She Was Music’s Greatest Teacher. And Much More.

A festival broadens our understanding of Nadia Boulanger, the pathbreaking composer, conductor and thinker.

For several months in 1916, the sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger stayed together at the Villa Medici in Rome. A residency at the villa was typically awarded to the winner of the Prix de Rome, a major competition for French composers; Lili had won in 1913, but an earlier visit to Italy had been interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. When the sisters arrived, the villa was mostly empty because of the war, and they quickly got to work. Each was trying to finish an opera, and they found solace and inspiration in each other’s creativity. It was a perhaps unprecedented moment in classical music’s patriarchal history: two women, side by side, composing operas. “They really did lean on one another,” the musicologist Kimberly Francis, who has written a forthcoming journal article about the sisterly collaborators, said in a recent interview. “It was this unique partnership.”