LDV103

30 POÉTESSES SYMPHONIQUES With Lili Boulanger and Betsy Jolas, the boundary between pure and programmatic music becomes almost impossible to delineate. The titles of their works seem to announce that they are probing the specific affect of a moment: a time of day or a season. Yet no further explanation is given for the story related by the orchestra. D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps (On a sad evening and On a spring morning, 1918) function like a mirror image, using the same thematic, rhythmic and harmonic material to evoke two contrasting facets of their composer. These orchestral pieces, derived from works for chamber ensembles (duo or trio), might well express the shifting mental state of a young woman of twenty-four who was aware that she was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Fear of death is answered, as it were, by the vitality of youth and the hope of renewal, embodied by spring. Was she wishing for an end to the Great War here? Was she dreaming she might recover? Was she thinking of the recognition that French women composers had gained thanks to her Prix de Rome in 1913? Whatever the case may be, these scores place her, stylistically and ideologically, on the threshold of a new modernity, alongside Claude Debussy, who died only ten days after her.