Pierre Boulez

Boulez in 1968

Pierre Boulez CBE (French: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor, writer and organiser of institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of the post-war classical music world.

Born in Montbrison in the Loire district of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as Music Director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. As a young composer in the 1950s he quickly became a leading figure in the musical avant-garde, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism and controlled chance music. From the 1970s onwards he pioneered the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of completed works was relatively small, but it included pieces regarded by many as landmarks of twentieth-century music, such as Le marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli and Répons. His commitment to the modernist project and the trenchant, polemical tone in which he expressed his views on music led some to criticise him as a dogmatist, a reputation which softened in later years.

In parallel with his activities as a composer Boulez became one of the most prominent conductors of his generation. In a career lasting more than sixty years he held the positions of Chief Conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He made frequent guest appearances with many of the world's great orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. He was particularly known for his performances of the music of the first half of the twentieth-century—including Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok, and the Second Viennese School—as well as that of his contemporaries, such as Ligeti, Berio and Carter. His work in the opera house included the Jahrhundertring—the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival—and the world premiere of the complete, three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu. His recorded legacy is extensive and he received 26 Grammy Awards.

He founded a number of musical institutions in Paris, including the Domaine musical, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Cité de la musique, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy in Switzerland.

Pierre Boulez died at his home in Baden-Baden on 5 January 2016, aged 90.

Biography

1925–1943: Childhood and school days

Pierre Boulez was born on 26 March 1925, in Montbrison, a small town in the Loire district of east-central France, to Léon and Marcelle (née Calabre) Boulez.[1] He was the third of four children: an older sister, Jeanne (b.1922) and younger brother, Roger (b.1936) were preceded by a first child, also called Pierre (b.1920), who died in infancy. Léon (1891–1969), an engineer and technical director of a steel factory, is described by biographers as an authoritarian figure, but with a strong sense of fairness; Marcelle (1897-1985) as a sociable, good-humoured woman, who deferred to her husband’s strict Catholic beliefs whilst not necessarily sharing them. The family prospered, moving in 1929 from the apartment above a pharmacy at 29 rue Tupinerie, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house at 46 avenue d'Alsace-Lorraine, where he spent most of his childhood.[2]

From the age of seven he attended school at the Institut Victor de Laprade, a Catholic seminary where the daily worship and gruelling schedule instilled in him an iron discipline which lasted all his life.[3] By the age of fifteen he was sceptical about religion:[4] "what struck me most was that it was so mechanical: there was a total absence of genuine conviction behind it". As a child he took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir.[5]

After completing the first part of his baccalaureate a year early he spent the academic year of 1940–41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby St. Etienne. The following year he took courses in advanced mathematics at the University of Lyon which his father hoped would lead to a career in engineering.[6] It was in Lyon that he first heard an orchestra and saw his first operas (Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg).[7] He also met the well-known soprano Ninon Vallin, who asked him to accompany her in arias from Aida and La Damnation de Faust. Impressed by his ability, she persuaded Léon to allow his son to apply to the Conservatoire in Lyon, but the selection board rejected him. Boulez remained determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir).[8] "Our parents were strong, but finally we were stronger than they," Boulez would later say.[4] In fact, when he moved to Paris in the autumn of 1943, Léon accompanied him, helped him find a room (at 14 rue Oudinot, near the Invalides) and subsidized him until he could earn a living.[9]

1943–1946: Musical education

Andrée Vaurabourg

In late 1943 he entered the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot at the Paris Conservatoire.[10] There he was introduced to Andrée Vaurabourg, wife of the composer Arthur Honegger, and between April 1944 and May 1946 he studied counterpoint privately with her. He greatly enjoyed working with her and she remembered him as an exceptional student, using his exercises as models in advanced counterpoint until the end of her teaching career.[11] He also studied the piano privately in the hope of entering Jean Doyen's class, but he was unsuccessful.[12]

In the autumn of 1944 he joined Olivier Messiaen’s advanced harmony class at the Conservatoire and attended the private seminars which Messiaen gave to chosen students, where key works of the early twentieth-century, including Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, were subjected to intensive analysis.[13]

In January 1945 Boulez moved to two small garret rooms at 4 rue Beautreillis in the Marais district of Paris, where he lived for the next fourteen years.[14] The following month he attended a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, conducted by René Leibowitz, a follower of Schoenberg. The piece was a revelation to him and he organised a group of fellow students to take private lessons with Leibowitz. It was here that he first studied twelve-tone technique and discovered the music of Webern.[15] Around this time he was one of a number of Conservatoire students (organised, it was said, by Leibowitz) who joined in sustained booing at a performance of Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, a work whose neo-classicism represented the pre-war culture he was determined to reject.[16] Eventually he also found Leibowitz’s approach too doctrinaire and he broke violently with him in 1946 when Leibowitz tried to criticise one of his early works.[17]

In the spring of 1945 he gained the Conservatoire’s first prize in harmony. The following academic year he studied fugue with Simone Plé-Caussade, whose lack of imagination so infuriated him that he boycotted the class and organized a petition that Messiaen be given a full professorship in composition.[18] In the winter of 1945/46 he was introduced to Balinese and Japanese music and African drumming at the Musée Guimet in Paris:[19] “I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.”[20]

1946–1953: Early career in Paris

Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud in 1952 (photograph Carl Van Vechten)

Boulez earned money by giving maths lessons to his landlord’s son[21] and playing the ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument), occasionally deputising in the pit orchestra of the Folies Bergère.[22] In early 1946 the theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault needed someone to play the instrument for a production of Hamlet for the new company he and his wife, Madeleine Renaud, had formed. Honegger suggested Boulez.[23] He was soon appointed Music Director of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, a post he held for nine years. He arranged and conducted incidental music, mostly by composers with whom he had little affinity (such as Milhaud and Tchaikovsky), but it gave him the chance to work with professional musicians whilst leaving him time to compose during the day.[24] It also broadened his horizons: over the next decade the company toured three times to South America and twice to North America.[25]

The period between 1947 and 1950 was one of intense compositional activity for Boulez. A series of major works received their first performances: the Sonatine pour flûte et piano, the first two piano sonatas and initial versions of two cantatas on texts by René Char, Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux.[26] In 1951 a large work for eighteen solo instruments, Polyphonie X, caused a scandal at its première at the Donaueschingen Festival, some audience members disrupting the performance with hisses and whistles.[27] He also experimented for the first time with electronic music, producing Deux Etudes for magnetic tape for Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe Recherche de la Radiodiffusion Française but he was dissatisfied with the results and withdrew them.[28]

Around this time he met two composers who were to be important influences: John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His friendship with Cage began in 1949 when Cage was visiting Paris. Cage introduced him to publishers who agreed to take Boulez's recent pieces; Boulez helped to arrange a private performance of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.[29] When Cage returned to New York they began an intense, six-year correspondence about the future of music. In 1952 Stockhausen arrived in Paris to study with Messiaen.[30] Although Boulez knew no German and Stockhausen no French, the rapport between them was instant: "A friend translated [and] we gesticulated wildly ... We talked about music all the time—in a way I've never talked about it with anyone else."[31]

Boulez quickly became one of the philosophical leaders of the post-war modernist movement in the arts. As Alex Ross observed: "at all times he seemed absolutely sure of what he was doing. Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring."[32] Many composers of Boulez's generation taught at the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany, which Boulez attended for the first time in July 1952. As well as Stockhausen, Boulez was in contact there with other composers who would become significant figures in contemporary music, including Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Henri Pousseur. According to Scott Burnham, the so-called Darmstadt School composers created a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervor; an international style that could not be co-opted as propaganda in the way that the Nazis had used, for example, the music of Beethoven.[33]

