Pierre Boulez

Boulez in 1968

Pierre Boulez CBE (French: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer and conductor as well as a writer and pianist. He was the founder and director of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) based in Paris.

In his early career, Boulez played an important role in the development of integral serialism, electronic and controlled chance music. The type of music which interested him, along with his highly polemical views on music evolution, gave him the reputation of enfant terrible.[1][2][3][4]

As a conductor, Boulez was known mainly for his performances of Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern. He was chosen to conduct the Jahrhundertring, the performance of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, and he conducted works by his contemporaries Elliott Carter and György Ligeti. He received a total of 26 Grammy Awards during his career. On 5 January 2016, Boulez died at his home in Baden-Baden, 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.[5] 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 with a strong sense of fairness; Marcelle (1897-1985) as a sociable and 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.[6]

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.[7] By the age of fifteen he was sceptical about religion:[8] "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.[9]

After completing the first part of his baccalaureate (a year early and top of his class in physics and chemistry) he spent the school year of 1940–41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby St. Etienne. The following year, at his father’s instigation, he took courses in advanced mathematics at the University of Lyon to prepare him for a career in engineering.[10] It was in Lyon that he first heard an orchestra and attended an opera (Boris Godunov). 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 academic year, with his sister's support and in the teeth of his father's opposition, he studied piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir).[11] "Our parents were strong, but finally we were stronger than they," Boulez would later say.[12] In fact, when he moved to Paris in the autumn of 1943, Léon accompanied him, helped him find a room (in the rue Oudinot near the Invalides) and subsidized him until he could earn a living.[13]

1943–1946: Musical education

In late 1943 he entered the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot at the Paris Conservatoire.[14] There he was introduced to Andrée Vaurabourg, who was married to the composer Arthur Honegger, and between April 1944 and May 1946 he studied counterpoint privately with her. She remembered him as an exceptional pupil ("he seemed capable of anything"), so much so that she continued to use his exercises as models in advanced counterpoint until the end of her teaching career.[15] He also studied the piano privately in the hope of entering Jean Doyen's class, but he was unsuccessful.[16]

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 Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Berg’s Lyric Suite and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, were subjected to intensive analysis.[17]

In January 1945 Boulez moved to two small garret rooms at 4 rue Beautreillis in the Marais district, where he lived for the next fourteen years.[18] The following month he attended a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, conducted by René Leibowitz, a pupil and follower of Schoenberg. The piece was a revelation to him and he organized a group of students to have private lessons with Leibowitz. It was here that he first studied twelve-tone technique and discovered the music of Webern.[19] Around this time he was one of a group 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.[20] Eventually he also found Leibowitz’s approach too rigid and doctrinaire ("Schoenberg was the truth, the Bible")[21] and he broke violently with him in 1946 when Leibowitz sought to criticise one of his early works.[22]

In the spring of 1945 he gained the Conservatoire’s first prize in harmony. The following academic year he took a course in fugue with Simone Plé-Caussade which so infuriated him (‘I could not stand it, she was unimaginative and the class was dead’) that he boycotted it and organized a petition that Messiaen be given a full professorship in composition.[23] In the winter of 1945/46 he was introduced to Balinese and Japanese music and African drumming at the Musée Guimet in Paris.[24] “I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.”[25]

1946–1953: Early career in Paris

Boulez earned money by giving maths lessons to his landlord’s son and playing the ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument), including at the Folies Bergère.[26][27] In early 1946 the theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault was looking for someone to play the instrument for a production of Hamlet by his Compagnie Renaud-Barrault and Honegger suggested Boulez.[28] He was soon appointed Music Director of the company, a post he held for nine years. He arranged and conducted incidental music, mostly by composers with whom he had little or no affinity (such as Milhaud and Tchaikovsky) but it gave him the chance to work with a group of professional musicians and left him time to compose during the day.[29]

