“How discouraged I am some days,” wrote Lili Boulanger to her close confidante Miki Piré, shortly before her early death, “because I realize that I will never have the feeling of having done what I wanted, because I can do nothing without interruptions, and they are longer than my work phases themselves!”
Born in Paris in 1893, Boulanger was chronically ill with bronchopneumonia as a child and spent much of her life in sanatoriums. She created her multifaceted oeuvre in just seven years (1911-1918). The work oscillates between late romantic, impressionist, and expressionist tonal languages—often with a spiritual dimension—and primarily comprises choral, vocal, orchestral, chamber, and piano works.
Lili Boulanger was born into a musical dynasty. Raised Catholic, she was deeply religious. Her mother, the Russian princess and singer Raïssa Myschezkaja, familiarized the family with the sounds of the Eastern Church liturgy. Boulanger took private lessons in harmony, organ, piano, violoncello, violin and harp and listened to her older sister Nadia’s music lessons. Gabriel Fauré, a regular guest at Boulanger’s home, was one of her musical advisors and occasionally allowed her to sit in on his composition class, where Maurice Ravel and George Enescu, among others, studied. At sixteen, despite her illness, Boulanger took the entrance examination at the Paris Conservatoire and received systematic music lessons for the first time. Only a short time later (1913), she became the first woman ever to win the prestigious “Prix de Rome” with the cantata “Faust et Hélène” and became an international celebrity overnight.
