mengelberg, Willem 154 Merritt, Tilman 115 Messaien, Olivier 253, 258 Milhaud, Darius 147, 151 Modern Music 58, 117 Modrakowska, Maria 14, 34, 36, 89, 132, 133 Monde Musical, Le 25 Boulanger’s reviews 98, 116, 143, 163–4, 167, 181, 196–7 Brahms 93–5 Concerts Colonne see under Concerts Colonne historical thinking and modern life 196 program construction 211, 217 rejection of individual subjectivity 69–70

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index and religious beliefs 67, 72 on technique rather than feeling 70 Monsaingeon, Bruno 8, 75, 181 Monteux, Pierre 32 Monteverdi, Claudio in Boulanger’s concerts 11, 136–7, 139, 143, 147, 154, 156, 160–1, 174 Boulanger’s recording 39, 92, 122, 156 Lamento della ninfa 136 madrigals 39, 194 Ohimé dov’è il mio ben 136 Su, su pastorelli vezzosi 151 Zefiro torna 122, 136 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 78, 88, 143, 147–8, 151–4, 253 Clarinet Concerto, K 622 147 Concerto in C minor, K 491 109–10 Fugue in C minor, K 426 81 Sonata for two pianos in D major, K 448 81, 82–8, 89, 92, 98 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 4 museums achieving didactic function through choice / order of displayed artifacts 203 art museums 203–5 collection museums 209–10 contemporary museum practice see under Valéry, Paul creation of collections in France 202–3 galleries in the musical museum see under tomb or treasure museum organization 204–5 power of juxtaposition in museum installations 211–12 musical work 41–76, 259–60 after World War II 258 architectural masterwork: Boulanger and the turn to form 42–59 aesthetics characterized by order and clarity / architecture 42–3 analysis of Bach cantatas 46–50, 51, 57 analytical practice 57–8 applying architectural principle to music see grande ligne, la Architectures 45–6 different ways of representing simple uninterrupted form 46–50 ethical dimension to concept of form 58–9 interpreting Fauré’s Requiem 48–56, 57 melodic reduction technique 57–8 new music / Stravinsky, approach to 56–7, 58 short/mid-term musical processes to be subordinated to long-term goals 45–6 and art/sculpture see galleries in the musical museum under tomb or treasure chronologically disjunct programming / cycle theory 200–2 compositions by Boulanger see composing/ compositions

285

concerts see concerts, problem of early music 11 applying formalist performance aesthetics of modernism 12 resistant to historically informed performance practice 12, 217 evaluating performances and critical skills 41–2 focus on original musical works and promoting new music 8, 11 formalist approach to musical work 42 “general ideas” within which audacious juxtapositions take place 144–62, 166–8 historical repertory 11–12 inspirational nature of interpretations 40 listening to the temple: singing architecture and living form 59–66 autonomy of artwork 13, 65–6, 129–30 Bergson’s work 60–2 literary citations 62–5 relationship of structural design to unfolding of musical time 60–2 structural listening 59 Valéry in discussions of form 63–6 long sequences where musical techniques join adjacent pieces 184–93 musical structure and performance decisions 12, 217–18 performance practice see performance practice producing modernist version of the musical work concept 13, 217 producing structurally coherent work in which form/content joined 12–13 promoting structurally defined, transcendent “workhood” 12, 13–14 rise of “structural performance” 14, 217 reconciling love of tradition and desire for the new 15 and religion see religion/religious beliefs Werktreue / fidelity to the work as goal of musical activity 8 “the works that stand for the time” 11 Mychetsky, Raïssa 9, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 145 death 31, 34, 234–5 Myers, Rollo 141 Narçon, Armand 34 new links 162, 163–93 hearing history 181–93 analysis courses to develop structural listening 181–2 long sequences where musical techniques join adjacent pieces 184–93 teaching listeners to hear relationships within musical works 182–4 more useful for education and pleasure 165–8

