ABSTRACT
The awarding of the Prix de Rome to Lili Boulanger in 1913 not only marked one of the most important steps forward in women composers’ transition from the private to the public musical realm, but also proved that it was possible for a woman to win the competition. Unfortunately, Lili Boulanger’s untimely death in 1918 curtailed her blossoming career and prevented her from fully capitalising on the many benefits that winning the prize could have brought her. Caroline Potter has suggested that, ‘arguably, she [Lili Boulanger] “could” win because, as she was unlikely to live long, she would not be a professional threat to her male peers.’1 Although this might have been true in 1913, by 1919 it most certainly was not. During the years directly following the First World War, the Premier Grand Prix de Rome went to a female competitor twice more: Marguerite Canal (in 1920) and Jeanne Leleu (in 1923).2 In 1903, Le Ménestrel had proclaimed that women candidates’ initial admission to the competition was a ‘great victory of feminism from the artistic point of view.’3 Annegret Fauser has argued that the awarding of the Premier Grand Prix de Rome to Lili Boulanger in 1913 brought this ‘great victory of feminism’ to ‘fruition’.4 It was during the interwar period, however, that this fruition truly arrived; as, unlike Lili Boulanger, the women who won the competition after World War One lived to benefit from the advantages which claiming the prize could confer.
