Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) and World War I France: Mobilizing Motherhood and the Good Suffering By Anya B. Holland-Barry A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 08/24/2012 This dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Susan C. Cook, Professor, Music Charles Dill, Professor, Music Lawrence Earp, Professor, Music Nan Enstad, Professor, History Pamela Potter, Professor, Music i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my best creations—my son, Owen Frederick and my unborn daughter, Clara Grace. I hope this dissertation and my musicological career inspires them to always pursue their education and maintain a love for music. ii Acknowledgements This dissertation grew out of a seminar I took with Susan C. Cook during my first semester at the University of Wisconsin. Her enthusiasm for music written during the First World War and her passion for research on gender and music were contagious and inspired me to continue in a similar direction. I thank my dissertation advisor, Susan C. Cook, for her endless inspiration, encouragement, editing, patience, and humor throughout my graduate career and the dissertation process. In addition, I thank my dissertation committee—Charles Dill, Lawrence Earp, Nan Enstad, and Pamela Potter—for their guidance, editing, and conversations that also helped produce this dissertation over the years. My undergraduate advisor, Susan Pickett, originally inspired me to pursue research on women composers and if it were not for her, I would not have continued on to my PhD in musicology. I thank her for always being a professional role model to me. I also am indebted to the generous financial support provided to me by two Andrew W. Mellon-University of Wisconsin Dissertation Fellowships, and two travel grants provided by the University of Wisconsin Vilas Grant, which helped bring this dissertation to completion. I thank Charles Hallisey from Harvard University for translating Lili Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique from Pâli into English, and Louise Achard for proofreading my French translations. I would not have completed this dissertation without the generous childcare support of my mother-in-law, Barbara Barry, who looked after my son in both Wisconsin and in France while I carried on research. Emily Andrae also provided me weekly childcare that granted me invaluable time to work. Furthermore, I thank my community of fellow mothers not only for their childcare services over the years while I worked on my dissertation, but for keeping me grounded, making me laugh, and believing that I can be both mother and musicologist. These iii indispensable women include Lyndsay Andrae, Anna Yang, Sarah Burke, Valerie Campbell, Peggy Daubenspeck, Dani Dexter, Erin Eberhardt, Jennifer Hackel, Sara Hagen, and Michelle Mitchell. I also thank my musicology and music theory colleagues who have intellectually helped me shape this dissertation through seminar discussions and their comments and critiques on papers I have presented at both regional and national conferences. I especially thank Allison Bloom, Scott Carter, Lesley Hughes, and Angela Pratesi. Finally, I thank my family: my mother and father, Gail Holland and Peter Holland, my in- laws, Barbara and F. Michael Barry, sister-in-law, Jessica Eichinger, and grandmother-in-law, Jeanne Kuzemchak, for their abiding support and encouragement, childcare, belief in my education, and confidence that I could achieve anything. My parents, in particular, ingrained in me at an early age the importance of education, self-motivation, and creative thinking. They always provided the best education possible and supported all my passions and pursuits. My husband, Christopher Barry, has been my rock and my partner throughout graduate school as he has worked alongside me on his own dissertation. I thank him for always understanding, encouraging me, pushing me past my expectations, and taking the time to read, edit, and discuss my work. He has worked tirelessly full-time, while writing his own dissertation, and has always supported our family as husband and father to our son and soon-to-arrive daughter. His belief in my dissertation and constant support has made my career possible. Contents 1. Dedication i 2. Acknowledgements ii 3. Introduction 1 4. Chapter One: 33 Dans l’immense tristesse: Wartime Motherhood and Melancholia 5. Chapter Two: 62 “From the Depths of the Abyss:” Good Suffering and the femme fragile 6. Chapter Three: 114 Marraines de guerre and Mimi Pinson: The Comité Franco-Américain and the Gazette 7. Chapter Four: 142 La Gazette des classes du Conservatoire National: Wartime Charity, L’Union sacrée, and Musical Frenchness 