9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

https://nyti.ms/29KszN6

THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER

By Ned Rorem

May 23, 1982

See the article in its original context from

May 23, 1982, Section 7, Page 1 Buy Reprints

New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to

TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New
York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.

SUBSCRIBE

*Does not include Crossword-only or

Cooking-only subscribers.

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online
publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter,
edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are
continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 1/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

NADIA BOULANGER A Life In Music. By Leonie Rosenstiel. Illustrated. 427 pp. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co. $24.95.

AM I the only living expatriate American composer who never studied with Nadia
Boulanger? Certainly she was a friend during my decade in France that began in 1949; she
did perform my music and helped with money, meals, prizes, and with advice on the good
life and concern for the bad. Yet, if she often inspected my work (''too many notes'' was her
Tallulah-voiced admonishment - the best threeword criticism anyone can offer a composer),
Boulanger never really gave me lessons. She weighed the pros and cons but concluded that
at 24 I was now formed - her nudging could only falsify what she termed my nature bete.
When I evaluate how memorably much I gained from Mademoiselle, as she was called, in
our rare hours together, compare those hours to the years granted some other musician,
then multiply that musician by thousands, it is easy to see her as the most influential
teacher since Socrates. I caught in microcosm, with neither envy nor love but with respect
and awe, what the devotees absorbed in depth.

Maybe long before knowing her I had gleaned as much as was needed from Nadia Boulan-
ger. I had, after all, studied with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, her first overseas
prodigies from the early 1920's who, thanks to a rigorous French training, had become our
quintessentially American composers. But there were not only composers. After World War
II, which Boulanger sweated out in the United States (though she never mastered English:
like many a fine musician she had no ear for foreign tongues), all of my older colleagues,
singers and dancers and drummers and managers, seemed to have collided with her. Myth
credits every American town with two things: a 10-cent store and a Boulanger student.
Even before the war, as a teen-ager, I had been imbued with her version of Monteverdi's
madrigals on the one record which, still today, I would take to a desert island.

Through osmosis I knew what the mentor was made of, even to her appearance (thin bow
ties, hair in a bun, pince-nez and sensible shoes, the long black dress), her technical
proficiency (chilling to Americans whose home-grown training remains comparatively lax),
her personal theatrics (tears on cue at mention of her dead sister, Lili), her miscrediting of
famous friends (Raymond Radiguet, not Jean Cocteau, put forth the notion that a true artist
has his own voice and cannot copy, so he has only to copy to prove his originality). I knew
everything except the essence, that her singular dynamism was determined less by
undeniable gift than by intensity of attention; by upbringing she was herself a composer, as
she felt every musician - at least by upbringing - should be. Yet with all her flair for
unmasking the most recalcitrant student's real nature, ''anyone who allowed her in any
piece to tell him what to do next'' (the words are Virgil Thomson's) ''would see that piece
ruined before his eyes by the application of routine recipes and of bromides from standard
repertory. The student who sought his remedies at home, alone, would grow in stature.''

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 2/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

HOW had Mademoiselle herself grown in stature? That is the question that Dr. Leonie
Rosenstiel undertakes to answer, in almost too exquisite detail, with the present volume.

Nadia Boulanger, who died a mere three years ago at 92, was born of a venerable father
(Ernest Boulanger, already 12 when Beethoven died in 1827, became a noted composer and
professor at the Paris Conservatory) and a glamorous mother, the young Russian princess
Raissa Myschetsky. Boulanger pere instilled in his daughter the assumption that music was
a more urgently natural part of life than literature or even sex. Her mother stressed the
moral obligation to do better, always better, and dominated Nadia with a Spartan charm.
After her husband's death she shared her daughter's bedroom until 1935, when Raissa died,
long after Nadia had become a world figure.

At 10 the girl entered the Paris Conservatory, where for a decade she won first prizes in
harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and accompagnement (a term covering all aspects of
score reading), and studied composition with Gabriel Faure. In 1908 she was granted
Second Grand Prix de Rome for her cantata ''La Sirene.'' (The First Grand Prix came five
years later to Nadia's fragile younger sister, Lili, the first woman composer ever to be so
honored.) From 1908 to 1918 Nadia taught harmony at the Conservatory. But not until 1948
would she be named full professor, that position in France being thought unsuited to a
woman, even her country's most sought-after pedagogue. Meanwhile, Nadia entertained a
very public rapport with Raoul Pugno, a famous and fat pianist old enough to be - and who
in a sense was - her father. (Dr. Rosenstiel endlessly wonders whether or not the
relationship was platonic.) With Pugno she not only gave concert tours but also composed
an opera, never produced, on a libretto by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. After the deaths in
1914 of Pugno and in 1918 of Lili, Nadia Boulanger stopped composing to become a full-time
teacher and occasional performer.

