À la recherche de Lili Boulanger

What we know of Lili Boulanger is that she was the first woman to win the Premier Grand Prix de Rome for musical composition, at nineteen, in 1913. And that, dying five years later, she left works of such power and originality that they make her a composer of the first rank.

The posthumous cult that her sister Nadia, an unrivaled musician and teacher, built around her glorified a genius cut down in her prime, but it also left many secrets in the shadows (deliberately?). When one goes back to the sources of this prodigious talent, one runs into a cascade of mysteries: the family’s origins, its lineage, the blossoming of this young girl’s vocation, her untimely death…

Setting out in search of this personality, Jérôme Spycket follows her, as far as the documents allow, through the hectic “artistic” life led by her mother and sister (surrounded by the protective figures of Raoul Pugno and the Bouwens family), through the relentless work that, despite failing health, allowed her to achieve very early the consecration the prize represents, through her troubled stays in Rome, and through the almost symbiotic bond between the two sisters (who were perhaps only half-sisters?).

Shedding light on the poignant destiny of Lili, a character in a true family saga, he conveys the feelings she inspired in her contemporaries, in which tenderness for her fragility mingled with admiration for her strength of character and the high caliber of her work.