Foundations (1929-1932): Boulanger, Stravinsky, and the
Symphonie de psaumes
In the final weeks of September 1929 Nadia Boulanger retreated to her summer home in Gargenville, France to afford herself a few moments of peace. That summer had been spent as every summer since 1921 had, teaching at the Conservatoire Américain at Fontainbleau, France, and the following academic year would be exceptionally busy, because Boulanger had agreed to take over the late Paul Dukas’s music history courses at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Boulanger therefore seized the opportunity to sequester herself at
Gargenville and permit herself some time to prepare her courses, entertain friends, and provide lessons to those students invited by her to loiter during the intersessional period. In the middle of this activity, on 26 September 1929, a letter from Igor Stravinsky arrived stating that the composer was looking for Boulanger.1
Stravinsky had recently returned to Paris after a summer vacationing with his family in Culoz. There, he had composed portions of his latest work, the pseudo piano-concerto, Capriccio, and socialized with Sergei Prokofiev, Ernest Ansermet, and Pytor Souvtchinksky. The vacation ended with the sudden news that Stravinsky’s impresario for twenty years, the mercurial Sergei Diaghilev, and died on 19 July. After returning with his family to their
home in Nice, Stravinsky departed for Paris, perhaps to seek comfort in the arms of his lover, Vera Sudeinkina. In addition, it seems that Stravinsky felt the need to impose some sense of order on his personal life, and so he requested an audience with Boulanger concerning his son, Soulima.2
Stravinsky’s message precipitated a house-call at Gargenville during which time the composer asked Boulanger to assume the musical education of his middle child. Boulanger accepted, and within two weeks the eighteen-year-old Soulima Stravinsky had been packed off to Paris, far from both parents’ watchful eyes.3Over the course of the 1929-30 academic year, Boulanger grew close to Soulima, serving as a sort of surrogate parent for him. This brought her into closer contact with Stravinsky’s immediate family, and eventually, within the creative circle of the composer himself.4The resulting familiarity between Boulanger and Stravinsky led these two musicians to engage in their first project together: the editorial revision and analysis of theSymphonie de psaumes.
The details of this project have never been published, and remain hidden in documents I recently discovered at thefondsBoulanger archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the StravinskySammlungof the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Bringing these materials together, I re-enter the musical conversation shared between Boulanger and Stravinsky in the early 1930s. First, I reconstruct the particulars of Boulanger and
2The details of these events can be found in Stephen Walsh’s:Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia
and France, 1882-1934(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1999), 483–85.
3Boulanger only agreed to teach Soulima Stravinsky music analysis, composition, and music history.
For a piano teacher, Boulanger connected him with Mme. C. Chailley-Richez. Walsh,Creative Spring, 492.
4The members of the Stravinsky family, excluding the patriarch, sent 256 letters to Boulanger from
1930 until her death in 1979. In the early years (pre-1935), Soulima, Theodore, and Catherine Stravinsky were the most prolific. See:F-Pn, N.L.a 108 (88-96) for Catherine’s letters;F-Pn, N.L.a. 108 (319-387) for Soulima’s; andF-Pn, N.L.a. 109 (1-62) for those of Theodore Stravinsky.
Stravinsky’s editorial work on theSymphonie de psaumesfrom August–October 1931 that resulted in the publication of the composition’s “Miniature Score.” Second, I examine the analytical materials Boulanger and Stravinsky exchanged in June 1932 to consider how they reflect theSymphonie de psaumes’s inner workings and Boulanger’s most famous teaching concept, thegrande ligne. In so doing, I redraw the connections between Boulanger’s and Stravinsky’s professional activities between 1930 and 1932.
In the Beginning: Nadia Boulanger as Cultural Authority
By the late 1920s, Nadia Boulanger was a powerful figure in the trans-Atlantic field of musical production. She had taught at Alfred Cortot’s École Normale de Musique for eleven years and served as professor at the Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleau since 1921.5 Boulanger was also an active participant in the Princesse de Polignac’s prestigious salon and served as the only female board member of the Société Musicale Indépendente (SMI).6
But it had not always been this way. Parisian social strictures concerning gender greatly limited Boulanger’s professional ambitions during the early twentieth century. Third- Republic Paris was still a place where professional opportunities for women were highly circumscribed, at least in those professions—such as professor at the prestigious
5In 1926, a stenographer for theLe Monde musicalattended Nadia Boulanger’s classes at the École
Normale and recorded her lectures. See: Nadia Boulanger “La Musique Moderne,”Le Monde musical, 37 année, nos. 2, 5, and 6, 1926 : 59-61, 201, and 242–44.
