CRISES OF CONFIDENCE — Nicholas Phan

This post is the program note I wrote for the first concert of CAIC’s 2020 Collaborative Works Festival, Les Parisiennes, which was broadcast October 16-18, 2020.

“If there is anything of which I am very sure, it is that my music is useless.”

— Nadia Boulanger

In his book, Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, Bruno Monsaingeon quotes Nadia describing her younger sister Lili as “the first important woman composer,” and musing “I wonder why there is a certain reluctance to acknowledge her place in history.” It is astonishing that a woman who was one of the greatest musical pedagogues of last century and was well-versed in centuries of music history was not aware of (or simply chose to ignore) the many important women composers of the late renaissance and the baroque. Yet developments in classical music during the period in which Nadia was born explain her apparent ignorance of the composers we featured on last week’s program.

Over the course of the 1800s, economic factors combined with technological advancements and the general Romantic idealization of the “genius artist” archetype promoted the concept of a classical music “canon”: A collection of musical works deemed great by critics and artists alike, establishing a pantheon of compositional heroes (all white men) whose music should be studied, revered, and performed. At the beginning of the century, repertoire being performed in concert halls was largely written by living composers. By the time Nadia Boulanger was born in 1887, roughly 80% of the music being presented was composed by dead ones. Nadia was raised within this cultural framework, and subscribed to it throughout her lifetime. Study of the works by the “great masters” was central to her pedagogical method, believing it was key in helping her own students to unlock their own artist genius. Yet this perception of music history and women’s place in it (including her own) explains why she expressed such lacking confidence in her own abilities as a composer.

“My own oeuvre, if you can call it an oeuvre is…miles emptier, because there is nothing to it. There is no personality…When I decided to abandon composition, it was because I knew that I would never be a great genius.”

— Nadia Boulanger

Crises of confidence plagued many women composers during the latter half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century in Paris, where women were attempting to carve out a platform for themselves in Europe’s cultural capitol. Just as the work of artists like Camille Claudel and writers like George Sand forced the male-dominated cultural world to take women artists of all stripes seriously, women writing music similarly insisted that their compositions be acknowledged outside the realm of Paris’ private (yet influential) musical salons and be allowed to graduate to the public stage as professional composers.

Much like the Italian women of the Baroque generations before her, Pauline Viardot came to composition through singing. The daughter of the famous tenor and teacher Manuel Garcia, her singing career made her one of the most famous women in Europe during her lifetime. The youngest child of an operatic dynasty that was highly invested in her carrying on the family business, Pauline’s family skirted the normal obstacles to women’s musical education during these years by arranging for her to receive private lessons in composition. As a teenager, her mother arranged for her to study with the composition teacher Anton Reicha, whose list of illustrious students included Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. Yet even with this privileged access to instruction, Pauline’s lessons were brought prematurely to a halt before she could study things like counterpoint and orchestration – foundational tools necessary to compose larger scale pieces that she would have received if she had been allowed a conservatory education.

Pauline composed hundreds of pieces of music, including many songs, chamber operettas, and sonatas for violin and piano, all of which were highly esteemed during her lifetime – so much so that she was encouraged to write the largest of all musical compositional forms: a full-length grand opera. The Grand Duke of Weimar was so enthusiastic about the idea that plans were developed around an operatic adaptation of Pauline’s close friend George Sand’s novel, The Devil’s Pool. Sand wrote a libretto, but Pauline abandoned work on the project after composing two-thirds of the piece. Her husband, Louis Viardot, explained why in a letter to Sand around the time, writing: “Pauline has never imagined herself to be a composer…she has never been satisfied with what she has done and has torn up these futile efforts.”

Pauline was encouraged greatly in her composition by the great Russian novelist with whom she carried on a lifelong affair, Ivan Turgenev, who introduced her to the Pushkin poems she set to music featured on this program and acted as translator for these settings. A well-traveled performing artist who was fluent in six different languages, Pauline’s compositions were fluid in terms of their ability to transcend musical borders. One critic described her songs as “individual in style – not assuredly Italian – not strictly German – not precisely French. Their originality does not reside in their ‘melodies’ so much as their entire structure.”

Also from a musical family, Cécile Chaminade was afforded a musical and compositional education via private instruction, although this was a hard-won compromise. Demonstrating musical promise from an early age, Paris Conservatory faculty members including Georges Bizet insisted that she study at the institution but her father forbade her from enrolling, believing it to be inappropriate for a woman of her class. Chaminade’s works were championed by both establishment musicians and critics from as early as her late teens. She became popular abroad in both England (where Queen Victoria was an ardent fan) and the United States, earning her the Légion d’honneur in 1913 – the first woman composer in French history to receive the honor.