In May 1952 Boulez gave the first public performance of Structure 1a for two pianos (with Olivier Messiaen). Towards the end of that year a tour with the Renaud-Barrault company took him to New York for the first time, where he met Stravinsky and Varèse.[30] He stayed at Cage's apartment but their friendship was already cooling as he could not accept Cage's increasing commitment to compositional procedures based on chance and he later broke off contact with him.[34]

1954–1959: The Domaine musical

The Salle Popesco in Paris, formerly the Petit Marigny

In 1954, with the financial backing of Barrault and Renaud, he started a concert series at the Petit Marigny theatre, which became known as the Domaine musical. The concerts focussed initially on three areas: pre-war classics still unfamiliar in Paris (such as Bartok and Webern), works by the new generation (Stockhausen, Nono) and neglected masters from the past (Machaut, Gesualdo)—although for practical reasons the last category fell away in subsequent seasons.[35] Boulez proved an energetic and accomplished administrator, taking charge of everything from hiring instruments to managing subscriptions and arranging accommodation for artists. The theatre was small, the wooden seats hard and the programmes inordinately long, yet the concerts were an immediate success.[36] The composer Francis Poulenc observed: "there is a touching atmosphere at the concerts. Crowds of young people cram in together for standing room."[37] They attracted musicians, painters and writers, as well as fashionable society, but they proved so costly that Boulez had to turn to wealthy private patrons for support, in particular Suzanne Tézenas.[38]

At the ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden on 18 June 1955, after fifty rehearsals, Hans Rosbaud conducted the first performance of Boulez's best-known work, Le marteau sans maître. A nine-movement cycle for alto voice and instrumental ensemble based on poems by René Char,[1] it was an immediate, international success.[39] William Glock wrote: "even at a first hearing, though difficult to take in, it was so utterly new in sound, texture and feeling that it seemed to possess a mythical quality like that of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire."[40] Stravinsky described it as “one of the few significant works of the post-war period of exploration.”[41]

In the early years of the Domaine musical Boulez left most of the conducting to others, including Hermann Scherchen and Hans Rosbaud.[42] On 21 March 1956 he gave his first full concert as a conductor in a Domaine programme which featured the French première of Le marteau sans maître.[43] Other milestones in the Domaine's history included a Webern festival (1955), the European premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon (1957) and first performances of Messaien’s Oiseaux exotiques (1955) and Sept Haïkaï (1963).[44] There were failures too, most famously the first Paris performance of Stravinsky's Threni in 1958. Poorly planned by Boulez and nervously conducted by Stravinsky, the performance broke down more than once. According to Glock, who sat between Stravinsky and Boulez at dinner afterwards, "the atmosphere was electric with discontent."[45] Later the concerts moved to the Salle Gaveau (1956-1959), then to the Théâtre de l'Odéon (1959-1968).[46] Boulez remained director of the Domaine until 1967, when Gilbert Amy succeeded him.[47]

In Darmstadt in September 1957 Boulez played an early version of the Piano Sonata No. 3.[48] In January 1958 the Improvisations sur Mallarmé (I et II) appeared, forming the kernel of a work which would grow over the next four years into a vast, five-movement "portrait of Mallarmé", Pli selon pli. It received its première in Donaueschingen in October 1962.[49]

1959–1971: International conducting career

In 1959 Boulez left Paris and moved to Baden-Baden in Germany. Robert Piencikowski suggests a number of reasons for the move: excellent rehearsal conditions with the orchestra of the Südwestfunk, an electronic studio where he could work on a new piece (Poésie pour pouvoir), but also disenchantment with the political climate in France under de Gaulle at the time of the Algerian war.[50]

During this period he turned increasingly to conducting. His first engagement as an orchestral conductor had been in 1956, when he conducted the Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra whilst on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company.[51] In Cologne he conducted his own Le visage nuptial in 1957 and—with Bruno Maderna and the composer—the first performances of Stockhausen's Gruppen in 1958. His breakthrough came in 1959 when he replaced the ailing Hans Rosbaud at short notice in demanding programmes of 20th-century music at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals, culminating in a performance of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin which Boulez remembered as "explosive."[52] This led to debuts with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Bavarian Radio Symphony and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras.[53] In 1963 he conducted the Orchestre National de France in the 50th anniversary performance of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the piece had had its riotous première.[1]

That same year he conducted his first opera, Berg’s Wozzeck at the Opéra National de Paris, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault with designs by André Masson. He enjoyed exceptional conditions, with thirty orchestral rehearsals instead of the usual three or four and the critical response was unanimously favourable.[54] He conducted Wozzeck again in April 1966 at the Frankfurt Opera in a new production by Wieland Wagner.[55] Wieland had already invited him to join the Bayreuth Festival's roster for Parsifal later in the season—after Hans Knappertsbusch died—and he returned to conduct revivals in 1967, 1968 and 1970.[56] He also conducted performances of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde by the Bayreuth company at the Osaka Festival in Japan in 1967, but the lack of adequate rehearsal made it an experience he later said he "would rather forget".[57] By contrast, hIs conducting of the new production (by Václav Kašlík) of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden in 1969 was praised for its combination of "delicacy and sumptuousness".[58]

Pierre Boulez conducting at Blossom Music Center in 1969. Photo by Peter Hastings. Courtesy of The Cleveland Orchestra Archives.

He made his orchestral debut in the United States in March 1965 with the Cleveland Orchestra, an orchestra with which he had a particular affinity because of its virtuosity and tonal refinement.[59] He became its Principal Guest Conductor in February 1969, a post he held until the end of 1971.[60] After the death of George Szell in July 1970, he took on the role of Music Adviser for two years, but the title was largely honorary owing to his commitments in London and New York.[61] In the 1968–69 season he also made guest appearances in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.[62]

Apart from Pli selon pli, the only substantial new work to emerge in the first half of the 1960s was the final version of book 2 of his Structures for two pianos. Boulez and Yvonne Loriod gave the premiere at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in October 1961.[63] Midway through the decade, however, Boulez appeared to find his voice again. Éclat, a short and brilliant piece for small ensemble, had its first performance in Los Angeles in March 1965 and by 1970 it had grown into a substantial half-hour work, Éclat/Multiples.[64] In 1968 the final version of Figures, Doubles, Prismes for large orchestra, a version of two movements from Livre pour quatuor for string orchestra (entitled Livre pour codes) and the two versions of Domaines (clarinet solo / clarinet and ensemble) all received first performances.[65]

1971–1977: London and New York

Boulez first conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in February 1964, in an unlikely place–the seaside resort of Worthing–and in some unlikely repertoire, accompanying Vladimir Ashkenazy in a Chopin piano concerto ("It was terrible, I felt like a waiter who keeps dropping the plates").[66] His appearances with the orchestra over the next five years included his debuts at the Proms and at Carnegie Hall (1965), and a tour to Prague, Berlin, Moscow and Leningrad (1967). In January 1969 William Glock, Controller of Music at the BBC, announced his appointment as Chief Conductor.[67]

Programme for NYPO Rug Concert 17 June 1973

Two months later Boulez conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time.[68] His performances so impressed both orchestra and management that he was offered the chief conductorship in succession to Leonard Bernstein. Glock was dismayed and tried to persuade him that accepting the New York position would detract both from his work in London and his ability to compose but Boulez could not resist the opportunity (as Glock put it) "to reform the music-making of both these world cities" and in June the New York appointment was confirmed.[69][70]

