This film was made
to commemorate Nadia Boulanger’s 90th
birthday. If there’s a perfume of
hagiography about it, why not? Nadia
Boulanger was a Grande Dame, and was
treated with reverence. Watching this
film is like looking through a time
warp into a world that no longer exists.
The film is in black and white for
one thing, and camera techniques formal,
even for the era in which the film
was made. It’s quite a shock to realize
the film and the events being recorded
took place only 30 years ago.
This isn’t necessarily
a problem as Mme Boulanger herself
seemed like a figure preserved in
an eternal past. Her mother was Russian
aristocracy, her father a composer
who’d won the Prix de Rome. She heard
Stravinsky in his early Paris days,
and he remained the defining musical
figure of her life. Even in her old
age, she dressed and acted as if she
were still in an earlier era. Indeed,
it was an image she cultivated for
it gave her authority in an era when
a lone woman without great means needed
a persona to succeed. Indeed, Igor
Markevitch says, in the film, that
she cultivated the image of "Herr
Professor" with her pince-nez
and rigid posture. She was a superb
teacher; her formidable reputation
itself attracted students from all
over the world. Being accepted by
Mme Boulanger conferred instant credibility,
by sheer association. She launched
careers. She became a phenomenon,
worshipped fervently, but also with
an element of awe and fear. Alan Kendall,
writing her first biography, titled
it "The Tender Tyrant".
Mme Boulanger taught
thousands in her time. Some were permitted
one to one classes, others just crowded
into her salon on Wednesdays, the
overflow standing outside in the lobby.
So much has been written about these
sessions, that it’s wonderful to be
able to see what they were like, and
to hear her in action, in real time.
Every surface in her apartment seems
cluttered with turn-of-the-century
knick-knacks, yet her mind is razor
sharp and clear. She talks over the
music as she guides a young pianist.
He’s extremely cute, bright-eyed and
enthusiastic. She clearly dotes on
him but she’s strict: nowadays teachers
don’t use put-downs or grab kid’s
wrists, but this was another era.
He’s so adorable that I tracked him
down. He’s now a professor in a college
in the US Midwest.
She had a formidable
ear. Leonard Bernstein played her
one of his songs in the course of
a social visit. Part way through she
hears a note she objects to. He’s
58 years old, but he feels like he’s
21 again and still a student. She
was right, too, about the note. She
was, he says, half blind and almost
immobile, but "what form !...she
radiated light".
Stravinsky had said
of her "She hears everything".
She says of him, that he had a "sense
of the sacred", and plays a few
notes from the Firebird on the piano
to demonstrate. He was always serious,
she says, even when he was having
fun. He made her go and hear his Circus
Polka in New York. The music is
played against a backdrop of 19th
century circus illustrations. Soon
after, we see the manuscript of the
Symphony of Psalms, and hear
excerpts, and as a special treat,
we hear and see Kathleen Ferrier sing
Brahms’s Sapphisches Lied.
What the film skirts around, though,
is how Mme Boulanger felt about music
written since Stravinsky’s youth,
or for that matter, his late period.
Her pupils always stressed that she
did listen to Schoenberg and discuss
modern music, but her silence, one
might say, is deafening. Of course,
there’ll be many who’d be glad to
bypass the 20th century,
but that’s an artistic dead-end. Music
grows and lives. Mme Boulanger herself
was well aware of the sterility of
retrograde thinking. "Today",
she tells the camera, "we are
in a fascinating time, where everything
is questioned, … some will find a
way to say something, others will
have nothing to say, but that has
always been the case". In their
own time, she says, Monteverdi and
Debussy were demonized.
Yet Mme Boulanger’s
influence went far, particularly in
the United States from which many
of her best known students hailed,
such as Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland.
She taught several English composers,
too, such as Lennox Berkeley, but
relatively few French or German. If
you relied only on this film, you’d
think Messiaen didn’t exist, for example,
as if they existed in parallel worlds.
Poulenc gets a mention because he
socialised with her patronne. Yet
Mme Boulanger was no reactionary.
In comparison to her, Bernstein comes
over far more hidebound and self-defensive.
She’s sharp, even at 90. Asked what
the key works of the 20th
century include, she says, quick as
a flash, "Wozzeck". People
get into habits, she explains, but
"habits are not traditions".
One day, perhaps,
there’ll be more in-depth analysis
of musical life in France after 1914.
It’s something worth examining as
French musical culture is distinctive
and unique. There isn’t, for example,
the plethora of concert halls and
orchestras one finds in Germany or
England. The 18th century
salon tradition continued well into
Boulanger’s time and indeed continued
later. Boulez’s Domaine Musical,
for example, was created to bring
together musicians and audiences interested
in hearing new music - including Stravinsky,
who had rarely been played during
the Occupation. When Mme Boulanger
is criticized for being a "Little
Sister of the Rich", courting
the aristocracy, that was more or
less what had to be done in those
times. Also, because the world is
so dominated by the English language,
it is important to get "past"
what we assume we know from English-language
sources. Until such time, though,
this film fills a useful function,
especially when read together with
Alan Kendall’s book, which still remains
an important reference because he’s
well informed and objective. Unfortunately,
it’s out of print, so grab any copy
you find.
The bonus film is
a historic treat, too: Markevitch
conducting the ORTF orchestra in Mozart’s
Prague Symphony in 1967.
Anne Ozorio
IDÉALE
AUDIENCE DVD 5DM41 (2007) [75:00] 
