As a child, Nadia Boulanger hated music: ‘I could not stand the sound of music. It almost made me sick. I screamed. My sobbing could be heard in the street.’ To the great delight of her musical parents – her father, Ernest Boulanger, was a composer and teacher at the Paris Conservatoire and her mother, Raissa Myschetsky, was a singer – this attitude changed when she was five and tried to play the sound of the siren of a passing ambulance on the piano. From that day on, music entered her life, and by the age of nine she went to study composition at the Paris Conservatoire with Gabriël Fauré.

Nadia Boulanger admired the music of French impressionists like Debussy and Ravel. She had no interest in dodecaphony, but had a strong affinity with Stravinsky. From the time she first heard the Firebird in Paris, she saw the potential of his innovative style. The two artists would be friends for the rest of their lives.

As a composer, she left behind a limited but underappreciated oeuvre. She thought her sister Lili, with whom she wrote the opera La ville morte, was much more talented. After her sister’s death, she decided to stop composing and devoted herself entirely to teaching and conducting.