Pierre Boulez, who has died aged 90, was arguably the single dominant figure of the classical musical world through the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Without his compositions, his legacy of recordings as a conductor, his writings on music and his administrative skill and drive, the musical scene today would be of a quite different order. To some extent this dominance was achieved by the application of remorseless logic to both organisational and interpersonal problems. But at the same time he was a man of great warmth and charm.
Boulez’s determination to forge a musical style in keeping with the post-second world war era can be heard in the Sonatine for flute and piano and in the First Piano Sonata (1946). Already he was using the 12-note series in a personal way, refusing to be bound by Schoenbergian rules. In the Sonatine, the writing for piano, “the archetypal instrument of delirium”, set the explosive pattern for later keyboard works, especially the Second Piano Sonata (1948), which is still a stiff test for the virtuoso: Olivier Messiaen claimed Boulez “totally transformed the sonority of the piano”. The First Sonata, as the writer and producer Dominique Jameux has pointed out, is built on binary oppositions that would later feature in Boulez’s “open-form” works – choose either this or that.
In 1946 he was appointed musical director of Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud’s Paris theatre company, a post he held for nine years. The practice this gave him in conducting other people’s music with players of variable ability provided valuable experience, tempering his natural impatience with anything that was not perfect. He was in contact with other inquiring minds such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who arrived in Paris in 1949 and 1952 respectively, but essentially he trod a lonely path, with no ready-made outlet for his music. The initial versions of Le Soleil des Eaux (1947) and especially of Le Visage Nuptial (1946), both for vocal forces and orchestra, consolidated his reputation for writing music that was difficult, even impossible, to perform.
A breakthrough came in 1954, thanks to Barrault and Renaud. With their financial support, Boulez founded the concert society Le Domaine Musical as a showcase mainly for new music, although its programmes were also to include works by Dufay, Gesualdo and Bach, as well as Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. But it was not designed to highlight Boulez’s own works, and the first performance of his earliest uncontested masterpiece, Le Marteau Sans Maître, for voice and ensemble, took place in 1955 in Baden-Baden, Germany. Stravinsky described it in 1960 as “one of the few significant works of the postwar period of exploration”.
Boulez later stated that its reference to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was “intentional and direct”. This may have surprised those who had been outraged by Boulez’s 1951 article Schoenberg est Mort, in which he castigated the older composer for not having pursued the serial system to what Boulez felt were its necessary conclusions, particularly in the realms of rhythm and form – Webern was much more to his taste in these respects. But in that article Boulez had singled out for praise three “remarkable phenomena” in Pierrot: non-repetition, “anarchic” (that is, anti-tonal) intervals and contrapuntal construction. The last two of these were to remain hallmarks of his own style. Meanwhile in the first book of his work Structures (1951-52), for two pianos, he had drawn necessary conclusions from the serial idea; as to the necessity of the idea itself, he was later to make the famous pronouncement that any composer who did not feel it was “pointless” (inutile).
With the Third Piano Sonata, begun in 1956 but still unfinished, Boulez turned to the concept of the “open work” or “work in progress”, inspired by Mallarmé’s Livre, the writer’s unrealised “total book”, and also by the novels of James Joyce, in which an end is permanently kept in view without being achieved, and in which the work (the labyrinth) is explored, like the city of Venice, by a variety of routes. This process undoubtedly constituted a wide extension of the performer’s freedom as found in the continuo keyboard part of baroque music; at the same time Boulez set his face against total improvisation as being a breeding-ground for cliche.
In 1959 he left a Paris whose “organisational stupidity” was more than he could stomach, for Baden-Baden, where he signed a contract with the Südwestfunk radio station to conduct concerts of 20th-century music. He taught at Darmstadt and Basel, his pupils including Cornelius Cardew, Gilbert Amy, Jean-Claude Éloy, Heinz Holliger and Paul Méfano, and continued work on another masterpiece, Pli Selon Pli, for soprano and orchestra, which had begun in 1957 as two Improvisations sur Mallarmé. Further movements were performed in Baden-Baden, Donaueschingen and Cologne before the premiere of the complete work in Donaueschingen in 1962. Boulez’s large‑scale control (the five movements together last over an hour) is as impressive as his ever-inventive imagination in the matter of pure sound. Altogether, in the words of the critic Paul Griffiths: “Because Boulez so wholly takes possession of his texts instead of merely setting them, the work is a portrait also of himself.”