Chaminade published over four-hundred pieces of music during the course of her lifetime, having the greatest success with her piano miniatures and roughly one hundred songs. Yet despite all of this success, she struggled with doubt and insecurity. Describing her process of publishing her works, she wrote: “I am reluctant to have my work published immediately, preferring to keep it hidden in a drawer for some considerable time until I come across it again. If I find then that it continues to please me, I send it to the publisher..." Her song, Ma première lettre, which opens this Parisiennes program, a setting of Rosemonde Gérard’s poem about a woman coming back to a letter written in her youth that she finds in a drawer, has many parallels with Cécile’s confession about her own compositional process.

As Chaminade became more established, critics who had once praised her music’s “feminine charm”, began to turn against her as she moved into larger forms of music, deemed the realm of musical masculinity. As the battle for women’s suffrage intensified in the United States and gained significant ground around the turn of the century, one critic for the New York Evening Post reviewed a performance of her music in 1908 saying: “…on the whole this concert confirmed the conviction held by many, that while women may someday vote, they will never learn to compose anything worthwhile. All of them seem superficial when they write music.” As misogynist criticism of her music increased during the latter part of her life, Chaminade was effectively barred from entry into the canon of music history, her music unjustly remembered as simplistic salon music full of “charm”, yet lacking in artistic depth.

1913 was a milestone year for women in French music history – Chaminade was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and just a few months later Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, the prestigious scholarship competition established by Louis XIV which had catapulted the careers of many of France’s most famed composers including Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy, Gounod, and Massenet. Similar to both Chaminade and Viardot, the Boulanger sisters were descended from a musical dynasty, one that ensured their access to an elite musical education. Their father had won the grand prize of the competition in 1835, and both sisters were ambitious in their desire to follow in their father’s footsteps after the competition was opened to women in 1903. Daughters of a more progressive father than Chaminade’s, both sisters were permitted to matriculate at the conservatory, and also studied with their father’s circle of friends who were members of Paris’ musical elite, such as Gabriel Fauré. Nadia competed in the competition four times and was awarded one of the second place prizes on her third entry into the competition on 1908 in a controversial slight that raised accusations of sexism and favoritism (the winner of the grand prize that year was the son of the director of the Paris Opera). Her sister took the top prize in a near unanimous vote 5 years later, at the age of 19.

Through their preparation for the Prix de Rome, both Lili and Nadia received the skills and formal training they would need to compose for larger forces. Yet their different experiences with the competition point towards their divergent future paths. Lili’s historic win catapulted her into the spotlight, and she became a darling of the musical press, who were obsessed with the seeming dichotomy of her towering musical genius juxtaposed against the image of her as a fragile young woman of frail health (Lili notoriously suffered from poor healthy from early childhood, having been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 3). Shortly after taking the grand prize, she secured a deal with the esteemed publishing house, Ricordi, and soon began work on a full-length operatic adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, La princesse maleine. Maeterlinck was such a fan of her work that he immediately granted her the rights. Nadia, on the other hand, continued to build her career as a teacher in order to make her income, and struggled to find a foothold as a composer. As ambitious as her sister, she composed an opera, La ville morte, which she wrote in collaboration with one of her primary mentors and collaborators, the composer Raoul Pugno. Sadly, the opera never received its premiere due to the Pugno’s sudden death and the outbreak of World War I a few months later. Following the deaths of her primary supporter and her sister, she succumbed to her crushing self-doubt and gave up composition in 1922.

While history remembers Nadia Boulanger as the famous teacher of the men who would come to populate the western classical canon in the 20th century, the songs on this program, written during the years she was preparing to enter the Prix de Rome show her to be a composer of great skill and promise, capable of writing music of extraordinary beauty. Their excellence betray the ambitions and determination of a young woman who worked hard to break the glass ceilings which prevented her from ascending into the heights of the classical music pantheon as a composer.

World War I also cut short Lili’s compositional career. The demands on Lili were already many when the war broke out, as she was busy composing to fulfill the terms of her prize. Once the fighting started, she poured herself into the war effort, spearheading the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National to support musicians at the front. Her diaries of this period note committee meetings nearly every day, and it is speculated that the exhaustion she suffered from her committee work, combined with her musical efforts, hastened the decline of her already extremely compromised health. She died at the age of 24 on March 15, 1918 – just one week after the premiere of her song cycle Clairières dans le ciel, which forms the bulk of this program.

