Posted March 6, 2025
Marie-Juliette Olga “Lili” Boulanger
(1893–1918)
Of A Spring Morning & Of A Sad Evening
Lili Boulanger was born into a great Parisian musical family and was surrounded by music and musicians of the highest quality. Lili’s older sister, Nadia, approached prodigy status, and Lili herself was heralded as a prodigy by several great musicians, including Gabriel Fauré, who was the first to discover that Lili had perfect pitch.
Lili was jaw-droppingly talented, but was dogged by ill health her entire life, the most pernicious being a lifelong debilitating gastro-intestinal disease (likely Crohn’s Disease). That illness would end her life in 1918 at the age of 24. Bedbound in 1917, Lili began composing at that time a pair of particularly fine works: D’un matin de printemps (“Of A Spring morning”) and D’un soir triste (“Of A Sad evening”). These were Impressionistic pieces, filled with exquisite colors and psychological explorations. Both were based on the same, short musical theme (an eight-measure, free-flowing melody that rustles about, first generally upwards, and then back to its starting note). Matin takes this theme into shimmering light and joy, while Soir opens with the theme and then grows into heartbroken grief. These two companion pieces were finished in 1918 and are the last that Lili could physically write in her own hand (in Lili’s final months, Nadia would be her scribe).
Matin begins with a distinctly sparkling sound—as the strings pulse quietly and crisply, glints of bright light gleam from the triangle and celeste. Boulanger has already captured the brimming of life on a Spring morning in just this opening. The eight-measure melody then presents itself in the flute with a cheerful freshness. The theme here is weightless and gleeful. A middle section, marked Mystérieux (mysterious) nods to Soir by briefly replaying the two pieces’ common theme and now clothed in a gloomy veil. Yet, as Spring always follows Winter’s melancholy, Matin concludes in the strings, harp, and brass with a chortling exclamation mark.
Soir begins with two bars of pulsating in the strings with bassoons, followed by the clarinets playing the shared melody outright. Soir then grows slowly in a series of sonic waves of sound into a blistering and dissonant climax at about four minutes, when the tam-tam (gong) and drums then introduce a halted kind of rhythm, like a battered, dying heartbeat. Boulanger then creates a canvas of evocative orchestral sounds with dark and grainy instrumental colors swirling around each other, while the strings reach up to achingly high registers, like internal screams, only to crash back inwardly. All of this pulses in sonic surges again until the next crushing climax at about nine minutes with brass and percussion, evoking the feel of heaving, uneven breaths. The work progressively fades until the very last bars, when a solo violin sings a brief melody of what would seem like hope, over a slowly throbbing harp and long-held chords in the winds. Of Boulanger’s works, D’un soir triste is perhaps her most poignantly autobiographical.
© Max Derrickson