Who was Lili Boulanger?
To reduce Boulanger’s story to her Prix de Rome triumph and her tragic early death at 24, as so often happens, distracts from a serious consideration of her at times groundbreaking music, and an honest appreciation of her professional ambition. Boulanger suffered, horribly, from Crohn’s Disease but the dreamy invalid – an image cultivated by Lili, her mother and sister and lapped up by the press at the time – is nowhere to be seen in her ruthless determination first to win the Prix de Rome, then to complete a series of major works before her death.