6For Boulanger and Polignac’s professional relationship, see: Jeanice Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and
the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,”The Journal of the American Musicological Society3 (1993): 415-68; and Sylvia Kahan,Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winaretta Singer Princesse de Polignac(Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2003). For more on the Société Musicale Indépendante see: Michel Duchesneau,L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871-1939(Sprimont : Mardaga, 1997); idem, “La musique française pendant la guerre 1914-1918: Autour de la tentative de fusion de la Société Nationale de Musique et de la Société Musicale Indépendante, ”Revue de musicologie82 (1996): 123–53; and Nadia Boulanger,F-Pn, “Société Musicale Indépendente,” Rés. Vm. Dos. 138.
Conservatoire de Paris—to which Boulanger aspired.7As Sharif Gemie writes: “young women entering the schooling sector encountered new social and political dilemmas…As female teachers, they were to be at once public and private beings, within the state and yet outside it.”8To circumvent these restrictions, Boulanger partially removed herself from the Parisian milieu during the 1920s and entered the interstitial, transnational space of the
Conservatoire Américain. This institution, housed outside Paris in the Louis XIV wing of the ancient Palais de Fontainebleau, was founded in 1921 and had a mandate to recruit students from across North America as pupils. In turn, the French benefitted from an increase in Franco-American relations and enhanced their image as a global cultural authority.9
Few capitalized on this mixing of American and French fields as well as Nadia
Boulanger. Even in its most nascent of forms, this transnational network validated her artistic authority in ways precluded by Parisian mores. Boulanger inherited her cultural capital from several generations of musically prominent Boulangers. This pedigree allowed her access to what Pierre Bourdieu describes as a set “of cultural orientations, personal trajectories, and an ability to play the game of social interaction,” that imbued her cultural cues with prestige in
7Though the French government made training more female teachers a priority in 1882, this
encouragement was restricted primarily to women intending to instruct at primary schools. Boulanger’s ambitions to practice as a professor of composition at a Conservatory fell far outside this mandate. See: Ingrid Sykes,Women, Science, and Sound in Nineteenth-Century France(New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Sharif Gemie,Women and Schooling in France, 1815-1914(Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1995); and Jo Burr Margadant,Madame le Professeur:Women Educators in the Third Republic(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
8Gemie,Women and Schooling, 56.
9
For a history of Boulanger’s involvement with the École Américain de Fontainebleau see: Kendra Preston Leonard,The Conservatoire Amércain: A History(Toronto : Scarecrow Press, 2007); eadem, “‘Two Hard Etudes and a Schumann Number’: American Women, Repertoire and Mentoring in France, 1921-1951,”
International Alliance of Women and Music Journal12 (2006): 9-14; and eadem, “‘Excellence in Execution’ and ‘Fitness for Teaching’: Assessments of Women at the Conservatoire Américain,”Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture11 (2007): 29-50. For more general information on her teaching career see: Caroline Potter, “Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), The Teacher in the Marketplace,”inThe Business of Music, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 152–70.
the eyes of many of her students.10 Her mother, Raïssa Boulanger (née Myschetsky) claimed to be a Russian princess and had been a student at the highly prestigious
Conservatoire de Paris during the latter half of the nineteenth century.11Boulanger’s famous paternal relatives included her grandmother, a renowned opera singer, and her father, aPrix de Romelaureate, composer, and Conservatoire instructor.12Practically by birthright, Boulanger became acquainted with the musical elite offin-de-siècleParis, including Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, and Charles Gounod. This heritage translated into immense cultural authority in the transnational field created at Fontainebleau. Here, the customs of France, and in particular the cultural acumen of Nadia Boulanger, held immense sway among the young American students. In this setting, they were less deterred by Boulanger’s gender than they were, as Annegret Fauser writes, “willing to worship this attractive and brilliant teacher.”13
It was in the first decade of Fontainebleau’s existence that Boulanger began to truly enforce her opinions about what constituted reputable music in her role as professor of harmony, counterpoint, and composition. Many of her students eagerly digested her ideas about tonality, form, dissonance, and discipline partially because they were validated by Boulanger’s potent pedigree. She made these ideas especially palatable by wrapping them in an ample dose of her version of Parisian life: inviting students back to her Paris apartment for
10Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone,Bourdieu, Ciritical Perspectives(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4.
11For information on Boulanger’s mother’s background see: Rosenstiel,Nadia Boulanger : A Life in
Music(New York and London : Norton, 1982), 14-16; Jérôme Spycket,Nadia Boulanger(Lausanne: Payot, 1987), 9-10; idem,À La Recherche de Lili Boulanger(Paris : Fayard, 2004), 30-60; and Bruno Monsaingeon,
Entretiens avec Nadia Boulanger(Paris: Van de Velde, 1981), 17-18.
