Lili Boulanger: D'un matin de printemps

I wrote these programme notes for Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, who organised this concert in Oxford for International Women's Day 2016.

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was born in Paris to musical parents, and her older sister Nadia also went on to become a noted composer. In spite of Boulanger's musical ability becoming clear from an early age, she suffered from chronic ill health which rendered her unable to study at music college. Instead relying on private tuition, she nevertheless became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913 (aged twenty), an accolade which brought her a great deal of attention from the international press. As a result, she was able to sign a contract with the publishing house Ricordi that offered her an annual income in return for the right of first refusal on publication of her compositions. After her brief residence at the Villa Medici in Rome was cut short by the outbreak of World War I, she founded the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National, an organization which offered material and moral support to musicians fighting in the war. She died of intestinal tuberculosis aged twenty-five before she was able to finish her opera La princesse Maleine (a fairy tale with war as its central theme), but her choice of text for this and her choral compositions (Psalms xxiv, cxxix and cxxx, and the prayer for peace, Vieille prière bouddhique) reflect both her social consciousness and what Annegret Fauser describes as her “fervent but open-minded Catholicism".

Her principal biographer Léonie Rosentiel situates Boulanger's composition “squarely within the French tradition” of impressionism, and Debussy's influence on her is clearly audible in the lush modal harmonies and shimmering textures of D'un matin de printemps. This was composed between 1917 and 1918, and is consequently one of Boulanger's last works; this was the last piece Boulanger wrote in her own hand, and Rosentiel writes of the frailty of her script betraying the impact of Boulanger's illness. Nevertheless, the increasing independence of her compositional voice is particularly manifest in her use of bitonality (more than one key at once), which greatly influenced Parisian composer Arthur Honegger. Furthermore, Boulanger was studying with  Gabriel Fauré by this time, and he was reportedly deeply impressed by her originality and freshness. In 1927, the asteroid 1181 Lilith was named in her honour.

D'un matin de printemps is an a ternary (A-B-A) form, with the A section characterised by a sprightly, dotted violin melody, which is appropriate to its title (“on a spring morning”). It skips around the root note E before flourishing up an octave. This melody is strikingly similar in shape and rhythm to that of its companion piece D'un soir triste (“on a solemn night”), but the way in which Boulanger sets their harmony, tempi, and articulations so radically differently renders the latter “morbid” and the former “animated, agitated, and slightly ironic”, writes Rosentiel. This “agitation” not only derives from the highly rhythmic texture, but Boulanger's harmonic treatment. The melody opens in the phrygian mode (all of the white notes on a piano from E to the next E), but after just one iteration it is transposed up a third to the same collection of intervals rooted on G# onto which the piano's previously clashing close semitones seemingly (and springishly!) blossom into more consonant thirds. After yet another iteration the same melody is transposed up yet another third to B. While tertiary modulation and the reharmonisation of a repeated melody are idiosyncratic impressionist techniques, the way in which Boulanger outlines not a modal but a tonal triad of E major in this harmonic motion demonstrates how she had a wealth of techniques of musical organisation at her fingertips.

The B section arrives after a transitional section through which the violin plays a hushedly trilled B (constituting a dominant pedal) over the piano's mysterious triplet melody in octaves. The B section melody has a more stable, sweeping crotchet rhythm, but is marked “ardent”, and its high tessitura builds through rising quavers to a passionate climax before the return of the A section melody.

Radically, this return is not on the “home” root of E, but E flat. Its return is accompanied by a dramatic statement of bitonality in the piano: an A flat-B flat clash in the left hand followed by an A-B clash in the right. This is a mixing of the two modes of the A and B sections: a coming-together of the broad-scale harmonic tensions of the structure. When the meoldy is finally heard again on E, it an octave higher than the opening, and reached by a string of semitone-clashing quavers in the piano. Its character is transformed by its mysterious re-setting. The reharmonising of an existing melody is yet another impressionist technique, and the final return of the melody in its original harmonisation and texture reveals all of the familiar A-section material heard previously to have been transitional. It is as if Boulanger is conveying the growth, change, and transience of spring before celebrating it in an extended and rhapsodic passage of rich harmonic ambiguity which builds to the closing, brilliantly high violin ascent offset by the piano's flourishing both-white-and-black-key glissando to the end.