An epic cycle of 13 songs, Clairières tells of a young and inexperienced man reminiscing about his relationship with a young woman. While a break-up is never mentioned, the narrator looks back with nostalgic sadness on the relationship. The final song is the first clue to the freshness of the relationship’s end: he opens by noting that the next day will mark a year since the couple’s first meeting. Only in this final song is the rawness of his emotional experience revealed. Here, Boulanger employs a brilliant structural technique inspired by Gabriel Fauré’s cycle La bonne chanson to illustrate the pain of these memories: she fills the last song with musical quotes from each of the previous twelve, each seamlessly flowing into each other with alarming speed. While this technique creates a dream-like effect in both cycles, Fauré’s resembles a pleasurable, drug-induced high. Boulanger’s is more like a nightmare, perfectly illustrating the utter devastation of her protagonist.

In Clairières dans le ciel, we get a sense of Boulanger’s highly developed harmonic language, which is forward-looking, expansive, and filled with shadings of chromaticism that make it seem like harmonies are implied rather than explicitly expressed. Its compositional boldness leaves us to wonder: how would she have continued to grow and push musical boundaries had her life not been cut short?

Born with the name Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse to a father much less progressive than Ernest Boulanger, Germaine Tailleferre received her musical education at the Paris Conservatory in spite of her father’s staunch opposition thanks to the ingenuity of her mother, who endeavored to hide her practice. Because of these childhood scars from her father, she changed her name to Tailleferre in order to disassociate herself from him. While she was at the conservatory, Taillferre forged friendships with a group of composers who would come to be known as Les Six, a musical cohort who would become famous for being at the forefront of Paris’ musical avant-garde during the interwar years.

Traveling to the United States to perform as a soloist in her own works, Tailleferre met the American caricaturist Ralph Barton, whom she married in 1926. The marriage was an abusive one. Barton was rabidly jealous of Tailleferre’s success and tried hard to stymie her work. Their marriage ended in 1929 in a spectacular blowout: angry that Tailleferre had become pregnant, Barton attempted to shoot her in the abdomen in an effort to forcibly abort the pregnancy. While Tailleferre managed to escape, the trauma of the experience caused her to miscarry. She immediately filed for divorce after the episode, and just two months later wrote her Six chansons, which are featured on this program. Writing about the period in her memoirs, it is evident that composing the songs were part of her effort to recover from the abuse:

“Once I had found calm and health, I no longer wanted to postpone working. My musical career had been interrupted for two and a half years; the time missed by this marriage had profoundly affected me…I refused to accept any new idea of marriage; the experience that I had just lived through was enough to leave me disgusted [with marriage] forever. I resumed with joy my musical life.”

Tailleferre’s output would include operas, concerti, chamber works and music for film in addition to songs. Coming out of this particularly tumultuous period in her life, her Six chansons françaises are perhaps some of her most staunchly feminist works.

Even as access to formal musical education became increasingly available to women during the years of the Belle époque, women composers faced numerous challenges to their careers, including the misogynistic trope that “feminine” music was only meant to be trifles for the salon, jealous husbands who discouraged their professional careers, and the pressure of needing to live up to the mythology of a canon completely devoid of music by women. Oftentimes, each woman’s music would be lost to the anecdote of their historical significance: Tailleferre’s music would be neglected, even while she was memorialized as the sole female member of Les Six; Lili would be remembered as the first woman to win a prestigious competition who died too young, but not as a great composer in her own right. Speaking to The Washington Post in 1908, Cécile Chaminade acknowledged the impediments to women’s success in the arts:

“There is no sex in art. Genius is an independent quality...I do not believe that the few women who have achieved greatness in creative work are the exception. But I think that life has been hard on women. It has not given them opportunity. It has not made them convincing. She is handicapped and only the few through force of circumstances or inherent strength have been able to get the better of that handicap...”

— Cécile Chaminade

While giving voice to those obstacles, Chaminade would go on to express hope for the generations of women to come, keenly aware of the trails she was blazing: “the woman of the future with her broader outlook for greater opportunities will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description...” Chaminade passed away, largely forgotten by the world, in 1944 – just one year before women would win the right to vote in France. In our next program we’ll explore the prescience of Chaminade’s optimism.