Nadia Boulanger Essentials

An organist, pianist and composer, Nadia Boulanger was also a pioneering conductor, both as a woman and in her revival of long-neglected repertoire of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries—particularly the works of Monteverdi, which she performed and recorded extensively in the 1930s and 1950s. Yet her greatest impact was as teacher to generations of composers, with students from Britain, her native France and particularly America, including Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson. Born into a musical family in Paris, 1887, Boulanger entered the Conservatoire at the age of 10, studying organ with Louis Vierne and composition with Widor and Fauré. As a composer, however, she felt outclassed by her brilliant younger sister, Lili, and she devoted herself principally to teaching after Lili’s death in 1918. In addition to composers, she taught musicians, such as the pianists Clifford Curzon and Dinu Lipatti (with whom, as duet partner, she recorded Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes in 1937-38 and a selection of the same composer’s Waltzes in 1937), and conductors, including Igor Markevitch and John Eliot Gardiner. She was the first woman to conduct orchestras including the BBC Symphony, the Boston Symphony, Hallé and Philadelphia. She also conducted the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” in 1938 and formed a strong professional relationship with that composer that lasted until his death in 1971. She died in Paris in 1979.