Boulez made a high-profile return to Paris in 1963, conducting both a 50th-anniversary performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Berg’s Wozzeck at the Opéra, where all 10 evenings were sold out. No less remarkable was his successful insistence on the unprecedented number of 35 rehearsals, and on the same orchestral players being present for all rehearsals and performances, putting an end to a long house tradition of tolerating substitutes. The triumph of these performances was matched by that of his version of Berg’s Lulu 16 years later.
Not everything in Paris, though, went his way. Successes such as his seductive Eclat, for 15 instruments (1965), and semi-theatrical Domaines (1968) and his collaboration with Wieland Wagner on the Bayreuth Parsifal of 1966 (repeated in 1967, 1968 and 1970) had to be set against his failures to persuade André Malraux, the minister for cultural affairs, to accept his recommendations for reorganising French musical life, and the collapse of plans made with Jean Vilar for a refashioning of the Opéra. Boulez’s indignant ripostes, “Why I say NO to Malraux” and the notorious 1967 interview in Der Spiegel in which he advocated burning down the world’s opera houses, did little to further his cause inside France, entertaining though they may have been for outsiders.
How deeply he minded his separation from his native country is hard to say. The evidence suggests that he was prepared to wait, like De Gaulle, until the state of disarray became self-evident enough to lead to his recall. In the meantime he had been appointed principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1967 and was invited by William Glock in 1968 to become chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a task he took up at the beginning of 1971 and fulfilled to great acclaim. It was his mission to introduce the British public to the masterpieces of the first half of the 20th century, without a knowledge of which, he felt, they were bound to find the music of their own time incomprehensible. His concerts at the Roundhouse, in particular, marked a turning point in London’s musical life.
Also in 1971 he was appointed to succeed Leonard Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Even if there were tensions between Boulez’s goals and the more conservative attitudes of the orchestra’s patrons, the recordings he made with the orchestra, including scores by Bartók and Ravel – an utterly miraculous Miraculous Mandarin and a lithe reading of Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, completely purged of false sentiment – testify to the quality of his direction.
Understandably, this workload led to a slight slowing in his compositional output throughout the 1970s, down to five works – little more than an hour’s music in all: Cummings ist der Dichter (1970), for voices and instruments; ...explosante-fixe... (1971, and ultimately revised and incorporated into Mémoriale, 1985); Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna (1975); Messagesquisse, for solo cello and six other cellos (1976); and the four Notations (1978). Rituel, deriving from a single sound-block and in this sense obeying the “necessity” that Boulez had found lacking in the serial Schoenberg, has a ritualistic structure surely proclaiming the composer’s debt to his upbringing. This work, and the five Notations, orchestral reworkings of short piano pieces of 1945, have regularly been greeted by non-specialist audiences with the greatest enthusiasm.
These conducting and composing activities would have kept most men content for at least a decade. But Boulez in exile was contemplating an unusually ambitious project, even for him: “a musical centre in which experimentation can take place on a permanent basis”. Fortunately his ambitions dovetailed with those of the French president Georges Pompidou, and in 1972 Boulez was nominated as director of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Ircam), an underground neighbour of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Among Ircam’s aims, as defined by Boulez, were research into acoustics, into instrumental design (“instruments have scarcely changed over the past two or three centuries”), and into the problems of composition itself. Since nothing of the sort had been attempted before on this scale, inevitably there were difficulties: musicians and scientists did not always see eye to eye, even where their roles were clearly defined, and the enemies were eager to pounce on perceived failings. As the musician and anthropologist Georgina Born wrote in her study of Ircam’s beginnings: “Throughout the early period and until the mid-1980s, Ircam remained heavily dependent on American computer music expertise and also on the technologies that these researchers brought with them.” This put an extra stick into the hands of those French critics who, not without reason, felt Ircam was swallowing up large amounts of state money with little to show for it – the capital cost of the building was already quoted as $12m in 1973, even though Boulez insisted on Ircam being independent of the ministry of cultural affairs so that it would be able to accept outside money for running costs. Boulez also instigated the building of the complementary Cité de la Musique on the northern outskirts of Paris, incorporating the new Conservatoire; to this has now been added the Philharmonie de Paris, a modular concert hall in accordance with his wishes.