His tenure in New York lasted between 1971 and 1977 and was not an unqualified success. The dependence on a subscription audience limited his programming. He introduced more key works from the first half of the twentieth-century and, with earlier repertoire, sought out less well-known pieces: in the 1972–73 season, for example, he conducted Schütz's Fili mi, Absolom, Haydn's L'incontro improvviso and Prokofiev's Suite from Chout.[71] He also liked to construct programmes out of extreme contrasts ("like a shower that runs hot and cold"): a concert in June 1974 began with Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks and ended with Ligeti's Aventures via Mozart, Webern and Varèse.[72] Performances of new music were comparatively rare. The players admired his musicianship but came to regard him as dry and unemotional by comparison with Bernstein, although it was widely accepted that he improved the standard of playing.[73] He returned on only three occasions to the orchestra in later years.[74]

His time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was altogether happier. With the resources of the BBC behind him he could be more uncompromising in his choice of repertoire.[73] There were occasional forays into the nineteenth century, particularly at the Proms (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in 1972; the Brahms German Requiem in 1973), but for the most part he worked intensively with the orchestra on the music of the twentieth-century. He conducted works by the younger generation of British composers—such as Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies—but Britten and Tippett were absent from his programmes.[75] His relations with the musicians were generally excellent.[76] Indeed, Dominique Jameux refers to "Boulez's elective affinity with English musicians" which he ascribes to "a liking for work well done and for telling jokes—an ability that Boulez possesses to a surprising degree."[77] He was Chief Conductor between 1971 and 1975, continuing as Chief Guest Conductor until 1977. Thereafter he returned to the orchestra frequently until his last appearance at a Prom in August 2008, when he conducted a concert of the music of Leoš Janáček, including his Glagolitic Mass.[78] In January 2016 BBC Four broadcast the hour-long documentary Pierre Boulez at the BBC: Master and Maverick.[79]

In both cities he sought out venues where music could be presented more informally: in New York he began a series of "Rug Concerts"—when the seats in Avery Fisher Hall were taken out and the audience sat on the floor—and a series called "Prospective Encounters" in Greenwich Village.[80] In London he gave concerts at the Roundhouse, a former railway turntable shed which Peter Brook had also used for radical theatre productions. His aim was "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration."[81]

In 1972 Wolfgang Wagner, who had succeeded his brother Wieland as Director of the Bayreuth Festival, invited Boulez to conduct the 1976 centenary production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.[82] The director was Patrice Chéreau. Highly controversial in its first year, by its final year in 1980 it was praised as one of the great Wagner productions. It was televised around the world.[83]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, few new works emerged during this period: Cummings ist der Dichter was first performed in Stuttgart in September 1970. In April 1975 Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna received its premiere in London and Messagesquisse, a short piece for eight cellos in July 1977 in La Rochelle.[84]

1977–1992: IRCAM

The IRCAM building at the Centre Pompidou

In 1970 Boulez was asked by President Pompidou to return to France and to set up an institute specializing in musical research and creation at the arts complex (now known as the Centre Georges Pompidou), which was planned for the Beaubourg district of Paris. The Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) opened in 1977.

Boulez had in mind as a model the Bauhaus, which had provided a meeting place for artists and scientists of all disciplines.[85] IRCAM's aims would include research into acoustics, instrumental design and the use of computers in composition.[1] The original building was constructed underground, partly to isolate it acoustically and partly so as not to obstruct the view of the Saint-Merri church (an above-ground extension was added later).[86] The institution was criticised for absorbing too much state subsidy, Boulez for wielding too much power.[1] At the same time Boulez founded the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a virtuoso ensemble which specialised in the performance of twentieth-century music and the creation of new works.[87]

Boulez wrote a series of pieces which used the potential developed at IRCAM electronically to transform sound in real time. The first of these were Répons (1981–84), a large-scale work for soloists and ensemble, and Dialogue de l'ombre double (1985), a more intimate work for clarinet and electronics. The desire to expand unrealized possibilities also led him to revise earlier works. HIs cantata on poems by René Char, Le visage nuptial (1946) was radically re-worked, reaching its final form in 1989. The twelve miniatures for piano, Notations (1945), were, from the 1970s onwards, in the process of being transformed into a cycle for large orchestra. The first four movements (I-IV) were performed by Daniel Barenboim and the Orchestre de Paris in 1980.[88]

In 1979 he embarked with Patrice Chéreau on an operatic project scarcely less groundbreaking than the Ring: the first performances of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu at the Paris Opera in the completion by Friedrich Cerha.[89] Otherwise Boulez scaled back his conducting commitments to concentrate on IRCAM. The majority of his appearances during this period were with his own Ensemble Intercontemporain—including tours to the United States (1986), Australia (1988), the Soviet Union (1990) and Canada (1991)—although he also renewed his links in the 1980s with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.[90]

From 1976 to 1995, he held the Chair in Invention, technique et langage en musique at the Collège de France.[91]

1992–2006: Return to conducting

Boulez at a conference at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in 2004

In 1992 Boulez gave up the directorship of IRCAM to concentrate on composing and conducting. He was succeeded by Laurent Bayle.[92]

The previous year he began a series of annual residencies with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1995 he was named Principal Guest Conductor in Chicago, only the third conductor to hold that position in the orchestra's history. He held the post until 2005, when he became Conductor Emeritus.[93] His 70th birthday in 1995 was marked by a six-month retrospective tour with the London Symphony Orchestra, taking in Paris, Vienna and New York, which culminated in a residency in Tokyo, where he was joined by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the CSO.[94] In 2001 Boulez conducted a major Bartok cycle with the Orchestre de Paris.[92]

This period also marked a return to the opera house. He worked with Peter Stein on two productions: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1992, Welsh National Opera[95] and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris); and Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (1995, Netherlands Opera[96] and Salzburg Festival). At the Aix-en-Provence Festival he conducted Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle (1998, directed by Pina Bausch)[97] and a triple bill of music-theatre pieces: Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro, Stravinsky's Renard and Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire with Anja Silja (2003, directed by Klaus Michael Gruber).[98] In 2000 he conducted Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Symphony of Psalms for the Zingaro equestrian theatre in an exhibition centre near Charles de Gaulle Airport.[99] In 2004 and 2005 he returned to Bayreuth to conduct a controversial new production of Parsifal directed by Christoph Schlingensief.[100]

Boulez wrote two further pieces using the resources of IRCAM: ...explosante-fixe... (1993), which had its origins in 1972 as a tribute to Stravinsky; and Anthèmes II (1997) for solo violin and electronics. In 1998 he completed work on a large piece for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists, Sur Incises, for which he was awarded the 2001 Grawemeyer Prize for composition,[101] and he contributed a short piece for six instruments (Petite dérive—en écho) to a 90th birthday tribute to Elliott Carter in the British journal Tempo.[102] In 1999 the orchestral version of Notation VII was given its first performance in Chicago.[92]

He continued to involve himself closely in institutional organisation. He co-founded the Cité de la Musique, which opened in La Villette on the outskirts of Paris in 1995.[21] Consisting of a modular concert hall, museum and mediatheque—with the Paris Conservatoire on an adjacent site—it became the home to the Ensemble Intercontemporain and attracted a diverse audience.[103] In 2004, he co-founded the Lucerne Festival Academy, an orchestral institute for young musicians, dedicated to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[104] For the next ten years he spent the last three weeks of summer working with young composers and conducting programmes with the Academy's orchestra.[105]

2006–2016: Last years

Pierre Boulez at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2008 with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

Boulez's last completed work was Dérive 2 (2006) a 50-minute work for eleven instruments, developed from a piece first heard in 1988. He left a number of major compositional projects unfinished, including the remaining Notations for orchestra.