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

286

Index new links (cont.) BBC broadcasting 163–4, 165–7 “general ideas” within which audacious juxtapositions take place 166–8 second road: encounters with history 168–81 history and tradition in Boulanger’s teaching see under teaching neoclassicism debate 168–70 public talks and lecture series 175–81 Newhouse, Victoria 204–5, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 196–7 “Art of the Past and Soul of the Present” 199–200 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan 208, 224 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 154, 156, 174 Panzéra, Charles 32 Paris Conservatoire 24, 51, 57, 90, 172–3, 202–3, 257 Pasler, Jann 11, 67–8, 159 Patou, Jean 43 Pelletier, Wilfred 208 performance practice see art of assembling art; making music with Boulanger under performing the work performing the work 77–123, 240, 259–60 making music with Boulanger 81–9 Boulanger/Curzon compared with the Bartóks’ Mozart K. 448 81, 82–8, 89, 92, 98 Boulanger’s performance style 88–90, 97, 102–10 performance ideology, differences in 78–9, 81 performance, meaning of 10–11 performing France 89–96 Brahms, Boulanger’s approach to 91–6 French performance traditions 96 styles similar to Boulanger’s being cultivated in France 89–91 poetic interpretations by Cortot 77–8 singing architecture and sounding form 97–111 Boulanger’s structural approach 102–10 continuity at a structural level 98–101 Paris as center for modernist performing styles 97 performing structurally 97–8 tempo 101–2 tyranny of the bar 101 sounding the future, performing the past 111–23 early music 117–23 “geometric”/”architectural” performance and Stravinsky 111–16 new music 116–17 Poétique, Boulanger’s involvement with 114–16 Stravinsky’s authority promoting “architectural” approach 114

structure, Boulanger’s emphasis on 78, 79, 80– 1, 102–9, 109–10 continuity at a structural level 98–101 “geometric” performance styles 79–80, 111–16 Pérotin 163 Peyron, Gisèle 34, 36, 102 Philip, Robert 122 Phillips, Duncan and Marjorie 223–4 Piston, Walter 115, 258 Polignac, Marie-Blanche de 34, 36, 88–9, 132, 133, 253 Polignac, princesse de, Winnaretta Singer 39, 232 assisting Boulanger’s career 32–3 attending Boulanger’s “Wednesdays” 33, 132 concerts for 26, 34–5, 81–2, 133–4, 147, 230, 232 Nadia Boulanger Morning Musicales 35 pianist 133 Pomian, Krzysztof 203, 206 Potter, John 79, 111 Poulenc, Francis 10, 11, 14, 138–9, 151, 252 Litanies à la Vierge noire Notre-Dame de RocAmadour 137, 139, 154, 163 mélodies 139, 151 Organ Concerto 137, 151 Priez pour paix 139, 251, 252 Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence 139 Sept chansons 139, 163 Suite française 139 “Tenebrae factae sunt” 156 Poulet, Gaston 26 Préger, Leo 133, 154, 157–8, 188 Proust, Marcel 224 Prunières, Henri 24 La Vie et l’oeuvre de Claudio Monteverdi 136 Pugno, Raoul 21–2, 28, 29, 32, 37, 39–40, 112 Concertstück 21 death 21–2, 23, 48 Les Heures claires (with Boulanger) 21 performance style 90 La Ville morte (with Boulanger) 22 Purcell, Henry 151, 154, 156 The Fairy Queen 133 Quimby, Arthur 154–6 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 151, 154, 159 Rateau, Albert Armand 228 Rauh, Lucy 34 Raunay, Jeanne 26 Ravel, Joseph-Maurice L’Heure espagnole 43 Le Tombeau de Couperin 145–7, 159 recordings 39, 82, 88–9, 92–3, 102, 156–7, 194, 206 distrust of 240–1 Monteverdi 92, 122, 156–7, 194, 218–19 Petit Concert 143, 157–8, 162, 165, 185–91, 219, 220