Much of the criticism was directed at Boulez personally, one critic accusing him of being “the new Lully”, drawing a parallel with the court of Louis XIV. Boulez’s definitive reply was a 45-minute work, aptly named Répons, which depended heavily on Ircam’s electronic resources. The premiere of its third version, given in October 1984 before an audience including Claude Pompidou, the president’s widow, and Jacques Chirac, more or less silenced criticism (though there were no doubt some who thought Boulez’s outstanding gifts as a composer made this less than a fair trial of Ircam’s validity, which needed to be seen to succeed with a wider sample of composers). The long trills, already heard in embryo in ...explosante-fixe..., now become a salient feature of the music and, with passages of almost jazzy ostinatos, mark a change from the non-repetitive, continuing variation that had in general characterised his music up to this point. But if the articulation of the discourse is now a little easier to follow, the language itself is as challenging as ever.
As for Boulez’s ear for sound (one orchestral player claimed he could tell in what key a pin dropped), Répons proved it to be undimmed; the listener indeed, continuously seduced by the sheer beauty of the textures, has cause to be grateful for the greater clarity of the structure in that it prevents the work from being merely a warm-bath experience. Répons reached its present length in 1988.
One of Boulez’s major works of the 1990s, Sur Incises, is another example of his many open-ended “works in progress”, which grew gradually from a tiny piano piece, Incises, written for a competition in 1994, to one more than 40 minutes long for three pianos, harps and percussion, completed in 1999. It also took the delirious piano to new heights, and depths – one of the most sheerly exciting works of the century, with a further emphasis on repeated notes that at times make it sound like a later model of Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 2.3.1.
In 1992 he conducted the Peter Stein production of Pelléas et Mélisande for Welsh National Opera, awarded the International Classical Music award for opera production of the year, and brought out the inherent strength and cohesiveness of Debussy’s score even more strikingly than in his 1969 performances of the opera at Covent Garden. He once said that he “liked to burn the mist off Debussy”. The uncompromising revolutionary thus revealed was a man always close to Boulez’s heart.
In his 70th birthday year in 1995 he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts around the world, including London, Paris, Vienna, New York and Tokyo. His 75th birthday year was the focus of similar activity, but before then, in 1997, he announced he would be devoting most of his time to composing – a commitment he repeated more forcefully in 2000. Eight of the original 12 Notations remained to be developed (in fact only one, no VII, was added to the original four), as well as a number of new projects including, to use Griffiths’s phrase, a further “settling of old scores”.
An idea for an opera, once mooted in collaboration with Jean Genet, was not revived after the author’s death, and in the event Boulez’s travelling and conducting continued practically unabated. On the compositional front most of his time was spent revising and rearranging earlier works: the only completely new piece, for piano, is tellingly entitled Une Page d’Éphéméride (2005). London and Paris were among the centres to mark his 90th birthday with concerts, and various box sets of recordings were released.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, west of Lyon, into a stable, middle-class family: his father, Léon, was an engineer, the technical director of a steel works, and both he and his wife, Marcelle, were educated as Catholics. Before going to Paris in the autumn of 1943, Boulez’s most extended period of education was in a Catholic seminary (1932-40). While he felt distaste for what he saw as the priests’ “mechanical attitude that had absolutely nothing to do with profound conviction”, the habits of hard work, discipline, order and early rising remained with him. Little in his lifestyle, opinions or music would ever lead one to realise that he was a southerner, his birthplace a mere 30km away from Emmanuel Chabrier’s.
Once in Paris, he was inevitably drawn by his need for teaching through conviction into the orbit of Messiaen. He studied in his Conservatoire class for no more than a year, although he attended his extramural analysis classes for rather longer, studying, among other things, Berg’s Lyric Suite, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps; he also took weekly counterpoint lessons (1944-46) with Honegger’s wife Andrée Vaurabourg, who remembered that “he never missed a lesson and was never late”.