He remained active as a conductor over the next six years. In 2007 he was re-united with Chéreau for a production of Leoš Janáček's From the House of the Dead, (Theater an der Wien, Amsterdam and Aix).[106] In April of the same year, as part of the Festtage in Berlin, Boulez and Daniel Barenboim presented a cycle of the Mahler symphonies with the Staatskapelle Berlin (Boulez conducted numbers 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8), repeating it over twelve days at Carnegie Hall in 2009.[107] In late 2007 the Orchestre de Paris and the Ensemble Intercontemporain presented a major retrospective of Boulez's music.[108]

His appearances became more infrequent after an eye operation in 2010 left him with severely impaired sight. Other health problems included a shoulder injury resulting from a fall.[109] In late 2011, when he was already quite frail,[110] he led the combined Ensemble Intercontemporain and Lucerne Festival Academy, with the soprano Barbara Hannigan, in a tour of six European cities of his own Pli selon pli.[111] His final appearance as a conductor was in Salzburg on 28 January 2012 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Mitsuko Uchida in a programme of Schoenberg (Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene and the Piano Concerto), Mozart (Piano Concerto No.19 in F major K459) and Stravinsky (Pulcinella Suite).[112] Thereafter he cancelled all conducting engagements.

Later in 2012 he worked with the Diotima Quartet, making final revisions to his only string quartet, Livre pour quatuor, begun in 1948.[113] In May 2013, to mark the 100th anniversary of the first performance of Le sacre du printemps, he gave a public interview with Robert Piencikowski at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris about his encounters with Stravinsky.[114] The same year he oversaw the release on Deutsche Grammophon of Pierre Boulez: Complete Works, a survey of all his authorised compositions. He remained Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy until 2014, but his health prevented him from taking part in the many celebrations held across the world for his 90th birthday in 2015.[115]

He died on 5 January 2016 at his home in Baden-Baden.[116] He was buried on 13 January in Baden-Baden's main cemetery following a private funeral service at the town's Stiftskirche. At a memorial service the next day at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, eulogists included Daniel Barenboim, Renzo Piano, and Laurent Bayle, president of the Philharmonie de Paris,[117] whose large concert hall had been inaugurated the previous year, thanks in no small measure to Boulez's influence.

Compositions

Student works

Olivier Messiaen

Boulez's earliest surviving compositions date from his school days in 1942–43, mostly songs on texts by Baudelaire, Gautier and Rilke.[118] Gerald Bennett describes them as "modest, delicate and rather anonymous [employing] a certain number of standard elements of French salon music of the time—whole-tone scales, pentatonic scales and polytonality".[119] As a student at the Conservatoire Boulez composed a series of pieces influenced first by Honegger (Prelude, Toccata and Scherzo and Nocturne for solo piano (1944–45))[120] and then by Messiaen and André Jolivet (Trois psalmodies for piano (1945) and a Quartet for four ondes martenot (1945–46)).[121] It is in the Onze notations pour orchestre that Bennett first detects the influence of Webern: "virtually diatonic passages alternate with others in a style more nearly resembling Webern's own jagged chromaticism."[122]

Boulez and the work in progress

The Onze notations were an early attempt to orchestrate eleven of the Douze notations pour piano (1946). In the mid-1970s Boulez embarked on a second, more radical transformation of these short piano pieces into extended works for large orchestra,[123] a project which pre-occupied him to the end of his life, nearly seventy years after the original composition. This is only the most extreme example of a lifelong tendency to revisit earlier works: "as long as my ideas have not exhausted every possibility of proliferation they stay in my mind."[124] Piencikowski characterises this in part as "an obsessional concern for perfection" and observes that with some pieces (such as Le visage nuptial) "one could speak of successive distinct versions, each one presenting a particular state of the musical material, without the successor invalidating the previous one or vice versa"—although he notes that Boulez almost invariably vetoed the performance of previous versions.[125]

First published works

Before the rehabilitation of the Notations, the Sonatine pour flûte et piano (1946—49) was the first work Boulez acknowledged as part of his canon. A serial work of great energy, its single-movement form was influenced by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No.1.[126] Gärtner writes that Boulez revised the work for publication in 1949, re-composing about a third of it and eliminating traces of the influence of Messiaen and Jolivet in favour of a more rigorously dodecaphonic style.[127] Bennett finds in the piece a tone new to Boulez’s writing: "a sharp, brittle violence juxtaposed against an extreme sensitivity and delicacy."[128] In the First Piano Sonata (1946) Jameux highlights the sheer number of different kinds of attack in its two short movements—and the frequent accelerations of tempo in the second movement—which together suggest the feeling of "instrumental delirium."[129]

There then followed two cantatas based on the poetry of René Char. Of Le visage nuptial Griffiths observes that "Char’s five poems speak in hard-edged surrealist imagery of an ecstatic sexual passion", which Boulez reflected in music "on the borders of fevered hysteria". He explored modes of articulation between song and speech, as well as quarter-tones.[130] In its original version (1946–47) the piece was scored for small forces (soprano, contralto, two ondes Martenot, piano and percussion). Forty years later Boulez arrived at the definitive version for soprano, mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra (1985–89).[131] Le soleil des eaux (1948) originated in incidental music for a radio drama by Char. It went though three further versions before reaching its final form in 1965 as a piece for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra.[132] The first movement (Complainte du lézard amoureux) is a love song addressed by a lizard to a goldfinch in the heat of a summer day, in an atmosphere which Jameux characterises as "fluid and nonchalant".[133] By contrast the second movement (La Sorgue) is described by Griffiths as a violent and incantatory protest against the pollution of the river Sorgue, "with shouting chorus and a bounding quaver rhythm".[134]

The Second Piano Sonata (1947–48) is a half-hour work of extreme virtuosity. Its four movements follow the standard pattern of a classical sonata but in each of them Boulez subverts the traditional model. Of the two middle movements Boulez said: “I tried to disintegrate slow movement form by the use of the trope, and repetitive scherzo form by the use of variation form.” He characterised this as a deliberate attack on Schoenberg’s attempts in his later music to revive older forms.[135] For Griffiths the violent character of much of the music “is not just superficial: it is expressive of a whole aesthetic of annihilation, and in particular of a need to obliterate what had gone before.”[136] When Boulez played the work for Copland, the older composer asked "But must we start a revolution all over again?"—"Mais oui," Boulez replied, "sans pitié".[137]

Total serialism

That revolution entered its most extreme phase in 1950–52, when Boulez developed a technique in which not only pitch but other musical parameters—duration, dynamics, timbre and attack—were organised according to serial principles, an approach known as total serialism or punctualism. Messaien had already made an experiment in this direction in his Mode de valeurs et d’intensité for piano (1949). Boulez went further, ordering each parameter into sets of twelve and prescribing no repetition until all twelve had sounded. According to Alex Ross the resulting surfeit of ever-changing musical data has the effect of erasing at any given point previous impressions the listener may have formed: “the present moment is all there is.”[138]

Boulez's works in this idiom consist of Polyphonie X (1950–51; withdrawn) for 18 instruments, the two musique concrète Études (1951–52; withdrawn), and Structures, Book I for two pianos (1951–52).[139] György Ligeti published a detailed analysis of the first chapter of this last piece in 1958, concluding that its "ascetic attitude [was] akin to compulsion neurosis", and that Boulez "had to break away from it ... and so he created the sensual, feline world of the 'Marteau'".[140]

