Boulanger, Lili: D’un soir triste

In 1913, the name Marie-Juliette Olga ‘Lili’ Boulanger was on everyone’s lips.
A woman had won the Prix de Rome composition prize for the first time ever. The Parisian had barely turned 20, and was younger than all her competitors. Not only was she a woman, the score she had delivered – the cantata Faust et Hélène – was truly astonishing. A great compositional talent was thereby catapulted onto the European cultural scene, accompanied by a famous sister, Nadia Boulanger, who would also make her mark on musical history.

Lilli’s success was enormous. However, there were long, dark shadows in the background. The young composer was seriously ill, and had been for a long time. We now know that she suffered from Crohn’s disease, and died at the age of just 24, leaving her beloved sister Nadia and depriving history of a great composer who would surely have gone on to write many more pieces and whose true potential will never be known. What would French music have been today if she had lived? And what would the history books have told us about women in music if Boulanger had achieved her full genius?

In 1917, it became clear that time was running out for Lili Boulanger. During the coming year, she composed D’un matin de printemps. The springlike freshness of this work is electrifying. Musical descriptions of nature’s splendour are evoked by a young woman who sees spring emerging for the very last time. She wants nothing more than to be alive. The two works D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste are as much like sisters as Lili and Nadia themselves. They are made up of the same DNA, a genome that starts by rising a minor third, returning to the main note, and then falling a major second. Both works exist in chamber versions, for duet, for trio and for orchestra. These versions differ from each other, and it could be suggested that Boulanger regarded them as parallel works with the same content, rather than having to be faithfully identical to each other. Högstedt has created his own version for wind instruments, where the trio versions form the foundation, but with significant inspiration from the orchestral versions.

The two sister works share a theme, but go their own separate ways. 1918’s D’un soir triste begins as a kind of funeral march. Heavy archaic chords, consecutive fifths and fourths introduce the main theme of the clarinets in procession. Halfway through the movement, it suddenly falls quiet. In this pronounced pause, timpani, percussion and brass are introduced as in a military funeral. Is it the sound of World War I that we hear? Or perhaps Lili is simply composing for her own death. We are suddenly whirled into a feverish fantasy, with the harp and shimmering, heavenly tones. When Boulanger finally takes us back to the opening theme, most of the instrumentation has been stripped away. All that remains is the archaic consecutive fifths and fourths of the opening, the skin and bones of the music.