Dear friends, a short note right off the top – this post is long, but if you can find a good time to sit down with it for 15 minutes and a glass of your preferred beverage, I think you will find it well worth the effort! Mademoiselle Boulanger, a lifelong Paris resident, was known as the greatest ‘Western Art Music’ composition teacher of the 20th Century, a revolutionary artistic period. These are some of the most profound and foundational thoughts about the arts and life that I have come across in print. They were based on her experience with the many gifted musicians, including Aaron Copland and Philip Glass, who came to her as students from all over the globe. But I believe these insights transcend the boundaries of music. Every human being is an artist. What does Nadia say to you about your magnum opus, that is, your own life story?

JKG, June 2021

“I have been to Athens only once, for three hours. That changed my life forever. I saw the Acropolis, I saw what made us what we are, the source of all that is precious, profound and joyous in us. ‘It is because passion is alive that the Greeks made a goddess of Minerva,’ wrote Maurras. As a child, I dreamt of Greece, and the very word ‘Greece’ aroused in me more than I could express or even know.

Although an amateur, my mother was a true artist, even though she never thought of creating anything; she married very young, and then she dedicated her entire life to us, day and night. Everything I know how to do more or less well in life I owe to her influence, to her exceptional intelligence. Although she adored me, she knew how to be severe: she demanded not a little curiosity from me, but as much curiosity as possible. She instilled it in me with a phrase that keeps echoing in my head every day. We were leaving the conservatory and I, who was already quite restless, had often been praised for giving the best performance. For the teachers I was part of a kind of legend from my father, of whom all of them had an extraordinary memory; in short, they attributed virtues and faculties to me that I did not have. But my mother was never fooled, she totally did not care that I was awarded first place. And that day she said to me: ‘I think it’s great that you are first, but there is something more important: do you think you have done everything you could?’ And when she said everything, I understood that I had not done all that I could and even today I still feel the same. I have worked hard, but I have never done all that I could. Only when one tries to get closer to that everything do they experience an inner joy despite all the sadness and all the grief.

The one thing my mother could not tolerate was a lack of attention. From the first I grew up with this absolute attentiveness, which is vital to self–awareness. People often seem to lack it now, yet it is essentially a form of character. With certain people there is such a force of concentration that everything becomes important, with others, everything passes and is forgotten, they repeat their actions from day to day. No evolution is possible because whatever is produced immediately dissolves. And then there are people who take twenty, forty, fifty years to find what they are looking for. So, before encouraging anyone, you must find out whether they’re capable of loving, of interesting themselves in what they’re doing, whatever it may be, for its own sake. This is a fundamental distinction between people, it makes some extraordinarily active, and others what I call sleepers.

I don’t know whether attentiveness can be taught. I would say that anyone who acts without paying attention to what he or she is doing is wasting their life. I’d go as far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. It takes us back to that marvellous page of Henri Bergson, where he explains that we are confronted with the chaos of nature, and that, to a certain degree, it is given us to organise it. In these conditions, we found we were capable of much more thought, of much more understanding, than we had believed possible: ‘Philosophers who speculate on this question have not sufficiently stressed that when the desired end is reached, nature gives a sign.’ Bergson adds this marvellous image: ‘This sign is joy; I can only define it as the divine essence.’

So what is it, this force which makes saints, heroes, geniuses, which makes people pursue their destinies to the end? It is given to everyone. It applies as much to Wagner writing his Ring cycle as to the anonymous window cleaner, or to the baby that we believe has only a rudimentary form of consciousness. I don’t know whether you like babies, you’re probably too young; I love them, but they make me anxious, because I don’t know how to cope with them. But I’ll never forget the day I took a child of fourteen months a parcel with a little bear or something of the sort. He wasn’t at all interested in the toy. He was fascinated by the string! You could not have distracted his mind and his little fingers from undoing the knot. There are people who shake hands like a dead fish – not very pleasant. Conversely, when some people shake your hand you register an exchange, however brief, an extraordinary exchange between that person and you. I believe that everything depends on attention. I only see you if I pay attention. I only exist in my own eyes, if I pay attention to myself.

There is a phrase in Hamlet, which I think of absolutely every day of my life, without exception: ‘Words without thoughts never to Heaven go.’ If I say ‘Good Morning’ to you without thinking, I don’t exist. Once when we were in Rome, and my sister was nineteen, she had won one of the world’s great musical competitions, the Prix de Rome – she was there in all her guilelessness. We were walking in the gardens of the Villa Medici. In the gardens, we had the illusion of youth which thinks it will last forever, and there was also an old woman doing the weeding, her skin all wrinkled, with traces of what must have been extraordinary beauty. This was in 1913, and it still plays a very important part in my life. We passed, she raised her head, she smiled an ineffable smile and said to us: ‘Buon giorno, e per tutto il giorno (good day and for all the day).’ The smile by itself was a gift. We must have understood, and thanked her. Sixty–five years have gone by, my sister died in 1918, but when I hear that phrase, I say to myself: ‘Never forget that your days are blessed. You may know how to profit by them or you may not, but they are blessed.’

