In March 1912, the famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe visited the home of his fellow musician Raoul Pugno in Paris. At the piano, Pugno played and sang through “La Ville Morte,” an opera he was writing with Nadia Boulanger, a mentee-turned-collaborator 35 years his junior.
“Of this very private performance,” Ysaÿe wrote to Boulanger later that month, “I keep the most profound and happiest impression.” The opera, he told her, was “so beautiful, so sound, so poignant.”
“La Ville Morte” was the most ambitious project of Boulanger’s young composing career. And once it took shape, with a piano-vocal score completed that summer, she wrote under the final measures, “Alleluia!!!!”
But one thing after another kept “La Ville Morte” from reaching the stage. In 1914, Pugno, an essential partner in selling it to the public, died. World War I broke out, delaying the planned premiere, not for the last time. Several years later, Boulanger’s dear sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, died, too, and Nadia virtually stopped writing or promoting her own music.
Boulanger would instead go on to become one of the greatest music teachers in history — a formative figure for titans of the 20th century, like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter, and other legends, including Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach and Philip Glass.
Hardly discussed as a composer, Boulanger died, in 1979, with “La Ville Morte” as more of a footnote than the true feat it was. Its full score was lost, and it has never been performed in the United States; it wasn’t even staged until this century. On Friday, though, it is having its American premiere at NYU Skirball in a production by Catapult Opera, featuring a new orchestration that reveals it, the conductor Neal Goren said, as “wildly rich and gorgeous.”
“I had no idea that Boulanger had composed an opera before this,” said Goren, Catapult’s founder and artistic director, who was presented with “La Ville Morte” while searching for an opera by a woman for the company. “I was totally taken with it. It’s like a cross between ‘Parsifal’ and ‘Pelléas.’”
Boulanger and Pugno composed to a libretto by the celebrated Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, based on his play “La Città Morta,” which had arrived in Paris under a French translation, “La Ville Morte,” starring Sarah Bernhardt, in 1898.
Pugno had been a major supporter of Boulanger’s career after she finished studying at the Paris Conservatory in 1904, not yet 18 years old. They had met while she was a student, and their relationship was one of both friendship and romance.
It’s not known when they started thinking about “La Ville Morte,” but scholars writing in the 2020 collection “Nadia Boulanger and Her World” — including Alexandra Laederach and the co-authors Jeanice Brooks and Kimberly Francis — have found mentions of the composition in Boulanger’s long-unavailable correspondence and daybooks. One entry, on May 22, 1910, says, “We wrote the first notes of ‘La Ville Morte.’”
Details about the opera’s genesis are hazy, particularly when it comes to the division of labor. That speaks to how truly collaborative it was — but also to how less seriously the music world took Boulanger than Pugno at this early stage of her career. She was building a respectable catalog, of both chamber and orchestral works, yet relied on Pugno’s reputation to generate interest in “La Ville Morte.”
Laederach describes the first manuscript of the piano-vocal score as “a precious source in which one can clearly distinguish two types of handwriting, always overlapping and complementary.” But Pugno didn’t give the public that impression. In her biography “Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music,” Léonie Rosenstiel recounts a 1912 interview that he gave to Ward Stephens in The Musician, in which, when asked what he was up to, he replied, “This summer I am unusually busy writing an opera.” Nowhere does he mention Boulanger.
She was also occasionally unhappy with both d’Annunzio and Pugno, who didn’t seem to match her ambition and eagerness to complete “La Ville Morte.” One ambivalent entry into her daybook that Brooks and Francis found says:
Went to Pugno’s — a little sadness and explanations — confession of the complex emotion made up of my pride as a woman, as a lover, and my sorrow as an artist — but this gratefully, tenderly and not decisively enough for things to get worse, then those rare and unforgettable hours — of sincerity, of emotion, of giving — what immense affection unites us — it is unbelievable.
Together, Pugno and Boulanger worked to get “La Ville Morte” onstage. They performed the score together, both singing at a piano. There was talk of premiering it at the Paris Opera, but it landed at the Opéra Comique, whose leader, Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi, penciled it in for 1914. At the beginning of that year, Pugno fell ill and died in Moscow during a concert tour with Boulanger. When the war broke out, Gheusi canceled all productions and went on to serve in the French army.
After the war, he was removed from the company. D’Annunzio was no longer invested in “La Ville Morte,” and none of the work’s other supporters were still alive. Although Boulanger would later speak unfavorably about her compositions, her actions regarding the opera spoke otherwise. She befriended a young Leonard Bernstein, and gave him a copy of the score. (Whether it was the piano-vocal or full version isn’t known.) He expressed interest in performing it, but didn’t follow through.
G. Schirmer published the piano-vocal score, which is how Goren first encountered the opera. He was asked to commission an orchestration; Joseph Stillwell and Stephan Cwik made one for 11 players, with the help of David Conte, a former Boulanger protégé.
Beyond the music, though, the opera needed work, said Robin Guarino, who is directing the Catapult production (which first ran at the Greek National Opera earlier this year). “There were redundancies in the text and some basic editing that had to be done,” she said. “Boulanger would have done this herself had there been a world premiere.”
Once the opera came together, Guarino found herself amazed by what she was seeing and hearing, a mysterious and dramatic tale that unfurls with a score of lush poetry and, she said, “feminism sizzling under the surface.”
Listeners will hear music redolent of Debussy and Wagner, Goren said, but also of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky. There is even some proto-jazz. “You can hear everything from the period reflected in this score,” he added. “There are basically two types of composers: synthesizers and innovators. I’m hoping that people will see her as a serious, valid composer, because she was the supreme synthesizer.”
