INTRODUCTION

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) had an enormous influence as one of the leading teachers of composition in the twentieth century, especially on her American students, who included Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and Elliott Carter. Her father, Ernest Boulanger (1815–1900), was a successful composer and teacher who won the Prix de Rome in 1836, and her mother, who was a pupil of his, was a domineering woman of obscure Russian origins forty years younger than her husband. Raïsa Boulanger, who claimed unsubstantiated aristocratic origins, seems never to have been satisfied with anything and this demanding approach was transferred to her daughter's attitude to education. Léonie Rosenthal concludes that ‘no one could entirely please Nadia Boulanger’. As Boulanger was growing up, musical training in Paris was rigorously conventional and deviously political – nepotism and lobbying were rife. Aspiring students had to go through an elaborate series of labyrinthine contests that might end up with the coveted Prix de Rome. Nadia, who entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten, just missed it, coming second, but her ailing younger sister Lili (1893–1918) was the first woman to win it in 1913 at a time of strong prejudice against women composers.

As a composer herself, Nadia soon preferred to fall under the shadow of her precocious younger sister and she took many opportunities to promote her work. Nadia bitterly resented her sister's early death; almost always thereafter she dressed in black, and marked the anniversary every year, as the letters from Berkeley show.