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index using sound recording to build an imaginary musical museum 220–3 using sound recordings to construct music history 221–3 Reicha, Anton: Traité de mélodie 57–8 religion / religious beliefs Boulanger’s religious beliefs 14, 66–7, 72, 253, 260 sacred mysteries 66–76 Ansermet’s application of Maritain 73–4 Catholic renouveau 71–6 concerts as form of religious ritual / understanding of concert experience 67–71 musical experience as akin to religious ecstasy 42 Rhapsodie (Boulanger) 21 spiritual orientation pervading Boulanger’s concert criticism 66–7 Revue musicale, La 44, 48, 60, 61, 73, 131, 143–4 Boulanger’s article on Fauré 48 concert series 160–2 Rice lectures 54–5, 56, 59, 63, 64, 117, 257 Rieti, Vittorio 151 Roger-Ducasse, Jean 25, 163 Roland-Manuel, Alexis 114–15 Rosenstiel, Leonie 254 Roussel, Albert 141, 143 Padmâvatî 32 Sachs, Curt 220–1, 253 Anthologie sonore 220–1 Saint-Saëns, Camille 24 Symphony no. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 207 salon, music in 1–4, 26–8, 32–3, 34–5, 224 Boulanger’s salon “Wednesdays” 10, 27–8, 29, 33, 130–2, 133, 147, 240 performing in salons 26, 225 for charity 26, 27 Sarton, May 140 Scarlatti, Alessandro 90 “Piece in D minor” 145 Schenker, Heinrich 58, 168 Schloezer, Boris de 131 Schmitt, Florent 25 Schnabel, Artur 86, 88 Schoenberg, Arnold 59 Scholes, Percy: Music for Eye and Ear 221 Schubert, Franz 81–2, 88, 142 Die schöne Müllerin 183–4 lieder 151–4 Schumann, Robert 81–2, 88, 101, 142, 159 Andante and variations for two pianos, Op. 46 37 Schütz, Heinrich 76, 156, 160–1, 167, 174 Historia der Auferstehung 118, 133–6, 141, 232–4, 257 Seefried, Irmgard 93 Segond, Cédric 10

287

Selva, Blanche 24, 100 Sermisy, Claudin de 163 Sessions, Roger 132 Shortall, Harrington 218 Siegmeister, Elie 170–1 Singer, Winnaretta see Polignac, princesse de Small, Christopher 10 Smith, Melville 39, 253 Société Charles Cros 39 Société Musicale Indépendante 28–9, 32 Soubrier, Jacques 221 Souvchintsky, Pierre 60, 114–15 Spectateur, Le 211, 258 Spisak, Michal 156 Stimpson, Brian 66 Stokowski, Leopold 137, 248 Stravinsky, Igor 10, 14, 59, 96, 215 appointed to Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard 114 and Bach 169 in Boulanger’s concerts 4, 147–8, 154, 156 compositions/works Ave Maria 138 Chroniques de ma vie 60–1, 79–80, 111 “Composing, Performing, Listening” 115–16 Dumbarton Oaks Concerto see Dumbarton Oaks Concerto Duo concertant 138, 232, 236–8, 247 Firebird 145 Jeu de cartes 230 Les Noces 56, 73–4, 175 Octet 73–4, 169 Oedipus Rex 138 L’Oiseau de feu 119 Pastorale 138 Perséphone 138, 174 Petrouchka 56 Piano Sonata 56 Poétique Musicale 60–1, 79–80, 111, 112, 114–16 Pulcinella 169–70 Quatre chansons russes 138 Rake’s Progress 182–4 Rite of Spring 56, 73–4 “Some ideas about my Octuor” 79–80 Sonata for two pianos 116, 137 Symphonie des psaumes 57, 113–14, 160–1 Trois histoires pour enfants 138 Violin Concerto 226, 248 conducting 231 with Boulanger 34, 113–14, 226 Dushkin, collaborating with 226 editing works, Boulanger 113 “geometric” performance style 79–80, 111–16, 169 performance practice in late Romantic tradition 80

