Nadia Boulanger
From left to right: “Cantique” by Nadia Boulanger, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Cello, and Kathryn Stott, Piano; Prelude in F-minor for Organ; “Modéré” from Three Pieces for Cello and Piano;
a performance of “Allons voir sur le lac d’argent” featuring Marion Tassou, Soprano, Enguerrand de Hys, Tenor, and Anne de Fornel, Piano
Although well-known as a composer, Nadia Boulanger is perhaps best remembered as a teacher of piano and composition. Her students included Daniel Barenboim, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, Igor Markevitch, and Astor Piazzolla, among hundreds of others.
The daughter of two composers, Ernest and Lili Boulanger, she was enrolled in the Conservatoire de Paris at an early age, but decided she lacked the talent for composition and became a teacher, leading to an influence that continues even today, with composer Ned Rorem describing her as “arguably the most important pedagogue of this or any other century.”
Composer Elliott Carter said of her: “Nadia was the only person besides Shoenberg for whom you could write contemporary music and get intelligent criticism. That was very remarkable. She knew the [Igor Stravinsky] ‘Rite of Spring’ by heart, so that if you [played] something [from it] she could say “Well, this is the way Stravinsky did it, and play it over from memory.”
Although she taught both in the United States and the United Kingdom at such prestigious institutions as The Juilliard School, The Yehudi Menuhin School, The Longy School and the Royal Academy of Music, for most of her life she taught from her family’s apartment in Paris, doing so for almost seven decades.
She was also the first woman to conduct many major orchestras in America and Europe, among them the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, The Hallé, (a famous English symphony orchestra based in Manchester), and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In addition, she also conducted several world premieres, including works by Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky.
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