Le marteau sans maître

Structures, Book I was a turning point for Boulez. Recognising a lack of expressive flexibility in the language (described in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land...") Boulez loosened the strictness of total serialism into a more supple and strongly gestural music: "I am trying to rid myself of my thumbprints and taboos", he wrote to Cage.[141] His first venture into this new kind of serialism was a work for twelve solo voices titled Oubli signal lapidé (1952), but it was withdrawn after a single performance. Its material was reused in the 1970 composition Cummings ist der Dichter.[142]

Boulez's strongest achievement in this method is Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master, 1953—55), a "keystone of 20th-century music".[142] Three short poems by René Char form the starting-point for three interlocking cycles, each consisting of a setting and related instrumental movements (there are nine movements in all). According to Hopkins and Griffiths the music is characterised by abrupt tempo transitions, passages of broadly improvisatory melodic style and—not least of all—the fascination of exotic instrumental colouring.[142] The piece is scored for contralto soloist with alto flute, xylorimba, vibraphone, percussion, guitar and viola. Boulez said that the choice of these instruments showed the influence of non-European cultures, to which he had always been attracted.[143] He described one of the work's innovations, called pitch multiplication, in several articles, most importantly in the chapter "Musical Technique" in Boulez 1971.

Pli selon pli

For the text of his next major work, Pli selon pli (1957–89), Boulez turned to the symbolist poetry of Stephane Mallarmé, attracted by its extreme density and radical syntax.[144] At seventy minutes, it is his longest composition. Three Improvisations—of increasing complexity—on individual sonnets are framed by two orchestral movements, into which fragments of other poems are embedded. For Griffiths these outer movements, Don and Tombeau, “represent … the birth and death of the poet, but they stand too for the birth and death of the work of art.”[145] Boulez’s word-setting, which in the first Improvisation is straight-forwardly syllabic, becomes ever more melismatic, to the point where direct comprehension is impossible. Boulez’s stated aim was to make the sonnets become the music at a deeper, structural level.[146] The piece is scored for soprano and large orchestra, often deployed in chamber groups. Boulez described its sound-world, rich in percussion, as “not so much frozen as extraordinarily ‘vitrified’”.[147] The work had a complex genesis, reaching its definitive form in 1989.[148]

Controlled chance

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.
— Pierre Boulez ("Sonate, que me veux-tu?", 1960)[149]

From the 1950s Boulez experimented with what he called "controlled chance" and he developed his views on aleatoric music in the articles "Aléa"[150] and "Sonate, que me veux-tu?"[151] His use of chance is very different from that in the works of, for example, John Cage. While in Cage's music the performers are often given the freedom to create completely unforeseen sounds, with the object of removing the composer's intention from the music, in Boulez's music they may only choose between possibilities that have been written out in detail by the composer. This method, when applied to the successional order of sections, is often described as "mobile form", a technique innovated by the composer Earle Brown and inspired by the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder,[152] to whom Brown and Cage introduced Boulez when he was visiting New York in 1952.[153]

Boulez employed variants of the technique in a number of works over the next two decades: in the Third Piano Sonata (1955—57/63) the pianist may choose different routes through the score and in one movement (Trope) has the option of omitting certain passages altogether;[154] in Éclat (1965), the conductor triggers the order in which each player joins the ensemble; in Domaines (1961—68) it is the soloist who dictates the order in which the sections are played by his movement around the stage; and in alternate sections of Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974—75), the conductor chooses the order in which each group begins to play—but its progress is then regulated by its assigned percussionist. In its original version Pli selon pli also contained elements of choice for the instrumentalists, but much of this was eliminated in later revisions. In later works, such as Répons, there are still passages where decisions as to timing are delegated to the conductor, but there is little freedom for the individual player.

Works with electronics

Boulez likened the experience of playing taped music in a concert hall to a "crematorium ceremony". The only wholly pre-recorded pieces he composed were the Deux Etudes (1951, withdrawn). He first combined orchestra and electronics in Poésie pour pouvoir (1958), using a text by Henri Michaux. He created a quasi-theatrical space with the orchestra and two conductors on platforms in a mounting spiral, and with the speakers placed behind the audience. His aim was to achieve continuity between what he described as "the heterogeneous character of the two media," using percussion to mediate between them. He was dissatisfied with the result and never returned to the piece.[155]

Unfinished works

A distinction may be made between works which Boulez was actively progressing and those which he appears to have put to one side despite their potential for further development. As for the latter category, the archives contain two unpublished movements of the Third Piano Sonata[156] and further sections of Éclat/Multiples ("it is almost finished ... I have practically twice the length of the work as I play it now").[157] At one stage he planned to add a second part, of equal length, to Répons, creating a work which would occupy a full evening.[158]

As for works Boulez was known to be working on in his later years, the premieres of two further orchestral Notations (V and VI) were announced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for May 2006 but later postponed.[159] In an interview in 2010 Boulez said that he had finished Notation V in short score and was now working on Notation VIII.[157] He was in the process of developing Anthèmes 2 into a large-scale work for violin and orchestra for Anne-Sophie Mutter[160] and spoke of writing an opera based on Beckett's Waiting For Godot.[161] None of these projects came to fruition.

Character and personal life

As a young man Boulez was an explosive, often confrontational figure. Jean-Louis Barrault, who knew him in his twenties, caught the contradictions in his personality: "his powerful aggressiveness was a sign of creative passion, a particular blend of intransigence and humour, the way his moods of affection and insolence succeeded one another, all these had drawn us near to him."[162] Messiaen said later: "He was in revolt against everything."[163] Indeed at one point Boulez turned against Messiaen, describing his Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine as “brothel music” and saying that the Turangalîla-symphonie made him vomit.[21] It was five years before relations were restored.[164]

Senecio, Head of a Man (1922) by Paul Klee

Alex Ross, in his book The Rest is Noise, described him as a bully. Boulez did not disagree: “Certainly I was a bully. I’m not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.”[20] Boulez's hostility was not only directed against the establishment. When, in 1951, Henri Dutilleux, who was only a few years older than Boulez, presented his First Symphony, Boulez greeted him by turning his back.[165] As Dutilleux said many years later: "the problem was he had a lot more power than me. Indeed, he has often seemed to enjoy expressing his contempt for other musicians who do not share his musical views."[166] The most notorious instance of this is Boulez's declaration in 1952 that "any musician who has not experienced‍—‌I do not say understood, but truly experienced‍—‌the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch."[167]

On the other hand, those who knew him well often referred to his loyalty, both to individuals and to organisations.[168] When the great French conductor Roger Désormière was paralysed by a stroke in 1952 Boulez sent scripts to French Radio in Désormière's name so that his mentor could collect the fee.[169] The writer Jean Vermeil, who observed Boulez in the 1990s in the company of Jean Batigne (founder of the Percussions de Strasbourg), discovered "a Boulez asking about the health of a musician in the Strasbourg orchestra, about another player's children, a Boulez who knew everyone by name and who reacted to each person's news with sadness or with joy."[170] In later life, he was known for his charm and personal warmth.[1] Of his humour, Gerard McBurney wrote that it "depended on his twinkling eyes, his perfect timing, his infectious schoolboy giggle, and his reckless compulsion always to say what the other person would not expect."[171] His close friends included Daniel Barenboim and Patrice Chéreau.[168]

Boulez had a lifelong interest in the visual arts. He wrote extensively about the painter Paul Klee and collected contemporary art, including works by Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Nicholas de Staël and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, all of whom he knew personally.[172] He was also a keen walker and, when he was at home in Baden-Baden, spent the late afternoons and much of the weekends walking in the Black Forest.[173]

