Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music

by Léonie Rosenstiel

A detailed, authoritative portrait of a commanding figure in twentieth-century music. Nadia Boulanger's life spanned nearly a century, and at her death she was still director of the American School of Music at Fontainebleau, which she helped found after World War I. Enormously influential, she taught many distinguished performers and composers―among them Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Elliott Carter. She helped American music gain worldwide recognition.

For this first full biography, Léonie Rosenstiel has drawn on papers and records to which Boulanger gave her unprecedented access and also on numerous interviews. The result is a rich portrait of an important woman of our time.

Genres: Music, Biography

438 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1982

Reviews

[Eleanor · Rating 1 out of 5]

How can any scholar take this book seriously? It reads like a tabloid, suffocating actual events with melodramatic language in order to portray a woman as a much more dramatic character than she probably was. This is clear when you read just about any other published book on Nadia Boulanger. It's also obvious that whoever Leonie Rosenstiel was, she had great distaste for Ms. Boulanger. Detail is given to (probably fabricated) embellishments on Boulanger's appearance and tone of voice rather than what anybody who studies this woman's life wants to know: exactly how and what she taught. Instead "Nadia Boulanger: a life in music" gives the reader a highly untrustworthy depiction of a histrionic woman barely recognizable next to all other accounts of Boulanger.

For a more objective read, check out Jerome Spycket's "Nadia Boulanger" Pendragon Press

[Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly flawed as a book, perhaps in part as a product of its time. There is way too much speculation about the psychological reasons for Boulanger’s decisions and behaviour, and the book gives way too much credence to what a clearly just someone’s narrative about her in a given moment.

But for all that, the book is a powerful portrait of a woman that towers over the world of 20th century classical music, and it gives a lot of amazing details of the times she lived in, and how she inhabited those times, and a very nuanced and detailed portrait of the person herself, with her various quirks, how she depended in lifelong devotees, how she moved about, etc.

[Stas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very shoddy. Constant psycho-babble. No references whatsoever.

[Trebledb · Rating 4 out of 5]

For classical musicians this is an essential read of a towering figure in the 2oth century music world. However, one thing that I found troubling about it is the author's somewhat underhanded way of expressing an almost dislike for her subject. The very last sentence of this 414 page biography is particularly baffling and unsatisfying. "In death as in life, Nadia Boulanger had been frustrated by time and circumstance." For such an accomplished and internationally awarded figure, this strikes me as an odd final statement.

[ND · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really finish this book, but it was due at the library, and had been such a slog that I thought it was okay to abandon it at Chapter 18 or so. Interesting woman, but hard to read about her busy,
successful, repressed life.

[Jawsthreefan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Léonie is an able biographer at times. She does a solid job of churning through a litany of names and dates (!), stopping occasionally to offer critical commentary which, taken at arm's length, is interesting in its own right and serves as a window into what young musicologists in the 80s may have been thinking about issues of gender and sexuality in music. The final 20 pages of the book are marked by a dramatic negative pivot in tone as the author needlessly dwells on the pain Nadia both felt and inflicted in her final, senescent years. This pain and Nadia's death is bizarrely treated as a fitting capstone to a life full of pain and unmet aspirations. Surely Boulanger is meritorious of a bio which ends with a full, final statement of her many and varied fantastic contributions to the world of 20th-century music, or which is capable of honoring more fully the complexities and contradictions of this woman.

I should also briefly note, as another reviewer mentioned, that there are no sources for anything in this book. There were multiple occasions where I, curious as to the details of a performance or a piece or a historical meeting, would look up the event in question and find either no corroborating evidence or contradictory evidence. The book, for instance, places the composition of Stravinsky's Petit Canon pour la fete de Nadia Boulanger several years earlier than her 60th birthday. These discrepancies are both frustrating and concerning to the discerning reader.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more both about Boulanger and this period in French and American music-making. It does a good job of introducing many relevant, names, faces, and events, but where it strives to do anything beyond that it fails.

[Anne Depaulis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this biography and getting to know Nadia Boulanger and her fascinating life. Unfortunately she doesn't get the credit she deserves in France and perhaps this book should be translated into French.