In her precocious youth, Nadia Boulanger harbored hopes of glory as a composer. But as the world was to discover, her true calling lay in music education. Her seven-decade series of at-home salons in her native Paris began while she was still in her teens. The moths drawn to her flame included such dissimilar specimens as Daniel Barenboim, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, and Astor Piazzolla, not to mention the music-mad Princesse de Polignac. At 90, her spine still as straight as that of Mary Poppins, her mind still as sharp as a sibyl’s, the legend everyone called “Mademoiselle” briskly dismissed her creative output of yesteryear as “inutile,” or useless. “Not bad,” she added, “because I had craft.”
A more flattering assessment comes from the conductor and impresario Neal Goren, among the most driven and inventive champions the medium of chamber opera has ever seen. Over the past quarter-century, the catalogue of his productions has included such landmarks as Haydn’s The World on the Moon in a planetarium, Catán’s Rappaccini’s Daughter in a rose garden, and Cavalli’s Heliogabalus in a cabaret straight out of Cabaret. Now his attention is on La Ville Morte (The Dead City), composed by the twentysomething Boulanger in an unconventional partnership with her erstwhile mentor Raoul Pugno, 35 years her senior. But for the outbreak of the First World War, their joint effort (both are credited) would have received its premiere in 1914, at the Opéra Comique.