12For a detailed account of Ernest Boulanger’s life see: Rosenstiel,Nadia Boulanger, 7-13.
13Annegret Fauser, “Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and the making of an ‘American’ composer,”
Musical Quarterly89 (2006): 535. See also Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson’s reminisces in: Virgil Thomson,A Virgil Thomson Reader(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Press, 1981), 389–93; and Aaron Copland. “Nadia Boulanger: An Affectionate Portrait,”Harper’s Magazine(1960): 49-51.
luncheons, and to her classes at the École Normale.14Boulanger found such success with these American, and increasingly international, students that she began to invite them for Wednesday afternoon classes at her home, linking her educational pursuits with the tradition of the French salon.15By 1930, these tactics yielded Boulanger a great deal of international clout. A generation of students, including Melville Smith, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thomson returned to America to propagate her fame, teach in institutions, and in several cases, run entire music departments such as those at Harvard University, the Longy School of Music, and the Peabody Conservatory. Advocating for her students also allowed Boulanger to enhance ties with conductors of American ensembles, the most loyal to her being Sergei Koussevitzky and Walter Damrosch. She also became increasingly well
connected amongst the highly female-dominated patronage circles of early twentieth-century America, befriending Mildred Bliss, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and Ellen Carpenter.16In the late 1920’s Nadia Boulanger, as Fauser writes, “epitomized the modern European woman.” She was capable of connecting people with a vast array of creative resources and was, as Richard Taruskin writes “a committed modernist, who abetted every innovative tendency in American music.”17This was the Nadia Boulanger that Igor Stravinsky approached in 1929, seeking a teacher for his son and, eventually, an editorial advisor.
14Rosenstiel,Nadia Boulanger, 156–57 15Ibid., 162
16For more on women patrons in America see: Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, eds.,Cultivating
Music in America:Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
17Richard Taruskin,The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 620. Taruskin raises this point when comparing and contrasting the influence of Boulanger and Sergei Koussevitzky on American composers with that of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Mitrofan Belyayev on Russian composers. Taruskin also argues that what these four musicians had in common was “their insistence on a pronounced national character in whatever music they supported.” Perhaps this similarity between Rimsky-
Boulanger and Stravinsky: A Partnership Begins, 1929-1932
As a Boulanger pupil, Soulima Stravinsky dutifully attended her newly-inaugurated music history courses at the École Normale, alongside students such as Igor Markevitch, and received weekly private lessons in her rue Ballu apartment.18Boulanger granted Soulima Stravinsky unfettered access to her inner circle, inviting him to her Bach Cantata classes held on Wednesday afternoons, and introducing him to her Russian mother, Raïssa Boulanger. Shortly after 2 March 1930, Soulima Stravinsky presented Boulanger with the autograph manuscript of the two-piano reduction of his father’sCapriccio. Inside, it bore the
inscription: “For you, dear Nadia Boulanger, this little souvenir from your faithfully devoted, Igor Stravinsky.”19By October, Boulanger had won over the heart of Soulima’s mother, writing encouragingly to her of what a dedicated and hard-working student her son was. Catherine Stravinsky replied that the pedagogue’s kind and sincere words, coupled with Soulima’s own glowing reports, were of great comfort to the entire family.20Also during the 1929-30 academic year Boulanger had chance to meet Stravinsky’s older son, Theodore, and her charms had an equal effect on him.21
By July 1930, when Stravinsky finished the final notes of hisSymphonie de psaumes,
Korsakov and Boulanger was also perceived by Stravinsky and further influenced his decision to solicit Boulanger as his son’s teacher.
18By 1931, these lessons took place every Tuesday at 11:30: Nadia Boulanger, Agendas, 1931,F-Pn,
Rés. Vmf. Ms. 97 (1). Markevitch discussed these classes for the Bruno Monsaingeon documentary made in 1973: Bruno Monsaingeon (director),Mademoiselle: A Film by Bruno Monsaingeon, DVD (1977, Paris :Idéale Audience Internationale, 2007).
19Stravinsky, Capriccio: Two-Piano Reduction, Autograph, 1930,F-Pn, Ms. 17941,. “Pour vous, chère
Nadia Boulanger, ce petit souvenir de votre fidèlement dévoué, Igor Strawinsky. Paris 2 III 3.”
20Catherine Stravinsky to Boulanger, 23 October 1929,F-Pn, N.L.a. 108 (88).
21Boulanger and Theodore Stravinsky met sometime in the summer of 1930 and by the following New
Year, Theodore was sending her greeting cards containing warm wishes. Theodore Stravinsky to Boulanger, 2 January 1931,F-Pn, N.L.a. 109 (1). He and Boulanger would eventually become quite close.
