Pierre Boulez

French composer and conductor

• Born: March 26, 1925
• Birthplace: Montbrison, France
• Died: January 5, 2016
• Place of death: Baden-Baden, Germany

Boulez’s compositions, essays, and lectures changed the direction of Western music. Though he emerged from the French tradition of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Olivier Messiaen, he rejected his roots and redirected his spiritual allegiance to the Austro-German tradition as embodied by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. He also became one of the most influential conductors of modern music in both Europe and the United States.

Early Life

Pierre Boulez (bew-lehz) was born in Montbrison, in the Loire section of the southeastern part of France, on March 25, 1925. He came from a respectable middle-class Roman Catholic family. His father was an engineer and technical director of a local steel company, while his mother, who tended to be freethinking, was a homemaker. He was introduced to orchestral music on a radio that his father had brought back from the United States. An elder brother of the same name, Pierre, had died in infancy.

Because Montbrison had no lycée, the young Pierre attended the best school in the area, the Roman Catholic Seminary Institut Victor de la Prade. Extremely devout, he remained there until he was fifteen, taking first honors in chemistry and physics. He also sang in the choir and took piano lessons privately in the larger nearby town of Saint-Étienne. By the time he was sixteen, he was unalterably dedicated to music, a fact that disturbed his father greatly, because it was assumed that young Boulez was to pursue an engineering career, as he had. Boulez deferred to his father’s wishes and studied mathematics at the University of Lyon with the hope of entering the École Polytechnic in Paris, but he spent most of the year practicing the piano and studying musical theory. In direct conflict with his father’s wishes, in 1943 he entered not the École Polytechnic in Paris but rather the famous Paris Conservatoire, where he excelled in all of his courses, taking the premier prize in harmony. He received excellent instruction from Olivier Messiaen, the deeply religious visionary composer and organist. Messiaen was a maverick professor and performer and introduced his students to the exotic sources of his own music: Gregorian chants, Asiatic rhythms and techniques, and the actual songs of hundreds of birds. It was during Messiaen’s class that Boulez discovered the genius of Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and the early works of Arnold Schoenberg. He also took private lessons from Andrée Vaurabourg, the wife of Arthur Honegger.

In 1945 Boulez heard a performance of Schoenberg’s Woodwind Quintet under René Leibowitz’s direction, and the performance became a revelation to him of a whole new set of musical possibilities. He asked Leibowitz to teach him the rules of this new musical aesthetic. Boulez found in twelve-tone music a completely new musical language, a language that freed him from the past clichés and exhausted formulas of a long-dead but unburied Romantic tradition. He adopted Leibowitz as his new mentor and began an allegiance to the Austro-German tradition, a much more stringently intellectual and analytical approach to music. The composers who grew out of this tradition were the classic moderns of twentieth-century music: Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and, most important, Anton von Webern.

By 1948, after working as the musical director of the new Compagnie Renaud-Barrault under his only conducting teacher, the distinguished composer-conductor Roger Désormière, Boulez produced two pieces of music that gradually drew the interest of the French musical establishment: his Second Piano Sonata and his cantata, Le Soleil des eaux . It was, however, the stunning performance by Yvonne Loriod (Messiaen’s wife) of the Second Piano Sonata at the Darmstadt Festival in 1952 that propelled the young Boulez into the international musical spotlight.

Life’s Work

Boulez’s career began in 1948 with his Second Sonata; therefore, many critics saw him as the composer of a French expression of the Austro-German school of compositional style, a style called serialism. Boulez did not ground his first works in the French tradition that started with Jean-Philippe Rameau and flowered with Debussy and Messiaen, but rather he used them to pay homage to his country’s longtime enemies, Germany and Austria. Boulez even attributed the German presence in France during the occupation as the occasion that brought high culture to his homeland.

In the serial or twelve-tone system of composition introduced by Schoenberg, Boulez found the possibility of breaking away from what he viewed as the exhausted forms of a late and decadent Romanticism as found, for example, in composers such as Johannes Brahms or Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. He wished to move away from the concept of tonality (that is, music written in a certain key or tonal center that remains the same throughout the piece) to atonality, in which there is no tonal center dictating the rules of composition. Schoenberg had invented a system that not only eradicated the musical habits of the past but also enlarged the parameters of musical expression by extending the range of musical possibilities from the standard seven tones to all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. For Boulez, these radical new forms meant that he had found a musical grammar that successfully replaced tonality by expanding the limits of musical expression but remained rooted in a mathematical system that kept it from collapsing into mere emotional declamation.