This was a period of intense compositional activity for Boulez. Between 1947 and 1950 a series of major works received their first public 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.[30] In 1951 a large work for eighteen solo instruments, Polyphonie X, created a scandal on its première at the Donaueschingen Festival, some members of the audience interrupting with hisses and whistles.[31] He withdrew the piece immediately and it has never been performed since.[32] He also made his first experiments with electronic music, producing Deux Etudes for magnetic tape for Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe Recherche de la Radiodiffusion Française but again he was dissatisfied with the results and withdrew the pieces.[33]

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 two 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.[34] 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.[35] 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."[36]

In May 1952 Boulez gave the first public performance of Structure 1a for two pianos (with Olivier Messiaen). Boulez quickly became one of the philosophical leaders of the post-war movement in the arts towards greater abstraction and experimentation. Many composers of Boulez's generation taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany, which Boulez attended for the first time in July 1952. According to Scott Burnham, in the so-called Darmstadt School composers were instrumental in creating a style that, for a time, existed as an "antidote" to music of nationalist fervor; an international, cosmopolitan style that could not be "co-opted" as propaganda in the way that the Nazis used, for example, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.[37] As well as Cage and Stockhausen, Boulez was in contact with many composers who would become influential, including Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Henri Pousseur.

Towards the end of 1952 a tour with the Renaud-Barrault company took him to New York for the first time, where he met Stravinsky and Varèse.[38] He stayed at Cage's apartment but their friendship was already cooling as he could not accept Cage's increasing commitment to chance compositional procedures. On his return to France, he stopped corresponding with Cage.[39]

1954–1959: The Domaine musical

In 1954, with the financial backing of Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, he established a concert series at the Petit Marigny, which became known as the Domaine musical. The first four concerts set the template for subsequent seasons: pre-war classics still unfamiliar in Paris (Bartok, Webern), works by the new generation (Stockhausen, Nono) and neglected masters from the past (Machaut, Gesualdo).[40] Boulez proved an energetic and accomplished administrator, taking charge of everything from managing subscriptions to putting out music stands.[41] The theatre was small, the wooden seats hard and the programmes inordinately long,[42] yet the concerts were an immediate success. Poulenc observed: "there is a touching atmosphere at the concerts. Crowds of young people cram in together for standing room".[43] They attracted musicians, painters and writers, as well as fashionable society.[44] They proved so costly that Boulez had to turn to wealthy private patrons for support, in particular Suzanne Tézenas.[45]

At the ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden on 18th 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 on poems by René Char,[5] it was an immediate, international success.[46] 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."[47] Stravinsky described it as “one of the few significant works of the post-war period of exploration.”[48]

In the early years Boulez left most of the conducting duties of the Domaine musical to others, including Hermann Scherchen and Hans Rosbaud,[49] but on 21st March 1956 he gave his first concert as a conductor in a Domaine programme which featured the French première of Le marteau sans maître.[50] Other notable events 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).[51] There were failures too, most famously the first Paris performance of Stravinsky's Threni in 1958. Poorly planned by Boulez and inadequately conducted by Stravinsky, the performance broke down more than once.[52] According to Glock, who sat between Stravinsky and Boulez at dinner afterwards, "the atmosphere was electric with discontent".[53] Boulez remained director of the Domaine until 1967, when Gilbert Amy succeeded him.[54]

In 1957 an early version of the Piano Sonata No. 3 was heard in Darmstadt and 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.[55]

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.[56]

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,[57] but 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.[58] This led to débuts with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Bavarian Radio Symphony and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras.[59] 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.[5]

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[60] because of its virtuosity and tonal refinement. He became the orchestra’s principal guest conductor in February 1969, a post he held until the end of 1971.[61] 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.[62] In the 1968-69 season he also made guest appearances in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.[63]

In 1963 Boulez conducted his first opera, Berg’s Wozzeck at the Opéra National de Paris, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault with designs by André Masson.[64][65] He enjoyed exceptional conditions, with thirty orchestral rehearsals instead of the usual three or four,[66] and the critical response was unanimously favourable.[67] He conducted Wozzeck again in April 1966 at the Frankfurt Opera in a new production by Wieland Wagner.[68] 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.[69] He also conducted performances of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde by the Bayreuth company at the Osaka Festival in Japan in 1967, an experience he later said he "would rather forget".[70] By contrast, hIs conducting of the new production (directed by Václav Kašlík) of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden in 1969 was widely praised[71] and led to an acclaimed recording.