When the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau was founded in 1921, Boulanger was its
chief draw, which she remained, except for the war years, every summer for the rest of her
life. Tours of the United States resulted in her becoming the first woman to conduct the
Boston Symphony and then the New York Philharmonic. The list of her students at home
and abroad is vast. Not only composers such as Louise Talma, Roy Harris, Walter Piston,
Elliott Carter, David Diamond and Theodore Chanler, to mention only Americans, but also
interpreters like Dinu Lipatti, Yehudi Menuhin, Maurice Gendron, Kathleen Ferrier and,
later, Noel Lee, Nell Tangeman, Jean-Pierre Marty and Jay Gottlieb would never have been
quite as they are without Boulanger's guidance.

Second only to Bach in the Boulanger pantheon came her friend Igor Stravinsky, who
habitually supplied his new manuscripts for her perusal. Stravinsky could do no wrong.
Indeed, after Stravinsky's espousal of post-Schonbergian methods, Boulanger, who despised
serial music, attempted to find some truth in his erring. In the autumn of 1964 I visited her
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 3/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

just after her return from Berlin, where she had heard Stravinsky's newest excursion into
12-tone terrain, ''Abraham and Isaac.'' Asked how long the piece lasted, Mademoiselle
Boulanger replied, ''Does one speak of temporal data where Stravinsky is concerned?'' I
later understood: The piece, 13 minutes by the clock, seemed like a numbing hour.

All her life she was newsworthy even to philistines, enigmatic even to intimates.
Boulanger's fame lay in her femaleness, thus in her firstness. She excelled at what no other
woman ever had, musical pedagogy at its highest, but she also gave up what no woman ever
had, a composing career. Was this sacrifice, as she later so hotly claimed, because her
compositions were ''useless,'' or because she wished to cede the field to her dead sister? She
was never an outright feminist, always giving the benefit of the doubt to her male students
while overtaxing the females; yet she was acquisitive of the females, ostracizing them
should they contemplate marriage.

Her old-maidish aspect notwithstanding, Boulanger was a creature of high temperament.

The open infatuations with old Raoul Pugno, later with young Igor Markevitch, now seem
rife with pre-Freudian innocence, as do intimations of latent lesbianism. She visibly
preferred men because they were not in competition with her, that is, with Lili, for beside Lili
there was no room for other female composers. Nadia Boulanger's uniqueness (unlike, for
example, teacher Martha Graham's) was that she not only dominated what had hitherto
been a solely male domain - the instruction of young composers - but in so doing had
quenched, once and for all, her creative fires. Dare I suggest that the renunciation was itself
a creative coup? That her own music was in fact useless?

Malleable toward her musical past, how rigidly Boulanger held to the social givens of her
aristocratic forbears! If there was a contradiction between the anti-Semitism stylish since
the early 19th century and the acceptance of homosexuality in Parisian upper echelons, it
was lost on Boulanger. That a good many of her pupils were Jewish was a condition she
overlooked only when they were gifted or rich, whereas homosexuality was ''bad'' only if it
interfered with work.

Boulanger early showed a knack for manipulating the well-placed and the well-off. From her
youthful feud with Faure, through her elbowrubbing with Valery and Gide, to her very
funeral at Trinite where Grace Kelly and her husband recited the Our Father from the front
row, Boulanger's society outside of school was of the most choye, and even in school she
never turned down a wealthy applicant, no matter how untalented. To us Americans this
knack seems overweening in a ''true artist'': If, say, Elliott Carter hires a press agent, do we
not feel he should be above all that? But ''all that'' has always been grist to the survival of
European artists. Boulanger's cajolings were strictly at the service of those artists. Deeply

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 4/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

royalist, deeply Catholic, she was a snob in that word's oldest sense - c'est noble - and her
noble amateurs sometimes produced pure gold. Listen again to the soprano Countess Jean
de Polignac's rendition of ''Amor'' among those Monteverdi madrigals.

Indefatigable, she might teach her first lesson of the day at 7 A.M., her last at midnight,
meals absorbed with phone crooked under her chin. Music came before all else, certainly
before gastronomy or love, and she demanded no less of each student. In the final years,
sightless, toothless, half-deaf, hands curled with arthritis, she kept at the routine. Leonard
Bernstein, perhaps the last person to speak with Nadia Boulanger, found her nearly
comatose in the Fontainebleau hospital. He asked if she heard music in her head, and if so,
what music. After a long, long silence, in her marvelous husky baritone she answered from
afar: ''A music that has neither beginning nor end.''

SHE thrived on publicity, yes, but mistrusted the printed word. Good teaching lies in leading
a student to culture and making him think. This transfer of knowledge is a contagious
enthusiasm. Boulanger's contagious enthusiasms grew to be rote. From year to year,
student to student, she reiterated the same examples, raised her eyes toward heaven at the
same phrase in a Bach aria, allowed those same eyes to flow with public tears at the annual
''reliving'' of Lili's obsequies, summoned the same bon mots of Charles Peguy at the same
magic moment of Stravinsky's Mass. Such repetitions, though dangerous for a creator, are
pollen for a pedagogue: The identical strong story is ever fruitful since meaning bends with
each listener. Still, Boulanger's ambivalence had always forbidden her to grant taped
interviews, to publish her speeches or to encourage a biography. Tapes trapped
contradictions as well as repetitions, publication glorified writer above text, and memoirs
meant death. Boulanger felt her life as an event was boring; her energies were aimed
strictly toward the education of others, and the tone of such energies by definition could not
be notated.

