Mademoiselle

Abstract This chapter begins in 2012, with Legrand walking past the apartment building where his “musical mother” Nadia Boulanger used to live. Back in the 1940s, he explained, she was a highly respected and influential teacher at the Conservatoire, with a long list of famous former students, including Aaron Copland, and friends including Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. Legrand reflects on how different his life and music might have been had he been taught instead by the composer Olivier Messiaen, whose students included the avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez. Boulanger, he writes, was perfect for aspiring composers who wished to express themselves emotionally rather than intellectually. He describes Boulanger’s appearance and personality, her strict and demanding teaching methods, her trenchant opinions. He quickly becomes her favorite student because he is so gifted, but she lambasts him for not working hard enough and they clash over his love of jazz, which she derides as “three-chord music.” Their student-teacher relationship is intense, but once he leaves the Conservatoire, they gradually lose touch. He attends her funeral in 1979, but the chapter ends with a story from 1951, when she asks him to compose music for a ballet and he refuses. In 2010, when he begins writing his first ballet, he feels as if he is finally respecting her wishes.