8. Chapter Five: 180 Vieille prière bouddhique: Alternative Visions of Exoticism and French National Identity 9. Epilogue 219 10. Bibliography 227 1 Introduction In 1918, as bombs fell on the streets of Paris, hundreds braved the war-torn city to pay their respects to the late composer Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) at the Église de la Trinité. In their eulogies, the primary newspapers in Paris compared the twenty-four-year-old Boulanger to the virgin martyrs of antiquity, whose sacrifices allegedly brought victory to valorous armies.1 In her short life, Boulanger had received notoriety in 1913 as the first female winner of France’s Prix de Rome, the country’s most prestigious compositional prize. Her contemporaries and critics applauded her for maintaining a serene, submissive, and frail persona as she entered the public, masculine domain of composition, and they now mourned the loss of a talent still in its prime. As seen in newspapers, magazines, and interviews, Boulanger’s perceived and constructed identity as a sickly, delicate, sacrificial child-genius enabled her to negotiate a public compositional sphere typically off limits to women and to become one of the most highly successful French composers of the early twentieth century. Boulanger’s story is not wanting for drama. The tragedy, the talent, and the heroism emphasized by many scholars in their telling of her tale, however, fails to engage with important questions about both her gendered position within French society and musical culture, and her compositional choices within the larger social, cultural, and political framework of the First World War. Boulanger was, I argue, essential to the Parisian musical community during the war for several reasons. She created, organized, and edited La Gazette des classes du Conservatoire National, a newspaper distributed to hundreds of the Conservatoire’s mobilized students (1915– 1918). The publication of the Gazette was one of the main activities of Comité Franco- 1 Léonie Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 135. 2 Américain du Conservatoire, a large network of musicians including Gustave Charpentier, Théodore Dubois, Gabriel Fauré, Émile Paladilhe, Camille Saint-Saëns, Paul Vidal, and Charles Widor. Furthermore, Boulanger’s musical compositions exemplified leading contemporary French musical styles that French musicians fervently debated and defined as key to musical French identity. These compositions included those Boulanger wrote during the war, such as Vieille prière bouddhique (1914–1917), Psaume 129 (1916), Psaume 130 (1914–1917), Dans l’immense tristesse (1916), and those she wrote prior to the war, but which were used in wartime benefit concerts, such as Pour les funérailles d’un soldat (1912–1913) and Clairières dans le ciel (1913–1914). As I will discuss throughout the dissertation, these compositions also reveal several of the foremost gendered wartime themes and concerns, such as suffering and melancholia, motherhood, childhood, negotiations of Self, Other, and exoticism. My dissertation engages the interrelations between gender, music, and war through an examination of Boulanger’s contributions to French musical communities and institutions during the First World War. Boulanger’s wartime musical compositions, along with her war charity work and her intentional representation of maternal gender roles, both challenge and broaden the conventional masculine narratives of World War I and French cultural identity. Boulanger and her colleagues, critics, family, and friends mobilized her femininity to symbolize dominant contemporary conceptions of French wartime motherhood, the marraine de guerre, the femme fragile, and the Catholic Good Sufferer. Her music adds a transformative layer to the traditional musical wartime narrative as it highlights and explores subjects that her male contemporaries did not broach. These aspects of Boulanger’s public and private persona underscore the leading gender concerns, instabilities, and debates during the war. Through an analysis of Boulanger’s 3 reception, her own constructed public and private personae, and her compositions, I argue that Boulanger, at various times, became a marraine de guerre, a Mimi Pinson, or a Thérèse of Lisieux; in other words, she symbolized France. Boulanger, however, did not just stand in for France, but specifically for an artistic, musical France during World War I. Boulanger’s Biography Boulanger’s life was shaped by continuous illness. In 1895, at just two years old, she contracted bronchial pneumonia, from which her immune system never fully recovered. For the remainder of her short life, she battled episodes of intestinal tuberculosis,