D’un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning)

• Boulanger composed D’un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning) for violin or flute with piano in 1917.
• In 1916, Lili Boulanger wrote to her friend Miki Piré during one of her many bouts of ill health, expressing her frustration about her future:

“I feel discouraged…not because of boredom, but because I understand that I would never be able to have in me the feeling that I have done what I would like to do, but what I have to do, since I cannot follow whatever it is with being interrupted for a long time so that my efforts cannot be sustained!”

Lili Boulanger, 1916 letter to Miki Piré¹

• The music for this short piece is bright and playful, betraying any insight into the composer’s declining health.
  • D’un matin de printemps was written alongside a contrasting companion piece – D’un Soir triste (Of a sad evening). Together, these two pieces represent the last works Lili wrote with her own hands, and perhaps they were meant to represent all the musical innovation and color that the composer still had left to offer.²

1. Quoted in Beer, Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (London: Oneworld Publications, 2016), 272.
2. Pamela Feo, “D’un Matin de printemps,” Boston Symphony Orchestra, accessed June 4, 2024, https://www.bso.org/works/dun-matin-de-printemps.