Do you think that it is intolerable, too serious an attitude to life? I don’t mind if it seems intolerable, ridiculous or naive; I owe my greatest joys – as I imagine other people do to those moments when I’ve seized what was given and experienced it not superficially but profoundly. That overwhelming moment produced by the ‘Buon giorno, e per tutto il giorno’ was nothing in itself, it was only an old woman gathering old weeds, but she had a crystalline soul. It gave her a kind of genius of the heart, a sanctity of spirit, and having nothing to express but what her heart inspired, she created something beyond herself, beyond me. She perceived the existence of something which made the day fine, she knew it was beautiful and everything deriving from it was a means of grace.

In art we call this inspiration. It is the moment when a person succeeds in grasping their thought, their real thought, right at the core; the moment when we touch the truth, when communion is established. This year there was a concert by Menuhin, an altogether superb concert. He gave a number of encores and the last was the slow movement of Brahms’s Sonata in D minor. What happened then was part of an indescribable completeness: the whole house found itself in the grip of the same mute emotion, which created silence of an extraordinary quality. Everyone understood, felt, participated in what he himself must have been feeling. I don’t think he will ever forget that moment. In some way it passed beyond him, to a higher level, which we very rarely reach. We are too weak to scale those heights very often, to realise the potential available if we could really commune with ourselves. Was Menuhin hysterical while playing sublimely a sublime movement of a Brahms sonata? No, he received the power to penetrate a thought which is neither Brahms’s nor his, nor mine; a thought floating in the world, above the world, bearing light.

I have the impression that the more I try to think of the essentials of music, the more they seem to depend on general human values. It’s all very well to be a musician, it’s all very well to be a genius, but the values which shape your mind, your heart, your sensibility, determine who you are. You may have to lead a life in which no one understands who you really are. When you have the opportunity, as I do, to deal with people just setting out – you suddenly discover in some of them such a longing for life that you know they will do whatever they do with love, with a feeling of abundance which comes from desire. Everything is there. Are we capable of desire, a permanent sense of discovery?

One day I was invited by Turkish friends to hear Oedipus in Turkish, admirably done. I knew Oedipus by heart, as we all do, so their speaking in Turkish didn’t bother me at all. I followed the thought. If I hadn’t known my Sophocles, I would never have guessed that Oedipus was Jocasta’s son and that he had killed his father, never – not the slightest suspicion. It’s something that wouldn’t enter your head. Although you know how the play unfolds, it develops in such a way that the moment comes when you are taken by surprise. I find that miraculous. I thank God and bow before the miracle. You can talk to great actors: each time they take up some piece they have played all their lives, it is a rediscovery. That is the privilege of emotion: if I know how to look at you, you surprise me each time. If I accustom myself to seeing you, without grasping that each time can offer a different insight, you become a piece of furniture I don’t think about any longer, and the loss is mine.

That you should be here, that you should be who you are, I find that a profound mystery. And if it isn’t a profound mystery, you are a nuisance to me. Because I’ve no desire merely to see you. Mother used to say to us: ‘Ah, please don’t start hugging me at the same time every night, it’ll become a habit.’ When I was a little girl I was sight–reading – in what must have been a scandalous way – the last sonatas of Beethoven (can you imagine!), it seemed to me that I was playing them better than anyone else could. I changed my opinion afterwards, but I still hear those works as if for the first time. I wouldn’t like to say to myself: ‘I like so and so a lot, but less than I used to.’ That has never happened in my life. I have never abandoned any friendship. It seems to me that the sign of old age, the real sign – and I have all of them except this – would be not to attach importance to things.

I think of this often in my regret at not speaking Russian, because that Russian heritage speaks strongly in me. I regret not knowing and not speaking Russian, or Latin either, which inevitably cuts me off from my roots; and I’m ashamed to have to admit that if I’d had courage and resolved to learn one word a week for ten years – that’s not a lot, one word a week – I could have read all of Russian literature. Now, have I read it? No. I have to search for the letters to read my own name in Russian. It’s the result of my negligence, of my indifference. I only had to learn it. No one prevented me and nothing stopped me from learning one word a week. If my desire is such that my natural laziness prevents me realising it, then the desire isn’t very strong.