In its obituary, The New York Times reported that "about his private life he remained tightly guarded" and that apart from his older sister, Jeanne, "few others were able to break through his reserve."[174] Boulez acknowledged to the biographer Joan Peyser that there was a passionate affair in 1946, described as "intense and tormented" and which Peyser suggested was the trigger for the "wild, courageous works" of that period. Aside from this his personal life remained almost entirely invisible.[175] Music critic Norman Lebrecht, who knew Boulez personally, speculated that he was gay, citing the fact that for many years he shared his home in Baden-Baden with Hans Messmer,[1] whom he sometimes referred to as his valet.[176] In his portrait for The New Yorker, published shortly after Boulez's death under the title The Magus, Alex Ross described him as "affable, implacable, unknowable."[161]

Conducting

Boulez was one of the leading conductors of the second half of the twentieth century. In a career lasting more than sixty years he directed most of the world's major orchestras. He was entirely self-taught, although he said that he learnt a great deal—both about the practicalities of conducting and about orchestration—from attending Roger Désormière's rehearsals.[177] He also cited Hans Rosbaud and George Szell as influential mentors.[178]

Pierre Boulez and George Szell outside Severance Hall in Cleveland. Photo by Peter Hastings. Courtesy of the Cleveland Orchestra Archives.

Explaining why he turned to conducting, Boulez said that he was convinced that the best possible training for a composer was "to have to play or conduct his own works and to face their difficulties of execution"—yet on a practical level he sometimes struggled to find time to compose around his conducting commitments.[179] The writer and pianist Susan Bradshaw thought this was deliberate and related to a sense of being overshadowed as a composer by Stockhausen, who from the late 1950s was increasingly prolific. "His conducting career made it impossible for him to compose. And he probably preferred it this way." The French aesthetician Pierre Souvchinsky disagreed: "Boulez became a conductor because he had a great gift for it".[180]

Not everyone agreed about the greatness of that gift. For the conductor Otto Klemperer he was "without doubt the only man of his generation who is an outstanding conductor and musician."[181] For the critic Hans Keller he was "incapable of phrasing. It's as simple as that ... That's why he conducts Bach, Beethoven or Webern in exactly the same way."[182] His biographer Joan Peyser considered that "in general Boulez conducts what he loves magnificently, conducts what he likes very well and, with rare exceptions, gives stiff performances of the classic and romantic repertoire."[183]

He was primarily known for his polished interpretations of twentieth-century classics‍—‌Stravinsky and Bartók, Debussy and Ravel, Mahler and Varèse, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg[184]‍—‌ as well as for authoritative performances of contemporary music. Although in the first part of his career he conducted a wide range of earlier composers, only Mozart, Berlioz and Wagner remained a consistent presence in his repertoire in later years. In 1984 he collaborated with Frank Zappa, conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain in three of Zappa's pieces.

Clarity, precision, rhythmic agility and a respect for the composers' intentions as notated in the musical score are the hallmarks of his conducting style.[185][186][187][188] Oliver Knussen, himself a distinguished composer-conductor, observed that: "his rehearsals are models of clear-headedness and professional courtesy—he effortlessly commands respect."[189] His rhythmic precision, achieved without the use of a baton, combined with his acute tonal discernment to engender many orchestral legends: "There are countless stories of him detecting, for example, faulty intonation from the third oboe in a complex orchestral texture," Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times.[174]

When asked about the audience, Boulez said: "For modern music, I prefer an audience that has vertical interests–that is, people who are interested in modern movies, modern art, modern literature [rather than] those who are interested in Beethoven as they would be in a cup of tea".[190]

Opera

The 1976 centenary production of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Boulez

Boulez also conducted in the opera house. His chosen repertoire was small and included no Italian opera. Apart from Wagner, he conducted only twentieth-century works. Things might have been different had his attempts to find a long-term collaborator, and to reform operatic institutions, not been consistently frustrated.

Of his early work with Wieland Wagner on Wozzeck and Parsifal Boulez said: "I would willingly have hitched, if not my entire fate, then at least a part of it, to someone like him, for [our] discussions about music and productions were thrilling." They planned other productions together, including Elektra, Boris Godunov and Don Giovanni, but by the time rehearsals for their Bayreuth Parsifal began Wieland was already gravely ill and he died in October 1966.[191]

When the Frankfurt Wozzeck was revived after Wieland's death Boulez was deeply disillusioned by the working conditions: "there was no rehearsal, no care taken over anything. The cynicism of the way an opera house like that was run disgusted me. It still disgusts me." He later said[57] that it was this experience which prompted his notorious remarks in an interview the following year in Der Spiegel, in which he claimed that "no opera worth mentioning had been composed since 1935", that "a Beatles record is certainly cleverer (and shorter) than a Henze opera" and that "the most elegant" solution to opera's moribund condition would be "to blow the opera houses up".[192]

In 1967, not long after the Spiegel interview Boulez, theatre director Jean Vilar and choreographer Maurice Béjart were asked to devise a scheme for the reform of the Paris Opéra, with a view to Boulez becoming its music director. Their plan—to close the Opéra-Comique, merge its orchestra with that of the Palais Garnier, end permanent singer contracts and focus on a smaller repertoire—was derailed by the political fallout from the 1968 student protests.[193] Later, in the mid-1980s, Boulez became Vice President of the planned Opéra Bastille in Paris, working with Daniel Barenboim, who was to be its music director. In 1988 the incoming Culture Minister Jack Lang appointed Pierre Bergé (president of Yves Saint Laurent) as Director. Bergé dismissed Barenboim and Boulez withdrew in solidarity, taking his planned productions with him.[194]

In the event Boulez conducted only specific projects—often in landmark productions by leading stage directors—when he could be satisfied that conditions were right. Thanks to his years with the Barrault company, the theatrical dimension was as important to him as the musical and he always attended staging rehearsals.[195]

Patrice Chéreau

For the centenary Ring in Bayreuth, Boulez originally asked Ingmar Bergman then Peter Brook to direct, both of whom refused. Peter Stein initially agreed but withdrew in 1974.[196] Patrice Chéreau, who was primarily a theatre director, accepted and went on to create one of the defining opera productions of modern times, helping to usher in the era of Regietheater. He treated the story in part as an allegory of capitalism, drawing on ideas that George Bernard Shaw explored in The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898.[83] He updated the action to the 19th and 20th centuries, using imagery of the industrial age, and he achieved an unprecedented degree of naturalism in the singers' performances. Boulez's conducting was no less controversial, emphasising continuity, flexibility and transparency over mythic grandeur and weight.[197] In its first year the production was greeted with noisy hostility by the conservative audience, and a core of around thirty orchestral musicians refused to work with Boulez in subsequent seasons.[198] Both production and musical realisation grew in stature over the following four years and by the end of the final cycle in 1980 they received a 45-minute ovation.[174] Boulez worked with Chéreau again on Berg's Lulu in Paris (1979) and Janáček's From the House of the Dead in Vienna (2007).

