Clairières didn’t come out of nowhere. Like many great works of art, it is a doomed love story. In narrative arc and other aspects, it is a descendent of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827) and Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und-leben (both 1840); its contemporary cousin is Schoenberg’s Das Buch des hängenden Gärten (1908–1909); it points forward to Messiaen’s Harawi (1945).

Spiritually closest perhaps to Dichterliebe, Clairières maps one person’s experience of a harrowingly intense love. The narrator (almost un-gendered except for a few adjective endings) worships a girl, loses her, and suffers acutely. We don’t learn any specifics: it’s not clear if a definitive split occurred, if she drifted away to another place or phase of life, or if she died. The love may have been one-sided, vividly flowering only in the narrator’s mind. Boulanger created her own sequence of thirteen movements from a poetry collection by Francis Jammes, and her choices (and omissions) show that her focus, like Schumann’s, was more on inner emotional fluctuations than on action or the outward manifestations of love. Some moments are as tender as Müllerin, others as psychologically splintered as Winterreise, but the piece stands firmly in the twentiety century; its vulnerable exploration of a relationship’s most interior tensions – where self meets another, how possible honesty in love is or isn’t – seems modern even now.

. . . The final song, ‘Demain fera un an,’ seems to burst out of the confines of the genre altogether, more operatic mad scene than song. The narrator returns to places where his love blossomed, lurching shockingly between dissociation, nihilistic anguish, and tender recall. The final pages contain a masterful Schumann-esque moment of nostalgic consolation. ‘J’écris,’ the narrator numbly intones: we realize that he is trying to write, to process raw experience, and five sweet bars from the first song appear, a fragment of a dream. They peter out mid-phrase, replaced by tolling low octave Ds and the song’s last refrain of despair.

Extraordinary works of art remind us that we’re not alone in our wonder and love and suffering… we move from the passionate sensitivities of adolescence (such as Lili embodied when she wrote her only song cycle) to greater grace and understanding.

– Excerpted from “Dichterleibe’s Daughter: Lili Boulanger’s Overlooked Masterpiece ‘Claireres dans le ciel’” by Katherine Dain (2023)