Illness and Premature Death
Her life and work were troubled by chronic illness, beginning with a case of bronchial pneumonia at age two that weakened her immune system, leading to the intestinal tuberculosis (now called Crohn's disease) that cut her life short at the early age of 24. Although she loved to travel, completing several works in Italy after winning the Prix de Rome, her failing health forced her to return home, where she and Nadia organized efforts to support French soldiers during World War I. Her last years were also a productive time musically as she labored to complete works previously left unfinished. Boulanger died in Mézy-sur-Seine and was buried in Paris, in a tomb located in the Cimetière de Montmartre, leaving unfinished the opera La princesse Maleine on which she spent most of the last years of her life. In 1979, her sister Nadia Boulanger was laid to rest in the same tomb. The definitive biography is The Life and Works of Lili Boulanger (ISBN 0-8386-1796-4) by the American musicologist Léonie Rosenstiel.
Wellesley College created an international foundation and annual award in her name (LBMF) to honor an outstanding young composer or performer. Awarded the prize were composers such as Harold Shapero and instrumentalists such as Robert D. Levin, Noël Lee and Sebastien Koch.
The asteroid 1181 Lilith was named in her honor.
Read more about this topic: Lili Boulanger
Famous quotes containing the words illness and, illness, premature and/or death:
“... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through the prison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“The more I read and the more I talked to other parents of children with disabilities and normal children, the more I found that feelings and emotions about children are very much the same in all families. The accident of illness or disability serves only to intensify feelings and emotions, not to change them.”
—Judith Weatherly (20th century)
“God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)