Lili Boulanger

Lili Boulanger was born in Paris in 1893 into a family of musicians. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a composer who taught singing at the Paris Conservatoire, her mother was a Russian singer, and her elder sister Nadia became one of the most influential composition teachers of the twentieth century. An illness in early childhood left Lili’s health permanently damaged, and she worked for the rest of her life against chronic sickness. Gifted from the start, she sang for Gabriel Fauré as a small child, studied at the Conservatoire, and in 1913, at nineteen, became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition, with the cantata Faust et Hélène. The prize brought a contract with the publisher Ricordi and a stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, cut short by illness and by the First World War, during which she and Nadia organised support for Conservatoire students serving at the front. Her music, which includes three psalm settings for chorus and orchestra, the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel and the paired orchestral pieces D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps, learned from Fauré and Debussy but has a dark intensity of its own. She died in 1918, aged 24.