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In November 1937, Nadia Boulanger came to London. Boulanger was La Grande Dame of 20th-Century music. She taught basically everyone: Copland, Carter, Barenboim, Glass, Piazzolla - she even taught Quincy Jones, who says he owes everything he knows to his fearsome French teacher. Virgil Thomson called her a one-woman graduate school.

But what of Nadia Boulanger on the podium? In 1937, Boulanger was the first woman to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in a programme that included music by Schutz and the British premiere of Faur茅鈥檚 Requiem. If she hadn鈥檛 been a woman, there would be nothing remarkable in it. Boulanger was the obvious person to bring Faur茅鈥檚 Requiem to the UK: she had been his student, and her encyclopaedic grasp of French musical history and analytical and interpretive rigour was second to none.

It鈥檚 hard to know what gender meant for Boulanger herself. Her relationship to feminism wasn鈥檛 straightforward and certainly doesn鈥檛 chime with our times. She believed a woman should only pursue a profession if absolutely necessary, and that a woman's career should never jeopardise her responsibilities as a mother and wife 鈥� a stance that seems at odds with her pursuit of status and intellectual clout. She herself never married or had children.

Although Boulanger never particularly pursued a career as a conductor, she ended up blazing a trail that women would follow several generations later. She was the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And when a reporter asked how it felt to be the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she replied: 鈥淚鈥檝e been a woman for a little more than 50 years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.鈥�

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from a recording of the Requiem's In Paradisum, conducted by Nadia Boulanger.

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