“Blow the opera houses up!”
“All the art of the past should be destroyed!”
“A musician who has not experienced… the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is USELESS!”
“From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés!”
“The Paris opera is full of dust and crap! Operatic tourists make me want to vomit!”
Pierre Boulez could be provocative and full of contradictions. Is it any wonder there’s been so much blowback against him and what he came to represent? This gadfly of the avant-garde was born 100 years ago today.
As a composer and polemicist, he was ever the rebel angel, the archnemesis of tonality and tradition. He studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, but in his advocacy of the abstruse, Boulez froze his teacher out. (Boulez characterized Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” as “brothel music.”) He idolized the Igor Stravinsky of “The Rite of Spring;” but in 1945, when Stravinsky unveiled his “Four Norwegian Moods,” a neoclassical pastiche in the style of Edvard Grieg, of all people, Boulez and his classmates booed vigorously.
As a conductor, he could be a persuasive interpreter of Mahler, Debussy, and Ravel. He enjoyed particular success with a landmark centenary production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” directed by Patrice Chéreau – a triumph scored in one of those very opera houses he was so eager to have destroyed. In his later years, he found value even in the music of Strauss and Bruckner.
But for the most part, the composers he championed were those who were perceived as revolutionary in their own time and who, as Liszt so memorably put it, had hurled their lances into the future.
In contemporary music, Boulez was a master. You’re on pretty safe ground if Boulez is conducting Webern, Xenakis, or himself. He even came around to grasping the value of his old mentor, Messiaen.
It’s as a composer that his reputation hangs in the balance. There’s been a lot of vituperation launched against Boulez’s aesthetic, but it’s hard to deny that he brought it on himself. Passionate acolytes remain, though they live like anchorites in the wilderness, in hovels and on barren cliff-faces, with no friends outside internet chat groups, or perhaps, depending on how closely they emulate the rhetoric of their idol, not even there.
Myself, I tend to be a little more moderate in my views, at least in this regard. Depending on my mood, I can put on a Boulez record and just go with it. His chamber cantata “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955), which I’ve played on the radio a few times over the years, is a good example of that. I understand what he’s up to, because I’ve done my homework, but it’s not to say I can hear everything any more than I can in any other serial score. But it sure does make some fascinating sounds. Actually, I find it his most approachable piece.
That’s about as good as it gets, folks. Later in life, when speaking of his “Structures, Book I” for two pianos (1951-52), Boulez described it as a work in which “the responsibility of the composer is practically absent. Had computers existed at that time I would have put the data through them and made the piece that way. But I did it by hand… It was a demonstration through the absurd.” Asked whether it should still be listened to as music, Boulez replied, “I am not terribly eager to listen to it. But for me it was an experiment that was absolutely necessary.”
Sometimes you have to push hard in order to find equilibrium. Ironically, Boulez makes such a show of breaking with tradition, yet he’s still caught within the tradition.
Boulez might not be to everyone’s taste, either as a composer or a conductor, but if he did one thing well it was to force everyone to think – about music, about progress, and about the reasons we value the things we hold sacred.
Boulez once proclaimed, “A civilization that conserves is one that will decay!” Even so, I’m glad we have his records.
Happy 100th, you mad prodigal.
Maurizio Pollini plays Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (1948)
Serial for breakfast: “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljcDXPcWRvI
Boulez rehearsing “Structures” (Book I, 1952; Book II, 1961) with Messiaen’s second wife, Yvonne Loriod
Conducting Debussy’s “Images for Orchestra”
An early “The Rite of Spring”
Conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 (live video)
“Das Rheingold,” from the Chéreau “Ring”
PHOTO: Put your hands up for Pierre Boulez