Two decades ago, however, she did a dazzling series of television broadcasts; some years
later, as anxious about Lili's posterity as about her own, she finally accorded Leonie
Rosenstiel access to previously unavailable papers, thus making this American researcher
the sole official chronicler of Nadia Boulanger. Alas, though Dr. Rosenstiel is authorized, she
is not quite an author.

After reading the present book, I read another half as long and twice as vital - the
untranslated transcripts of those programs in which Nadia Boulanger's voice throbs with
wisdom and warmth on the very page. I was simultaneously confronted by two Boulangers -
three, if my private souvenirs are worthy - and realized once again that a model can count
for less than her various painters. Dr. Rosenstiel, who prefers to speak in place of Boulanger,
is a thesis writer trying for style, a style that is often grudging, as though she disliked her
subject. Information, as a documentary mass, is the book's main and irreplaceable asset.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 5/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

When the information is a gradual building of needed facts, as in the tense telling of the 1908
Prix de Rome competition from Boulanger's entry to her final high placement (accompanied
by the revulsions of misogynist Camille Saint-Saens and the ecstasies of the suffragist
press), we root for the heroine. When we learn that during their first meeting in 1910,
Stravinsky replies to Boulanger's congratulations for his ''Firebird'' with: ''That's not very
important. What is, is that my name becomes a household word,'' we smile at the
comeuppance of the no-nonsense demoiselle. We know that she too will soon seek to debunk
the still-held notion of the artist as decoration. And when on her 25th birthday, still single
(thanks to her enslavement as family breadwinner), Boulanger joins the St. Catherine's fete
for unmarried girls, declaring that ''when a woman wants to fulfill her true role of mother
and spouse, it is impossible for her also to fulfill her role as artist, writer or musician,'' we
cringe at the conflicts she will suffer for the next six decades. Still, since scarcely a month of
those six decades is unaccounted for, nor any viewpoint, especially an unpleasant one,
unrecorded, we grow weary of the dogged inventory, the graceless Anglicizing, the
unverified quotes, the cold redundancies that could be cut by a quarter with no loss of
content.

LONG before those decades closed, Boulanger grew out of fashion. In 1946, returning to
Paris after a six-year stay in the United States, she found Pierre Boulez's clique booing
Stravinsky; as Stravinsky's staunchest appendage, the outmoded Boulanger also came
under fire. As recently as 1972 Boulez recalled with customary charity: ''After the war,
Messiaen and Leibowitz were the important figures and no one had any use for Boulanger.''
Like Boulanger, Boulez in his early years was a prophet mainly in foreign lands. Unlike her,
he returned in triumph to France where to this day, for better or worse, he reigns supreme.

As influence waned, honors accumulated. By 1977 her mesmerism had deteriorated into
dogmatism, but international admirers kept up the fan club. Pompidou pinned on her the
highest of his Government's civilian awards, that of the grand officier of the Legion
d'honneur, and the little square at 36, rue Ballu, where she had lived and taught since 1904
was renamed Place Lili-Boulanger.

NADIA BOULANGER is mainly remembered as a mentor of composers, although she was

the guiding light for every breed of musician, not least of all the female musician, and her
public career as organist, conductor, musicologist, lecturer and even for a time newspaper
critic was unprecedented. Yet were she judged today solely by what ''her composers''
composed while studying with her, her ratings might fall. For every Aaron Copland she
championed were dozens of nowforgotten geniuses. Most of her Americans, owing her their
strong sense of form, came home to bigger things. Of her French stable, only Jean Fran,caix,
whom she seems to have cut from whole cloth, still prevails at 80. As for Lili, it could be
argued that she is less a force than a symbol. But where are those wondrous others? Like

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 6/7
9/16/2020 THE COMPOSER AND THE MUSIC TEACHER - The New York Times

her mezzo-forte performing style, Nadia Boulanger's taste was, finally, diatonic and bland a
la Faure. How heretical might she find the vastly chromatic late works of her Elliott Carter,
of Ross Lee Finney, of Copland himself? But the planet continues to turn. If Boulanger did
not change the planet's shape, she shaped some who did.

Was her emphasis on technique only one of many ''techniques''? Do the French, with their
machine-gun solfege accuracy, necessarily produce better musicians than the more flaccidly
reared Americans? At least Nadia Boulanger knew that to be moved without metier is
insufficient, while with metier, inspiration falls into place. Her contagious enthusiasm was
no tacit encouragement for random emoting, but a demonstration that structure, art's
sovereign ingredient, need not be always dull, and that to write down your dreams you must
be wide awake.

Ned Rorem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1976, is the author of ''The Paris Diary,'' ''An Absolute Gift'' and other
books.

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 1982, Section 7, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: THE COMPOSER AND THE
MUSIC TEACHER

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/23/books/the-composer-and-the-music-teacher.html 7/7