His other preferred director was Peter Stein. Of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande Boulez had written: "I don't like the French tradition of sweetness and gentleness ... [the work] is not gentle at all, but cruel and mysterious."[199] Stein realised that vision in his staging for WNO in 1992, John Rockwell describing it as "an abstract, angry Pelléas, one perhaps over-intent on emphasizing the score's links to modernity".[200] David Stevens described their 1995 production of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in Amsterdam as "theatrically and musically thrilling."[201]

From the mid-1960s Boulez spoke of composing an opera himself. His attempts to find a librettist were unsuccessful: "both times the writer has died on me, so I'm a bit superstitious about looking for a third candidate".[57] From the late 1960s he exchanged ideas with the radical French playwright and novelist Jean Genet and parts of a draft libretto were found among Genet’s papers after his death in 1986.[202] He later turned to the German playwright Heiner Müller, who was working on a reduction of Aeschylus's The Oresteia for Boulez when he died in 1995, again without leaving anything usable.[57] In the 1980s he discussed with Patrice Chéreau an adaptation of Genet’s 1961 play Les Paravents (The Screens), which was planned for the 1989 opening of the Opéra Bastille in Paris, but this too came to nothing.[203] In a 1996 interview Boulez said that he was thinking of Edward Bond's The War Plays or Lear, “but only thinking.”[57] When news emerged in 2010 that he was working on an opera based on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, few believed such an ambitious undertaking could be realised so late in the day.[202]

Recording

Boulez's first recordings date from his time with the Domaine musical in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were made for the French Vega label. They document his first thoughts on works which he would subsequently re-record (such as Varèse's Intégrales and Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No.1), as well as pieces to which he did not return in the studio (such as Stravinsky's Renard and Stockhausen's Zeitmaße). They also include two of his five recordings of Le marteau sans maître (with contraltos Marie-Thérèse Cahn in 1956 and Jeanne Deroubaix in 1964). In 2015 Universal Music brought together the recordings from this period in a 10-CD set.[204]

Arnold Schoenberg by Egon Schiele (1917)

Between 1966 and 1989 he recorded for Columbia Records (later Sony Classical). Among the first projects were the Paris Wozzeck (with Walter Berry) and the Covent Garden Pelléas et Mélisande (with George Shirley and Elisabeth Söderström). He made a highly-praised recording of Le sacre du printemps with the Cleveland Orchestra and a number of recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra, including rarities such as Berlioz's Lélio and the first complete recording of Mahler's Das klagende Lied. The LSO also contributed to the Webern edition which Boulez supervised, consisting of all the works with opus numbers. When he took up his posts with the New York Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestras, and later the Ensemble Intercontemporain, most recordings were made with them. One of the outstanding achievements of the Columbia years was a wide-ranging survey of the music of Schoenberg, including Gurrelieder, Moses und Aron, Erwartung and Pierrot lunaire, but also less well-known works such as Die Jakobsleiter and the unaccompanied choral music. As for Boulez's own music, there were two further recordings of Le marteau sans maître (with Yvonne Minton in 1972 and Elisabeth Laurence in 1985), a first recording of Pli selon pli (with Halina Łukomska as soprano soloist) and recordings of Rituel and Éclat/Multiples. In 2014 Sony Classical issued Pierre Boulez—The Complete Columbia Album Collection on 67 CDs.[205]

Three major operatic projects from this period were picked up by other labels: the Bayreuth Ring was released on video and LP by Philips; the Bayreuth Parsifal and Paris Lulu were recorded for Deutsche Grammophon.

In the 1980s he also recorded for the Erato label, mostly with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with a greater emphasis on the music of his contemporaries (Berio, Ligeti, Carter, Donatoni, Xenakis and Kurtág). There was a Stravinsky cycle—including his only recordings of the complete Pulcinella and The Soldier's Tale—as well as a survey of some of his own music, including a second recording of Pli selon pli (with Phyllis Bryn-Julson as soloist) and recordings of Le visage nuptial, Le soleil des eaux and Figures, Double, Prismes. In 2015 Erato issued Pierre Boulez—The Complete Erato Recordings on 14 CDs.[206]

From 1991 onwards Boulez recorded under an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. It centred on the orchestras of Chicago and Cleveland in the United States and Vienna and Berlin in Europe.[207] He re-recorded much of his core repertoire—the orchestral music of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok—and oversaw a second Webern edition, extending this time to the unpublished works. HIs own late music featured prominently, including Répons, ...explosante-fixe... and Sur Incises. There was a fifth recording of Le marteau sans maître (with Hilary Summers in 2002) and a third of Pli selon pli (with Christine Schäfer) in its definitive version, incorporating major revisions made in the late 1980s. Composers new to his discography included Richard Strauss, Szymanowski and Anton Bruckner—his recording of the Eighth Symphony met with particular acclaim.[208] The most significant addition to his recorded repertoire was the multi-orchestra cycle of the Mahler symphonies and vocal works with orchestra. It began with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a 1994 studio recording of the Sixth Symphony and ended with the same orchestra in a live recording from the 2011 Salzburg Festival of Das klagende Lied (this time omitting Waldmärchen). Coupled with Berg's Lulu-Suite, it was his final recording.

All of Boulez's recordings for Deutsche Grammophon have been collected into boxed sets of CDs. In 2015 DG issued a 44-CD set Boulez—20th Century for his 90th birthday. DVDs of two opera productions are also available on DG: the WNO Pelléas et Mélisande and the Vienna From the House of the Dead.

In addition, many hundreds of concerts conducted by Boulez are held in the archives of radio stations and orchestras. Occasional releases provide a glimpse of the wealth of material they contain. In 2005, for example, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra released a 2-CD set of broadcasts by Boulez, focussing in particular on works which he had not otherwise recorded, including Janáček's Glagolitic Mass, the suite from Debussy's Le martyre de Saint Sébastien and Messiaen's L'ascension.[209]

Performing

From time to time in the early part of his career Boulez performed publicly as a pianist, usually as part of a mixed programme in which he also conducted orchestral or instrumental music. Between 1957 and 1959 he gave several performances of his own Third Piano Sonata[210] (one Darmstadt performance on 30 August 1959 was recorded and was issueded commercially in 2016 on CD2 of the seven-disc boxed set, Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4: Pianists, Neos 11360) and in the 1960s and 1970s he occasionally included songs for voice and piano in orchestral programmes, for example accompanying Dorothy Dorow in Debussy’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé at a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert in March 1966 and Christa Ludwig in songs by Berg at a New York Philharmonic Orchestra concert in February 1972.[211] He also played music for two pianos with Yvonne Loriod. Their recital at the 1965 Edinburgh International Festival was characteristic, consisting of Boulez's Structures and Debussy’s En blanc et noir and Boulez accompanying Severino Gazzelloni in his Sonatine pour flûte et piano.[212] A rare example of his pianism in later life was a short film made by Austrian television in 1992, in which Boulez played his early Notations.[213]

Writing

Boulez has been called an articulate, perceptive and sweeping writer on music.[214] He wrote on questions of technique and aesthetics in a reflective if sometimes elliptical manner.

The Boulez scholar Jean-Jacques Nattiez placed Boulez as one of the two twentieth-century composers who wrote most prolifically about music (the other being Schoenberg), joining a line of writer-composers going back to Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner.[215] In fact it was with a 1952 article with the inflammatory title Schoenberg is Dead, published in the British journal The Score shortly after the older composer’s death, that Boulez first attracted international attention as a writer.[216] This highly polemical piece, in which he attacked Schoenberg for his conservatism, contrasting it with Webern’s radicalism, caused widespread controversy.[217]

Generally Boulez avoided publishing detailed analyses, other than one of Le sacre du printemps. As Nattiez points out: "as a writer Boulez is a communicator of ideas rather than of technical information. This may sometimes prove disappointing to composition students, but it is no doubt a peculiarity of his writing that explains its popularity with non-musicians."[218] Much of Boulez’s writing was linked to specific occasions, whether a first performance of a new piece, notes for a recording or a eulogy for a lost colleague. His writings have been republished in English under the titles Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Boulez on Music Today and Orientations: Collected Writings, as well as in the journal of the Darmstadt composers, Die Reihe. A third edition of the French texts, with previously uncollected material, appeared under the title Points de repère I, II, and III.[219] The third of these volumes brought together for the first time the lectures Boulez gave as Professor of the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995.