Despite his admiration for the man, he always had reservations about some elements of Messiaen’s musical language. Turning the pages for the celesta player at the first performance of Trois Petites Liturgies in 1945, he appreciated what he later called “the side-order” – the gamelan-inspired sounds – as well as Roger Désormière’s sober and efficient conducting, which would be one model for his own; but the swooping of the ondes martenot and the sugary added-sixth chords prompted talk both there and with the Turangalîla Symphonie of “bordello music”, leading to a temporary cooling of relations.
Nonetheless, Boulez’s many eventual recordings for Deutsche Grammophon included a mesmeric account of Messiaen’s Chronochromie (Cleveland Orchestra, 1993). Also outstanding in a recorded repertoire that extended to Bruckner and Mahler were the Ravel Piano Concertos with Krystian Zimerman as soloist – in D, for the left hand, with the London Symphony Orchestra (1996); and in G, with the Cleveland Orchestra (1994).
In 2010-11 Boulez’s health deteriorated and by the early months of 2012 his eyesight was seriously affected. For some time he had been planning a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter, a reworking of Anthèmes 2, a delightful, magical 20-minute work for violin and live electronics (1997), but sadly this never materialised.
One friend who worked with Boulez in America reckoned that, for all his intellectual rigour, he was essentially a doer rather than a thinker. Composing is a lonely business, and as he grew older he increasingly relished the company of other musicians, with a special fondness for the young, towards whom he was firm and uncondescending. He was good at telling jokes, and rehearsals with his own Ensemble Intercontemporain were conducted in a happy atmosphere in which the highest standards of attention and execution were simply taken for granted.
His personal life remained hidden – clearly not by accident, since he was reported as saying he would be the first composer to lack a biography. He was devotedly served from the early 1970s by his valet, Hans Messmer, and by his highly efficient assistant, Astrid Schirmer, and was close to his elder sister Jeanne and his younger brother Roger, who both survive him, as well as their children and grandchildren.
To some extent the relaxed Boulez was the result of his having finally got his own way in the things that mattered to him, something perhaps only a certain brutality, allied to genius, could have achieved: he explained in a TV interview that, to begin with, he was the dog barking outside the tent – now he was inside the tent he had no need to bark. The caustic, peremptory tone of much of his writing is intended to wake us up. As he said in 2000, echoing words of Désormière: “You mustn’t be discouraged: be aware of the inertia of others, and be more stubborn than they are” – a notably more diplomatic pronouncement than those of 20 years earlier, when he snapped at an interviewer who accused him of being “somewhat sectarian”: “I am not somewhat sectarian, I am completely sectarian”, or when he stormed that “at my age and in my position I refuse to be dependent on the kind of nonentities who join committees!” Born’s accounts of committees set up within Ircam testify to Boulez’s unwavering impatience with such things.
Age brought a softening of his stance on other topics too. A group of British critics, talking with him about British composers and knowing his general lack of enthusiasm in this area, were surprised when the name of Vaughan Williams came up and Boulez retorted: “Vaughan Williams … now he is interesting.” At the Edinburgh festival he also admitted that he and like-minded colleagues in the 1950s and 60s had underestimated the public’s need to have musical ideas repeated.
If Boulez was intelligent enough to know his own value, he was also kind and without self-importance. Not all men in his position would happily stand in a corridor for 20 minutes between two three-hour rehearsals to record an interview, with technicians jostling his elbow; not all men would have been able to use the occasion to deliver themselves of a 15-minute disquisition on Messiaen that could easily have been broadcast unedited.
Jameux ended his biography of Boulez with the words: “Outwardly he gives an impression of resolution, mental alacrity, perseverance and self-justification – inwardly, one of evaluation, amendment, realism and self-criticism.” If Boulez’s utter conviction of the value of his mission, to write music worthy of his time and to fight cynicism and indifference wherever he found them, made him a formidable enemy, it was also the driving force behind his uniquely valuable contribution to the musical world of his time. Perhaps the final words should belong to Désormière, quoted by Boulez in his deeply moving memoir of that conductor: “Precision, a mark of aristocracy.”
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