Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys, a Selected Correspondence

This rich epistolary dialogue, revealed here for the first time, shows the influence of an exceptional teacher on the shaping of the cultural canon, and a great composer’s desire to define his own place in history. Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky began corresponding in 1929, when Stravinsky was looking for someone to whom he could entrust the musical education of his younger son, Soulima. Boulanger accepted the responsibility, and so began a warm and lasting dialogue with the Stravinsky family. For fifty years, Nadia Boulanger exchanged letters with Igor Stravinsky. In addition to this correspondence, there are some 140 letters addressed to her by members of the composer’s immediate family: his wife Catherine, his mother Anna, and his sons Théodore and Soulima.

Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence offers a rich selection from this many-voiced correspondence. The letters are published here in English translation, most of them for the first time, some in their entirety. The French originals, still largely unknown, are available on the book’s companion website. The correspondence follows the exchanges between Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinsky family from 1929 to 1972, the year after the composer’s death. Across the letters, the evolution of their relationship takes shape: first colleagues bound by mutual esteem, Boulanger and Stravinsky became close friends before distance grew between them and each attained the status of a guiding figure. Their exchanges cover professional and personal matters, musical and social ones alike. Through them emerge, more broadly, the upheavals that swept through the twentieth century, as well as the vulnerability of artists eager to leave their mark on modernity.