Nadia Boulanger, fully Juliette Nadia Boulanger, was a French conductor, pianist, organist, composition teacher and composer. She was born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris on 16 September 1887 and died there on 22 October 1979. The daughter of the composer, pianist and Paris Conservatoire teacher Ernest Boulanger and the singer Princess Raïssa Ivanovna Mychetsky, she grew up in a musical and intellectual household frequented by Gabriel Fauré, Raoul Pugno, Jules Massenet and Camille Saint-Saëns.
Boulanger studied at the Paris Conservatoire with André Gedalge, Paul Vidal and Fauré. After Fauré's death in 1924, she succeeded him as custodian of his musical legacy and conducted his Requiem widely in Europe. As an organist, she studied with Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne; her family installed a Charles Mutin house organ in their Rue Ballu apartment in 1905. From 1904 she also performed as a piano duo with Pugno, who supported her early career.
She shared the Rue Ballu apartment in Paris's 9th arrondissement with her younger sister, Lili Boulanger, until Lili's death in 1918, and lived there from 1904 until her own death. Lili dictated her final composition, Pie Jesu, to Nadia from her deathbed. Nadia then said that she would no longer compose, instead concentrating on conducting, teaching and promoting Lili's music. In 1939 she established the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, which continues to award the annual Prix Lili Boulanger for promising young musicians. During the Second World War she lived in Hollywood, returning to Paris in 1946 to resume teaching.
Although she left a relatively small body of music, Boulanger composed more than 30 songs as well as piano and chamber works, generally shaped by the examples of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Her works include the cantata La Sirène, which won the second prize in the 1908 Prix de Rome; Trois pièces; Vers la vie nouvelle, dedicated to Lili; Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra; and Cantique (Lux aeterna) for women's choir and organ. With Pugno she wrote the song cycle Les heures claires and the opera La ville morte, on a libretto by Gabriele d'Annunzio. Their collaboration ended when Pugno died of a pulmonary embolism while they were touring in Moscow in early 1914. The opera's orchestral score was lost during the First World War; it was reorchestrated for chamber ensemble in 2024, when it received its world premiere.
Boulanger developed an extensive teaching practice, using partimento, a form of counterpoint in which a motif serves as the basis for improvisation and harmonic development. She taught privately, at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she was director from 1948 to 1978. Her pupils included Leonard Bernstein, Ástor Piazzolla, Aaron Copland, Michel Legrand, Darius Milhaud, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Barenboim and Philip Glass. She urged Piazzolla to concentrate on Argentine tango, declined to teach George Gershwin because she feared a rigorous classical education would compromise his jazz style, and taught some pupils without charge, including Jacques Beers.
As a conductor, Boulanger led a cappella choir in 1933–1935 and became the first woman to conduct several leading orchestras in Europe and the United States, including the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra. She conducted world premieres by Copland, Stravinsky and Jean Françaix, and directed the music for the 1956 wedding of Prince Rainier III of Monaco and Grace Kelly. She received the Legion of Honour in 1932, was promoted to Grand Officer in 1977, became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962, and received an OBE in 1977. She was buried beside Lili in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.