Throughout his career he also expressed himself through long-form interviews, of which perhaps the most substantial are those with Antoine Goléa (1958), Célestin Deliège (1975) and Jean Vermeil (1989).[220] In addition, two volumes of correspondence have been published: with the composer John Cage (from the period 1949–62);[221] and with the anthropologist and ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner (from 1954–70).[222]

Legacy

An article published for Boulez's 80th birthday in the Guardian revealed that Boulez's fellow-composers had divided, and sometimes equivocal, views about him. According to George Benjamin "[Boulez] has produced a catalogue of wondrously luminous and scintillating works. Within them a rigorous compositional skill is coupled to an imagination of extraordinary aural refinement". For Oliver Knussen he was "a man who fashions his scores with the fanatical idealism of a medieval monk minutely illuminating volumes." By contrast, John Adams described him as "a mannerist, a niche composer, a master who worked with a very small hammer." Alexander Goehr thought that "[Boulez's] failures will be better than most people's successes."[189]

In October 2016 the large concert hall of the Philharmonie de Paris, for which Boulez campaigned for many years, was renamed the Grande salle Pierre Boulez.[223] In March 2017 a new concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal, will open in Berlin under the auspices of the Barenboim-Said Akademie. It is a flexible space, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, which will be home to a new Boulez Ensemble, made up of members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle and guest musicians from Berlin and around the world.[224]

Trivia

In December 2001, not long after the attack on the World Trade Center, police entered Boulez’s hotel room in the Swiss town of Basel and confiscated his passport. It appeared his name was on their database of terrorist suspects not, as some speculated, because of his remarks in the 1960s about blowing up opera houses, but because in 1995 a Swiss music critic who had written a bad review of a Boulez concert received a threatening call (including a reference to bombs) from someone using Boulez's name. A police spokesman apologized and expressed the hope that it would not stop Boulez returning to Basel: “I understand a lot of Swiss like his music.” [225]

Boulez met American singer-songwriter Paul Simon and his then-wife Peggy at a party in New York, where he mistakenly referred to Paul as "Al" and to Peggy as "Betty", giving Simon the idea for the song You Can Call Me Al, his biggest solo hit.[226][227]

The British satirical magazine Private Eye appropriated his name for the byline on one of its regular columns, Music and Musicians. Lunchtime O'Boulez has been spreading gossip about the classical music world since the 1970s.[115]

Selected compositions

Decorations and awards

Bibliography

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References

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  19. ↑ Barbedette, 212;
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  142. 1 2 3 Hopkins and Griffiths.
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  152. ↑ Campbell, Edward. "Troisième sonate pour piano et oeuvre ouverte", in Barbedette, 141—43.
  153. ↑ Fichter, Thomas. "Earle Brown's Calder Piece and Alexander Calder's Chef d'orchestre", in Borchardt-Hume, 70.
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  155. ↑ "An Interview with Dominique Jameux", in Boulez (1981), 201–202; Jameux, 114–16.
  156. ↑ Edwards, Allen. 1989. “Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation.” Tempo (New Series) no. 169 (June), pp. 4–15
  157. 1 2 Wolfgang Schaufler (December 2010). "Pierre Boulez, About the Music". Universal Edition website. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
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  187. ↑ Oestreich, James (16 March 2000). "Music Review; Colorful Sounds, Tuned by a Dynamo". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  188. ↑ Tommasini, Anthony (29 January 2005). "A Good Scrubbing for Mahler". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  189. 1 2 Clements, Andrew and Tom Service (compilers) (24 March 2005). "A master who worked with a very small hammer". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 6 March 2014. Retrieved 7 May 2016.
  190. ↑ Henahan, Donal (5 December 1967). "Tables are Turned on Avant-Garde Conductor". New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  191. ↑ Gilly 2003, 8.
  192. ↑ "Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!". Der Spiegel. 25 September 1967. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
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  194. ↑ Rockwell, John (10 June 1992). "Suddenly, Opera Is Everywhere in Paris". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  195. ↑ Jampol 2010, 10.
  196. ↑ Boulez, Chéreau, Peduzzi and Schmidt 1980, 15–16.
  197. ↑ Boulez, Chéreau, Peduzzi and Schmidt 1980, 22–23.
  198. ↑ Wagner 1994, 167
  199. ↑ Heyworth, 30.
  200. ↑ Rockwell, John (24 February 1992). "Boulez and Stein Stage 'Pelleas' With Modern Nuances in Wales". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  201. ↑ Stevens, David (11 October 1995). "Schoenberg's Gift of Eloquence: Thrilling Staging of 'Moses'". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  202. 1 2 Clements, Andrew Pierre Boulez, 1925–2016, Opera Magazine, March 2016.
  203. ↑ Barulich 1988, 52; Boulez 1981, 26.
  204. ↑ Accompanying booklet to CD set (2015). Pierre Boulez, Le Domaine musical, 1956–1967. Universal Music Group, 4811510.
  205. ↑ Allen, David (5 December 2014). "Recapturing the Radical on the Podium". New York Times. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  206. ↑ Clements, Andrew (26 March 2015). "Pierre Boulez: 60 Years on Record". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  207. ↑ "Pierre Boulez: Biography". Deutsche Grammophon. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  208. ↑ Marc Bridle. "Review of Boulez's Bruckner 8th Symphony on CD". MusicWeb International. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  209. ↑ "Pierre Boulez at 90, part 2: for the record". Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
  210. ↑ Vermeil, 180–81.
  211. ↑ Vermeil, 190 and 204.
  212. ↑ Programme booklet for concert at the Edinburgh International Festival on 2 September 1965.
  213. ↑ "Boulez plays Boulez". Universal Edition. 1992. Retrieved 1 October 2016.
  214. ↑ Barulich 1988, 50.
  215. ↑ Boulez (1981), 12-13.
  216. ↑ Boulez (1991), 209–14.
  217. ↑ Glock (1991), 89–90.
  218. ↑ Boulez (1981), 14.
  219. ↑ Boulez 1995, 2005a, and 2005b.
  220. ↑ Goléa; Boulez (1976); Vermeil.
  221. ↑ Boulez, Pierre and John Cage.
  222. ↑ Boulez, Pierre and André Schaeffner.
  223. ↑ "The Spaces". Philharmonie de Paris. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  224. ↑ Pierre Boulez Saal—Music for the Thinking Ear [2017 programme brochure].
  225. ↑ Riding, Alan (7 December 2001). "Police Raid Boulez, but Not for His Music, Exactly". New York Times. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
  226. ↑ "An artistic conversation of brillianace [sic]" by Kelly McNoldy, The Sandspur, October 17, 2008
  227. ↑ Eliot, Marc (2010). Paul Simon: A Life. John Wiley & Sons. p. 194. ISBN 9780470900871.
  228. ↑ "Leading clarinetist to receive Sanford Medal". Tourdates.co.uk. Archived from the original on 29 July 2012. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
  229. ↑ "Bundeskanzler: Anfragebeantwortung" (PDF) (in German). p. 689. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  230. ↑ "2001: Pierre Boulez, Sur Incises". Archived from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2016.
  231. ↑ "Pierre Boulez (conductor and composer)". Gramophone. Retrieved 10 April 2012.

Further reading

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