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Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. By James Whipple Miller. Chestnut Hill Press. $39.99. 

     Imagine a book about Mozart’s quirky and often childish sense of humor that mentions his comic operas and amusing comments in scores such as those of his horn concertos only in passing and you will have some idea of the approach of James Whipple Miller to Nadia Boulanger. Imagine further that the nonexistent Mozart book is structured essentially as an epistolary novel – or rather an epistolary work of nonfiction – and you will have further insight into Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades. This is to say that musicians, including the great ones, are people, too, and however much their music may be the center of their lives, it is not the totality of their existence. 

     It is true that if it were not for music, there would be little reason for this book – but the musical material exists mostly in the background here, never quite fading into it but rarely assuming foreground emphasis. This is not so much a biography of Boulanger (1887-1979) as it is a story of her interactions with two of her pupils: Ruth Robbins (1910-2005) and Idil Biret (born 1941). Robbins was Miller’s aunt, and Biret is married to Miller’s longtime friend Şefik Büyükyüksel, so there are ties that bind here that go beyond music, and they are many and of considerable duration. 

     Miller writes attractively for a general audience – classical-music knowledge is helpful but scarcely required here – and structures the book in two clearly delineated sections. The first introduces the three principal characters, with Boulanger first and foremost but more in the role of primus inter pares than that of someone idolized and idealized. The second, much longer segment is a year-by-year presentation of hundreds of letters and telegrams and jottings, amply footnoted, sent from 1941 through 1979. It is these missives that bring forth the essential humanity of a couple of 20^th-century musical giants (Boulanger and Biret, with Robbins not quite at their level). The greetings, good wishes, complaints and preoccupations with trivia provide refreshing insight into these women’s personalities precisely because everything is so matter-of-fact. From “hoping to lunch with you this Wednesday” (1944) to “pray the Lord to help you in all your terrible anxiety” (1959), the communication is at the same time heartfelt and mundane. Miller carefully provides context for many references, but the essential humanity of the missives, their essential humanness, comes through even without knowledge of the specifics to which they refer. The book becomes a kind of reassurance, a clear demonstration that even people who excel in rarefied areas (classical music certainly being one) have the same sorts of worries, concerns, and ups-and-downs of life as do those who can only read about significant accomplishments in a field and admire them from afar. 

     Music is scarcely absent from the book, and some of the comments on it are trenchant and seem surprisingly up-to-date, such as this from Robbins in 1955: “If I knew people who liked to get together once a week or so just for the pleasure of making music together, life would be entirely different. But there is such a commercial point of view about music here: you either have to ‘make money’ with it or ‘get on the radio’ (or television, which is even worse), or it is not worth doing.” There is throughout a frankness in the back-and-forth that sometimes reveals thinking that, if expressed nowadays on social media, would come back to haunt people. One example, from Robbins in 1956: “Our house is not sold and no prospects at the moment. We thought that giving it to a Jewish agent would be a good thing as Highland Park has become 80% or more Jewish (that is probably an exaggeration, but not much). However, it seems that the newer type of wealthy Jew is not buying property here anymore as the town has become so saturated with the undesirable kind! So now we will switch to a gentile agent and hope for better results.” 

     If some of these writings thus clearly show their age and the time period and sociopolitical environment in which they were produced, that is actually all to the good, because it further humanizes people who might otherwise – certainly in the case of Boulanger and Biret – be considered to have “celebrity status” and therefore be unknowable as real human beings (the parasocial phenomenon long predates today’s social media). When Boulanger in 1944 writes from the safety of California that “the sacrifices are too terrible” and that so many have been “killed by the Germans, dead through suffering – gone because it was the time marked by God,” the experience of World War II comes through with all too much clarity. And then, when in 1947 she sends Robbins a list of things she needs, including chocolate, cheese, powdered milk, rice, candy, dried fruit and more, this is testimony not only to the postwar world but also to the quotidian reality in which everyone, no matter how well-known, lived and still lives. 

     There are some deeply significant events on which Miller’s book does shine a particularly bright light – such as November 22, 1963, the date of the assassination of President Kennedy, when Biret (whose birthday was the day before) was scheduled to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. The decision to proceed with the concert, and the feelings engendered by that decision as well as by the music itself, come through with particular pathos and emotional involvement through the words here – and may remind readers of other notable juxtapositions of music and earthshaking events, such as Leonard Bernstein’s Christmas 1989 East Berlin concert, marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which the conductor changed Freude to Freiheit in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades is not, by and large, about occurrences or people writ large: by design, it is a sidelight on the life of Boulanger and those close to her, not a full-fledged biography. A book like this is invariably self-limited to readers who know the subject matter, at least in general terms, and are eager for additional specifics and insights. But if it is unlikely to engage a large audience, it reaches out with considerable skill and sensitivity to a smaller group whose members will here discover that some of their idols have feet not of clay but of flesh and bone, and, moreover, clad in sensible shoes.