A lost opera from the most powerful musician you’ve never heard of: La ville morte reviewed

Who was the most influential figure in 20th-century classical music? Stravinsky? Pierre Boulez? What about Bernstein or Britten? John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Powerful public figures all. But there’s a case to be made for a very different kind of character — less king than kingmaker, a musical éminence grise.With a Who’s Who of pupils that included Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, John Eliot Gardiner and Daniel Barenboim, Nadia Boulanger is the most powerful musician you’ve never heard of, ‘the most important teacher since Socrates’, as one composer only partly joked.

Photographs show us a stern, spectacled, almost invariably elderly figure. Neatly coiffed and tailored, she could be your French grandmother, except for the eminent men who crowd round her, listening with close attention, respect bordering on reverence.

Despite some early success as a composer, including second prize in the all-important Prix de Rome, Boulanger quickly put ambitions of creating her own music aside.