Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Juliette Boulanger was a French composer, conductor, and the most influential composition teacher of the twentieth century. Her American pupils included Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Philip Glass.

She was born on September 16, 1887, in Paris, into a musical household. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a Prix de Rome composer and professor at the Paris Conservatoire; her mother, Raissa Mychetsky, was a Russian princess who had been his pupil. Her younger sister Lili Boulanger would also become a composer. Nadia entered the Conservatoire in 1897 and studied organ with Louis Vierne and composition with Gabriel Fauré, winning prizes in harmony, counterpoint, and accompaniment, and taking second place in the Prix de Rome in 1908.

She concluded that her own compositions could not match her sister's gifts and, after Lili's death in 1918, devoted herself to teaching. She joined the staff of the École Normale de Musique in 1920 and the new American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in 1921, where she taught every summer for more than half a century.

Aaron Copland arrived in 1921 and a stream of American composers followed throughout the interwar years. She conducted the London, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia orchestras, championed the music of Monteverdi and her sister, and continued private teaching in Paris until shortly before her death there on October 22, 1979, aged 92.

The feminine name Nadia is a Russian short form of Nadezhda, meaning "hope," rooted in the Slavic word nadežda. Through her decades of teaching she became a figure of hope for generations of young composers crossing the Atlantic.