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

288

Index Stravinsky, Igor (cont.) Maritain’s writing as tool to explain Stravinsky’s work 73–4 Mozart’s Fugue in C minor, performing with Soulima Stravinsky 81 new music 11, 28, 56–7, 58, 117–18 as a “difficult” modern 139 relationship with the Blisses 225–6, 248–50 teaching with Boulanger 80, 114 in the US 229–30, 258 World War II, during 251–2 Stravinsky, Soulima 57, 112–13, 116, 259 Mozart’s Fugue in C minor, performing with Igor Stravinsky 81 Stravinsky, Theodore 249–8 Strecker, Willy 226, 248 Suarès, André 143–4 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 59 Suë, Louis 43 Architectures (with Mare) 43 Szalowski, Anton 133 Szigeti, Josef 91–2 Szymanowski, Karol: Stabat Mater 208 Tallis, Thomas 156 O Nata lux 154 Taruskin, Richard 79, 81, 117, 118, 185 teaching 12–13, 22 Bach–Stravinsky comparisons characterizing teaching 232 history and tradition / past masterworks and demands of music history 168–9, 170–5 conflict with Cortot and Mangeot over teaching 171–2 course sheets 173–4 Emmanuel’s work, relying on 172–4 focus on early repertoires 170–1 new/recent works and early music in Wednesdays sessions 174–5 institutional teaching Conservatoire Américain 26 Conservatoire Femina-Musica 24 École Normale de Musique 24–5, 77, 170–5 and listening see hearing history under new links between them Paris Conservatoire 257 performances in pedagogical contexts 32, 130–2 private teaching 24, 27, 170–4 educational institution / “Wednesdays” 10, 27–8, 29, 33, 130–2, 133, 147 new/recent works and early music on “Wednesdays” 174–5 public talks and lectures 170, 175–81 reputation as teacher/lecturer 32, 39 students/pupils 10, 11, 27–8 Boulanger’s inspirational effect 7

composers, training 11, 96, 130 in United States see under United States (US) see also career Thibaud, Jacques 24 Thomson, Virgil 96, 101, 144 Thurston, Ethel 253 tomb or treasure 194–216 galleries in the musical museum 202–16 Boulanger’s approach close to practices of “collection museums” 209–10 conflict between aesthetics of masterpiece / series technology 206–9 counterpart to Boulanger’s approach in Barnes’s work 212–16 power of juxtaposition in museum installations 211–12 museums see museums musical work facilitating comparisons with art/sculpture 202 the past lights the present, the present the past 196–202 Bergson’s concept of durée 197–8 concert principles / historical empathy relying on connection to music 198–200 concerts establishing the presence of historical works 195, 216 chronologically disjunct programming / cycle theory 200–2 “existential historians” 197 literary modernists 198–9 modernist historical thinking 195–7 Toscanini, Arturo 80, 88 United States (US) 7, 39 art galleries / collections, visiting 211–12, 215, 223–4 Boulanger’s views on 30–1 conducting 142–3, 234 Dumbarton Oaks Concerto see Dumbarton Oaks Concerto mass media for performances 38–9 Petit Concert recording released 143, 157–8, 190–1 teaching in 192–3, 234, 253, 254 offers of teaching/lecturing posts 30 public talks and lecture series 175–81 tours of the United States 26, 29–30, 119, 142–3, 144–7, 251, 253 wartime charitable works with musicians/ diplomats 25–6, 255–6 World War II, during 142–3, 253–7 feelings of guilt and anxiety 254–5, 256–7 Valéry, François 191–2, 193, 219 Valéry, Paul 39, 63–6, 115, 209, 251–2 L’Âme et la Danse 44, 63–4 on Boulanger 97, 199, 218–19, 220

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646

Index contemporary museum practice 128–9, 130, 181, 206–7, 209, 216 “Le Problème des musées” 128–9, 195, 205 Eupalinos 44, 63–5, 71, 207 van den Borren, Charles 121–2 Vierne, Louis 96 first symphony 145–7 Vilmorin, Louise de 1–2 Vivaldi, Antonio 133 von Nordberg, Hermann 93 Wagner, Richard 208 Parsifal 208 Tristan und Isolde 173 Wallace, Lucille 81 Walsh, Stephen 242 war between the wars see between the wars Great War 19, 20–1, 22–3, 25, 196, 224, 254

289

effects of Great War on Boulanger’s life 14–15, 21, 23 World War II 39, 251 after World War II 258 in France 251–3 in the US see under United States (US) Warburg, Aby 201–2 Watkins, Glenn 168 Weber, Carl Maria von 142, 151–4 Webster, Beveridge 112, 225, 226, 232 Wiéner, Jean 167 Weingartner, Felix 80, 88, 154 Wellek, René 65 Wharton, Edith 224 Winged Victory (Nike) of Samothrace 207, 208 Wolff, Katherine 252 Wragley, Richard 255–6 Wührer, Friedrich 93

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 04 Feb 2020 at 10:23:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920646