After receiving this revelation, Boulez rigidly adhered to any and all ramifications of it. He promoted the composers who had engendered his own stylistic developments: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. These composers were responsible for purifying the language that moved music into new possibilities. To remain consistent, Boulez also promoted those earlier composers who influenced these three classic moderns, such as Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Boulez himself summed up the significance of serial or twelve-tone music: “With it, music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein. The tonal idea was based on a universe defined by gravity and attraction. The serial idea is based on a universe that finds itself in perpetual expansion.”

Out of Boulez’s newfound dogma came what has come to be regarded as his masterpiece. Indeed, some scholars find Le Marteau sans maître (1954, revised 1957) worthy of comparison to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, two benchmarks of the modernist movement of the twentieth century. As he did with his earlier Le Soleil des eaux, Boulez used sections of René Char’s brilliant but complex poems. He attempted to follow the accents and meters of Char’s poetry with the rhythms and dynamics of his own music. The piece is scored for seven instruments: alto voice, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, flute, and percussion. There are nine movements, but only four contain parts of Char’s poems. Over the years, numerous imitations of the exotic instrumentation have been attempted by many composers. The music embodies the tonal equivalent of the message of Char’s apocalyptic poem, that civilization is mechanistically moving toward its own doom. It has no master to guide it, and Boulez used his music to call the attention of the world to its condition.

Because of the quickly spreading fame of Boulez as a composer, he came into considerable demand as a teacher and conductor all over Europe, particularly in Germany and Paris. With the support of Suzanne Tezenas, the wealthy widow of the French fascist author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, he founded the Domaine Musical series of concerts at which he lectured on and presented the works of contemporary composers and the neglected works of the past he considered to be especially relevant to modern sensibilities. The concerts became an important part of the musical life of Paris from 1954 until 1967. He also began to accept academic positions in universities in both Europe and the United States. He lectured at the University of Darmstadt for twelve years, was professor of composition at the University of Basel from 1960 to 1963, and served as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1963. He delivered his now famous lectures at Darmstadt, which were subsequently published as Penser de musique aujourd’hui (1964; Boulez on Music Today, 1971).

Boulez produced fewer compositions in the 1960s and 1970s, probably because of the time spent working as a conductor and lecturer. His compositional style changed dramatically because of the influence of the American composer John Cage. Boulez had met Cage years before in Paris, had become fast friends, and then had a falling out. Yet Cage’s experiments with aleatory (chance) music and open form became major influences on Boulez’s work. With Boulez’s Deux Improvisations sur Mallarmé (1953), Strophes (1957), and Third Piano Sonata (1958), he moved into an exploration of the possibilities of open form, which meant that the work is, theoretically, never finished. All works become works in progress and, therefore, are open; they are treated as if they possess an organic life of their own and are permitted to join themselves with larger entities as later works emerge. All during the late 1950s and 1960s, Boulez followed this aleatory model, believing that the composition of a particular piece was primarily a process. Both Deux Improvisations sur Mallarmé and Strophes eventually became part of his next great work, Pli selon pli (1962). In his Third Piano Sonata, which remains unfinished, the pianist has the choice of arranging the order of the piece’s five movements and also may choose among movements to play or may omit certain sections. The performer is given alternative paths or options.

In his later work, Boulez focused on spatial explorations. In Domaines for Clarinet Alone or with Twenty-one Other Instruments (1968), he experimented with the physical distribution of the players themselves by having the clarinetist actually move within the various instrumental groups. In . . . explosante-fixe . . . (1971), a thirty-minute work for three flutes, chamber orchestra, and live electronic music, the musicians involved have a wide range of forms on which to decide as well as the task of determining how many and specifically what instruments will be used. He returned to his longest-standing work in progress, Livre pour quatuor (1958), and arranged it for full string orchestra, changing the title to Livre pour cordes (1968).

