The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger
Alan Kendall
Lyceum Books 144 pp. $8.95

There has long been a need for a book about Nadia Boulanger. Now nearing her ninetieth birthday, she has been well known as a teacher of extraordinary culture, personality, and musical virtuosity for some fifty years. Daughter of Ernest Boulanger, a French composer, who was old enough to have known Chopin, and Raissa Michetsky, a Russian princess and amateur singer, Nadia learned to read music before words, first studied harmony with her mother, memorized the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by the age of twelve and all the Beethoven Sonatas by fifteen. She could have become a legend just for her musicianship: her extraordinary ear, her unsurpassed sight-reading, her encyclopedic knowledge of music. But she combined this with a devotion to others and a gift for teaching that have drawn hundreds of young musicians to study with her. Among her best known students are Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Dinu Lipatti, and Igor Markevitch. She has come into contact with practically every famous musician of the twentieth century, and her friends have included not only such musical figures as Stravinsky, Ravel, and Rubinstein, but also the writers Valéry and Gide.

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