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.[72] 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.[73] 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.[74]

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 ("I felt like a waiter who keeps dropping the plates").[75] His appearances with the orchestra over the next five years included his débuts at the Proms and at Carnegie Hall (1965), and a tour to Prague, Berlin, Moscow and Leningrad (1967).[76] In January 1969 William Glock, Controller of Music at the BBC, appointed him Chief Conductor.[77]

Two months later Boulez conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time.[78] 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 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.[79][80]

His tenure in New York lasted between 1971 and 1977 and was not an unqualified success. The dependence on a subscription audience placed limits on his programming. He introduced more classics from the first half of the twentieth-century. With earlier repertoire he shifted the focus away from familiar staples towards less well-known works: in the 1972-73 season, for example, he conducted Schütz's Fili mi, Absolom, Haydn's L'incontro improvviso, Brahms' Serenade No.2 and Prokofiev's Suite from Chout.[81] Performances of new works were relatively rare. The players admired his musicianship but came to regard him as dry and unemotional by comparison with his predecessor, although it was widely accepted that he improved the standard of playing.[82] He returned on only three occasions to the orchestra in later years.[83]

His time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was altogether happier. The resources of the BBC gave him greater freedom in his choice of repertoire[84] and relations with the musicians were generally excellent.[85] 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.[86] In January 2016 BBC Four broadcast the hour-long documentary Pierre Boulez at the BBC: Master and Maverick.[87]

In 1972[88] Wolfgang Wagner, who had succeeded his brother as Director of the Bayreuth Festival, invited Boulez to conduct the 1976 centenary production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. The director was Patrice Chéreau. Highly controversial in its first year, by its final year it was hailed as one of the great Wagner productions. It was recorded and filmed and televised around the world.[89]

Relatively 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.[90]

1977–1992: IRCAM

In 1970 Boulez was asked by President Pompidou to return to France and to create and head 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 renewed the artistic vision of its time by providing a meeting place for artists and scientists of all disciplines.[91] IRCAM's aims would include research into acoustics, the design of instruments and the potential for computers to play a role in composition.[5] The original building was constructed entirely 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).[92] The institution was criticised for absorbing too much state subsidy, Boulez for wielding too much power.[5] 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.[93]

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 Boulez 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.[94]

In 1979 he embarked with 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.[95] The production was televised (but not commercially released) and an audio recording released by DG. 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.[96]

From 1976 to 1995, he held the Chair in Invention, technique et langage en musique at the Collège de France.[97]

1992–2006: Return to conducting

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

In 1992 Boulez relinquished the directorship of IRCAM, handing over to Laurent Bayle, in order to concentrate on composition and conducting.[98] The previous year he began a series of annual residencies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and in 1995 he was named principal guest conductor, only the third conductor to hold that position in the orchestra's history. He held the post until 2005, when he became conductor emeritus.[99]

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.[100] In 1995 he co-founded the Cité de la Musique, a combination of conservatoire and concert hall on the outskirts of Paris.[26]

This period also marked a return to the opera house. Boulez worked with Peter Stein on two productions: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1992 in a co-production between WNO[101] and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; and Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in 1995 with the chorus and orchestra of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (Amsterdam[102] and Salzburg). Pelléas was filmed for video release, Moses recorded for CD, both for DG. He also conducted Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle at the 1998 Aix-en-Provence Festival in a production by the choreographer Pina Bausch.[103] In 2000 he took part in a different kind of music theatre altogether, conducting Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps and Symphony of Psalms for the Zingaro equestrian theatre in an auditorium normally used for trade shows near Charles de Gaulle Airport.[104]