Boulez moved in the same direction in which many modern poets and novelists, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and his beloved Stéphane Mallarmé, had moved. Just as they viewed the subject of poetry as the making of poetry, Boulez saw the subject of music as the making of music. In Boulez’s view, authentic contemporary aesthetics always produce some version of a portrait of the artist. Modern art is always about itself, and the only operation that saves it from becoming an empty act of solipsism is the act itself. The imaginative energy of the creative artist is, therefore, the sole creator of meaning in a deterministic and violent universe.

Boulez’s later career, although he never stopped composing music, was largely spent in becoming one of the most influential and controversial conductors both in Europe and in the United States. In 1963 he returned to Paris after a long and bitter hiatus to conduct triumphantly the first French performance of Berg’s Wozzeck at the Paris Opéra, an accomplishment that garnered for him numerous invitations for conducting engagements. His performance of his own piece, Pli selon pli, at the Edinburgh Festival became an international musical event. It was his invitation to conduct Wagner’s Parsifal at Germany’s most sacred musical shrine, Bayreuth, that catapulted him into the front rank of major conductors. His brilliant performances, characterized by lucidity and coherence, captured the attention of the conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, who subsequently engaged him for a number of performances with his orchestra during the late 1960s. Boulez’s recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra, particularly his stunning interpretation of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, won for him worldwide recognition as one of Western music’s most accomplished conductors. His association with Szell also brought him into proximity with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, since Szell had been a musical adviser and frequent conductor of the Philharmonic for many years.

The climax of Boulez’s conducting career came in 1970–1971, when he became the musical director of both the British Broadcasting Company Symphony in London and America’s most renowned orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. His tenure at the Philharmonic was marked by controversy and innovation, because he considered the primary mission of a major orchestra to be the education of the public. Unfortunately, the board of directors lost its nerve after ticket sales plummeted as a result of Boulez’s intellectually stimulating but unpopular programming. Boulez also inaugurated a series of informal “Rug Concerts,” which were similar to his highly successful Domaine Musical concerts in Paris during the late 1950s. These concerts were widely attended by young people who wished to hear and understand the latest in contemporary music. He was determined to teach the younger generation the language of twentieth-century music by connecting it to its sources and inspirations in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In 1974, Boulez relinquished his position at the Philharmonic and moved back to Paris, where he became the director of France’s most sophisticated musical research facility, the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or IRCAM. Music critic Peter Heyworth, of the London Observer, calls IRCAM a “milestone in the history of Western music as crucial as the advent of the airplane has been in the field of transport.” Only someone like Boulez, with his international reputation as a great composer, conductor, and writer, could have marshaled the financial support for such an enormous enterprise. At the institute, Boulez resumed his experiments with music produced through electronic media. In the 1950s he had tried using tape recordings for sound manipulation but found them too constraining and awkward. IRCAM acquired the most advanced computer and recording technologies, and with these he could coordinate recorded and live music in accordance with his wishes. Among the fruits of these experiments was Répons (1984), for chamber orchestra and six instrumental groups, whose sounds could be electronically processed by a computer in real time.

Boulez held the professorship in “invention, technique et langage en musique” at the Collège de France from 1976 to 1995. During the late 1970s and 1980s revisions of older works occupied much of his creative energy. These included new versions of Notations, Pli selon pli, and Le Visage nuptial. In 1995 he was named principal guest conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and went on a world tour to celebrate his seventieth birthday. In the late 2000s, he finished an immense project, recording the entire cycle of eight symphonies by Gustav Mahler for Deutsche Grammophon, and that same year he conducted Leoš Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead (1930). In addition to being a composer and conductor, Boulez was a provocative, insightful writer, turning out articles and books that both championed modern music and analyzed contemporary productions, often incisively. He once dismissed as useless some of the music of Arnold Schoenberg and criticized Stravinsky as an epigone of various historical styles.