Recently, someone carried out an odd project: to count how many notes Schubert wrote. Perhaps his energy was somewhat misplaced. He arrived at a horrifying number and asked the following question: ‘Leaving aside genius, how much time would it take simply to write this number of notes?’ After investigating the matter, he found that it would take about twenty-five years. Well, Schubert only took fifteen years to put millions of notes on paper. Where did this power come from?’ Schubert didn’t say to himself I should like to speak Russian.’ He did it instead of talking about it. We talk about what we don’t do, and the great excuse we offer is lack of time. But Schubert didn’t have time, Bach didn’t have time, Fauré didn’t have time, no one has time! They found time – that’s why Plato is still alive to us today. That is why you must say to children every day, those words of Valery’s that are inscribed on the walls of the Trocadero: ‘It depends on you, oh passer–by, whether I am tomb or treasury. It depends on you, friend; do not enter without desire.’

That a fine fellow called Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the St. John Passion, the St. Matthew Passion, is unknown to most people, or else they couldn’t care less, and take not the least joy in them. But what do you think it takes for this immensely important event to survive? Is not the music the most important element? Well, not to me; you equally are, because the St. Matthew Passion doesn’t exist if you do not listen to it. When I had read a new book by Valéry, I would say to him. ‘What a marvel, what an incredible achievement!’ And Valéry would reply: ‘But it is you who have made it.’ You’d be surprised for a moment. I don’t know whether, when you were little, you were as struck as I was by the Evangelist’s saying, ‘For whosoever hath, to him shall be given.’ I was incensed. ‘What, he has already received a lot and he will be given even more!’ However, there is great wisdom in that because what good does it do to give a lot to someone who has nothing and will do nothing because he has no desire in him?

One day a pupil of mine went for a piano lesson with a very well–known teacher, who greeted him with, ‘It’s terrible, you know, to be a talented artist and to be reduced to giving lessons.’ My pupil, bad–mannered but really inspired, said: ‘Well, Monsieur, if you are wasting time giving lessons, you won’t waste it with me, because I’m going.’ And he left. I told him: ‘You are very bad–mannered, but you’ve done the right thing in telling him that, because no one is obliged to give lessons. It poisons your life if you give lessons and it bores you.’

I had a Polish student whose father had shut the piano to him and only permitted his academic studies, which were brilliant. At twenty–one, he still had not touched a piano, but he decided, ‘Whatever Papa thinks, I want to be a musician, I want to be…a pianist.’ He sought out the Director of the Warsaw Conservatory, Monsieur Sikorsky, and said: ‘Monsieur, I’ve come to ask you for piano lessons.’ ‘Well, play me something.’ ‘The thing is, I can’t play.’ ‘And why do you want lessons?’ ‘I want to become a pianist, I want to play the great concertos.’ ‘But my boy, you can’t, you are twenty–one, you know nothing about music, it’s impossible. I haven’t the right to encourage you. Better to give up, believe me.’ He went away, saying to himself, ‘I’ve been talking to an honest man, but I’m determined to become a pianist.’ He began work on his own. After six months, he wrote to Sikorsky: ‘Monsieur, I realise I am being indiscreet, but my whole life depends on your decision and judgement, I think I’ve made some progress. Would you give me ten minutes of your time? Would you hear me play?’ Sikorsky invited him along. He had made such progress that Sikorsky was moved to tears. He gave him lessons every day; at thirty–one, Wojtowicz was playing the great concertos, the whole repertoire, and he became a teacher at the Warsaw Conservatory. It is an incredible story. He is still alive, I see him whenever I go to Poland. He found the way to become a great pianist.

I believe there was someone in Bergson’s circle, his right–hand man in a way, who at thirty–five declared, ‘I’m really very drawn to Chinese.’ Bergson said to him: ‘My dear chap, you cannot begin Chinese at your age. To be able to do anything decent in Chinese, you have to learn to transcribe thousands of signs. You can’t do it.’ ‘Yes, I know, I know, but there are summons one simply has to obey,’ he responded. And he succeeded. To think that a man or woman with everything against them can overcome all obstacles by courage, will, energy, vital powers! I find that more impressive than the result itself; it’s a joy to see that all effort bears fruit.

Bach’s Well–Tempered Clavier has been with me throughout my life. When my father died I already knew it by heart. That must have satisfied him, because I think he had it by heart too. Each week I had to play a prelude and fugue from memory. But you know, you mustn’t exaggerate, a prelude and fugue a week, that’s not much! In my course I require as much of my pupils. I make them write out the separate parts from memory after which they should be able to reconstruct the whole piece. After a training of this kind, they have well–furnished minds. In fact, I get the most out of this class, because each note interests me and takes on a new dimension.

Yes, these are draconian, savage demands! I think it was Montaigne who said: ‘Without memory I have no past, I have no present, I have only something fugitive which is linked with nothing.’ We are eternally faced with the equation: living in the past, living in the present, living in the future. Everything that brings us into contact with great minds, minds inspired by noble motives, helps us to rise above the humdrum. If we have learned a lot by heart, we always have company. And what company! The royal company of the centuries’ great masterpieces. Everything that goes beyond the everyday level belongs to the same sphere.”

Header photo by Zach Vessels on unsplash.com