Boulanger was considered amembre de familleby the Stravinsky household.22Their growing awareness of her love for the patriarch’s music elicited an invitation to join them for the world premiere of theSymphonie de psaumeson 13 December 1930 at the Palais des Beaux- Arts, in Brussels, Belgium.
The opportunity for Boulanger to attend this concert was the culmination of several exceptional circumstances —the Stravinskys’ invitation being but the crowning touch. Sergei Koussevitzky had originally secured the work’s commission and premiere for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) on the other side of the Atlantic. Stravinsky placed a clause in the contract, however, that required the performance take place before 1 December 1930. Unfortunately for Koussevitzky, unforeseen delays led the BSO to reschedule their performance date to 19 December, which meant that Ernest Ansermet’s concert, planned for Brussels on the 13th, became the premiere instead. This string of events allowed Boulanger to be present at the first performance of Stravinsky’sSymphoniealong with the rest of his immediate family.23 There, Stravinsky joined with his wife and sons in welcoming Boulanger. Once again ingratiating himself to the pedagogue, and as a gesture of friendship, he presented her with a copy of the autograph orchestral score to hisSymphonie. The title page inscription reinforces that Boulanger was now considered an extended family
22After a brief trip to Avignon and Marseilles with Sudeinkina, Stravinsky took his family to
Charavines-les-bains for a summer vacation. This was where he completed hisSymphonie de psaumes. Walsh,
Creative Spring, 496. Soulima did not attend with them, he had taken ill and was in the hospital in Paris where Boulanger visited him on a regular basis. Catherine Stravinsky to Boulanger, 27 June 1930,F-Pn, N.L.a. 108 (89).
23Boulanger attended the premiere with members of the immediate Stravinsky family excluding the
composer’s mother, Anna, who had not been able to travel and stayed in Nice. Boulanger wrote to her from Brussels of the success of the performance. Anna Stravinsky was most grateful and sent her a reply several days later. Anna Stravinsky to Nadia Boulanger, 17 December 1930,F-Pn, N.L.a 108 (85).
member. It reads: “to Nadia Boulanger, to her who hears all in complete artistic
sympathy…Day of this symphony’s premiere, when we were all together” (see Figure 1.1).24 Boulanger accepted Stravinsky’s gift and began preparing theSymphonie de psaumes as the centerpiece for her upcoming courses at the École Normale and the Conservatoire Américain.25In February, Boulanger attended several concerts related to Stravinsky, including the French premiere of theSymphonie de psaumesat the Théâtre des Champs Élysées.26Her diaries reveal that this concert coincided with evening soirées and dinners where Boulanger’s and Stravinsky’s otherwise isolated spheres merged, and she rubbed elbows with various acquaintances including Sudeinkina, both of his sons, and mutual friends Prokofiev, Samuel Dushkin, Hélène and Raymond Lifar, and Arthur Honegger.27These evenings created the perfect milieu wherein to discuss and celebrate Stravinsky’s new masterpiece.
24Igor Stravinsky, “Symphonie de psaumes,” Photostat of the Autograph Manuscript, 1930,F-Pn, Gr. Vma. 476. “À Nadia Boulanger, À celle qui entend tout en toute sympathie artistique. Igor Strawinsky,
Bruxelles, Jour de la 1ère de cette Symphonie quand nous étions tous ensemble, le 14 XII 1930. ” Stravinsky most likely wrote his inscription the day after the premiere, seeing as the date is wrong. He was performing his ownCapriccioon the same concert, so it was unlikely he brought the score with him to the actual concert. On the opposite page to this inscription are Boulanger’s first markings indicating that, from the very start, she was dividing the work for analysis.
25Boulanger began teaching her course on theSymphonie de psaumesat the École Normale de
Musique on 21 February 1931. Boulanger, Agenda, 21 February 1931,F-Pn, Rés. Vmf. Ms. 97 (1). Léonie Rosenstiel claims that this lecture was intended for publication in theMonde musical, but was never actually produced, Rosenstiel,Nadia Boulanger, 237. Boulanger’s course at Fontainebleau began on 18 August 1931. Boulanger, Agenda,F-Pn, Rés. Vmf. Ms. 97 (3).
26Boulanger, “Concerts Stravinsky,” Agenda, 20 February 1931,F-Pn, Rés. Vmf. Ms. 97 (1). The
French premiere is listed in her diary as “Stravinsky, Symphonie de psaumes,” Agenda, 24 February 1931,F- Pn, Rés. Vmf. Ms. 97 (1).
27The first dinner was the night of the Parisian premiere, Agenda, 24 February 1931,F-Pn, Rés. Vmf.
Ms. 97 (1). Boulanger hosted the second dinner: “Dîner Strawinsky, Théodore, et Sviétik; Irène Baliankine