Boulez received many of the most prestigious awards available to modern conductors and composers. In 1985 he won the Sonning Award, Denmark’s highest musical honor. In 1996 he was awarded Sweden’s Polar Prize the “Nobel Prize of Music” by King Gustav of Sweden. Israel’s Wolf Foundation presented him with the Wolf Prize in 2000, a prize that honors achievement in the interest of humankind and friendly relations among peoples. Répons won a Grammy Award in 2000, and Sur Incises (1996/1998), a work for three pianos, three harps, and three mallet percussion instruments, garnered the Grawemeyer Award in 2001 from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. In 2002 Boulez received the Glenn Gould Prize from Canada in recognition of his contribution to music. In 2009, Boulez was the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, a Japanese version of the Nobel Prize, given in recognition of outstanding contributions to the arts, science, and philosophy. In 2010, he received the Edison Award from the Netherlands for his outstanding achievements in music. Two years later, he was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame. The following year, he was honored with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He also held an honorary doctorate from the University of Frankfurt (1996).

Though little was ever known about Boulez's personal life, it has been reported that his health began failing around 2011, eventually leading to reduced eyesight by 2012. He passed away at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany, on January 5, 2016, at the age of ninety. He was survived by his sister and his brother. Both the prime minister and the president of France paid homage to his career and influence upon learning of his passing. At the time of his death, he was conductor emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Iconoclastic, outspoken, and polemical, Boulez drew attention for his biting pronouncements. He once remarked that “the most elegant solution for the problem of opera is to blow up the opera houses.” This bit of bluntness, well known among art musicians, caused him surprising trouble in 2001. Three months after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center towers, while sleeping in a Basel hotel after conducting at a festival, Boulez was arrested in an antiterrorist raid by the Swiss police. The authorities took his remark about the opera houses seriously, even though it had been made four decades in the past. His passport was confiscated for three hours before he was released. Boulez remained active into his eighties, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and revising his earlier works.

Significance

Boulez is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and controversial musical figures. Considered an “angry young man” in art music of the 1950s and 1960s, he set out to divert Western music from what he saw as decadence and decline. In the process he became one of the most influential composers of the modern era. His Le Marteau sans maître probably has as many imitators as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata has become a staple in the repertoire of pianists who are seriously devoted to contemporary music.

No major composer of the twentieth century is so consistently literary both in his texts and in his role as possibly the most compelling writer on music in the second half of the century. By choosing the complicated texts of René Char, Henri Michaux, and Stéphane Mallarmé, Boulez demonstrates not only his authenticity as a genuine modernist but also that, in music as well as poetry, form is never more than an extension or revelation of content. Boulez characterized his own style as “organized delirium,” which would certainly apply to the poets whose texts he favored and places him firmly in the tradition of French dramatist Antonin Artaud. His project as a composer had been, however, to externalize his interior conflict and embody it in forms appropriate to its expression. Few composers, conductors, and writers in the second half of the twentieth century were as influential as Boulez. Moreover, Boulez was widely hailed for the precision and creativity of his conducting. He raised the standard for both performances and recordings of modernist classics.

Bibliography

Boulez, Pierre. Notes of an Apprenticeship. Trans. Herbert Weinstock. New York: Knopf, 1968. Print.

Campbell, Edward. Boulez, Music and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

Culshaw, Peter. "Pierre Boulez: 'I Was a Bully, I'm Not Ashamed.'" Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 10 Dec. 2008. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Duchen, Jessica. "Modern Master." International Piano 17 (2013): 30–31. Print.

Gilly, Cécile. Boulet on Conducting: Conversations with Cécile Gilly. Trans. Richard Stokes. London: Faber, 2003. Print.

Goldman, Jonathan. The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Griffiths, Paul. "Pierre Boulez, Composer and Conductor Who Pushed Modernism's Boundaries, Dies at 90." New York Times. New York Times, 6 Jan. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.

Kozinn, Allan. "Revisiting a Mellowed Pierre Boulez." New York Times. New York Times, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. New York: Norton, 1961. Print.

Nichols, Roger. "Pierre Boulez Obituary." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 6 Jan. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.

Peyser, Joan. Boulez. New York: Schirmer, 1976. Print.

Peyser, Joan. Twentieth Century Music: The Sense Behind the Sound. New York: Schirmer, 1970. Print.

Thomson, Virgil. A Virgil Thomson Reader. New York: Houghton, 1981. Print.

Whittall, Arnold. “Boulez at Eighty: The Path from the New Music.” Tempo 59 (2005): 3–15. Print.