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.[105] In 1999 the orchestral version of Notation VII was given its first performance in Chicago.[106]

In 2001 Boulez conducted a major Bartok cycle with the Orchestre de Paris[107] and in 2003 he and the director Klaus Michael Gruber presented a triple bill of music-theatre pieces at the Aix-en-Provence Festival: Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Theatre), Renard by Stravinsky and Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.[108] In 2004 and 2005 Boulez returned to Bayreuth to conduct a controversial new production of Parsifal directed by Christoph Schlingensief.[109]

In 2004, he co-founded the Lucerne Festival Academy, a summer orchestral institute for young musicians, dedicated to music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[110] For the next ten years he spent three weeks in August and September working with young composers and conducting programmes with the Academy's orchestra.[111]

2006–2016: Last years

Boulez's last major composition was Dérive 2 (2006) a 50-minute work for eleven instruments, developed from a piece first heard in 1988. The premieres of two further orchestral Notations (V and VI) were announced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for May 2006 but later postponed.[112] In an interview in 2010 Boulez said that he had finished Notation V in short score and was now working on Notation VIII.[113] He was in the process of developing Anthèmes 2 into a large-scale work for violin and orchestra for Anne-Sophie Mutter.[114] He also spoke of finishing Éclat/Multiples ("it is almost finished ... I have practically twice the length of the work as I play it now"),[113] further expanding Répons,[115] completing the unpublished movements of the Third Piano Sonata[116] and writing an opera based on Beckett's Waiting For Godot.[117] None of these projects came to fruition.

He continued to conduct, including a final operatic project in 2007, when he was re-united with Chéreau for Leoš Janáček's From the House of the Dead, originating at Vienna's Theater an der Wien, later traveling to Amsterdam and Aix.[118] In 2007 he and Daniel Barenboim conducted a shared cycle of all the Mahler symphonies—in chronological order—with the Berlin Staatskapelle. Boulez conducted numbers 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8. They repeated the cycle over twelve days at Carnegie Hall in 2009.[119]

His appearances became more infrequent after an eye operation in 2010 left him with severely impaired sight.[120] Other health problems included a shoulder injury resulting from a fall.[120][121] In late 2011, when he was already quite frail,[122] he led the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Lucerne Festival Academy with the soprano Barbara Hannigan in a tour of six European cities of his own Pli selon pli.[123] His made his final appearance as a conductor in Salzburg on 28th January 2012 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Mitsuko Uchida as part of the Salzburg Mozart Week 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).[124]

Thereafter he cancelled all conducting engagements, although he continued as Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy until 2014. His health prevented him from taking part in the many celebrations, held across the world, for his 90th birthday.[125] He died on 5 January 2016, at his home in Baden-Baden, at the age of 90.[126] He was buried on 13 January in Baden-Baden's main cemetery following a church service. 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.[127]

Compositions

Early works

His earliest surviving compositions date from 1942–43, mostly songs on texts by Baudelaire and Rilke. 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".[128]

He went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style.[129] The first fruits of his studies were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. In the late 1940s, Boulez preferred instrumental forms that were superficially affiliated with the neo-classical movement. He used sonata form as a pretext for thematic presentation.[130]

Serialism

[A]ny 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.
— Pierre Boulez ("Eventuellement...", 1952, translated as "Possibly...")[131]

Boulez's totally serialized, punctual works consist of Polyphonie X (1950–51; withdrawn) for 18 instruments, the two musique concrète Études (1951–52), and Structures, book I for two pianos.[132] Structures was also a turning point for Boulez. As one of the most visible totally serialized works, it became a lightning rod for various kinds of criticism. György Ligeti, for example, published an article that examined its patterns of durations, dynamics, pitch, and attack types in great detail, concluding that its "ascetic attitude" is "akin to compulsion neurosis", and that Boulez "had to break away from it ... And so he created the sensual feline world of the 'Marteau'".[133]

These criticisms, combined with what Boulez felt was a lack of expressive flexibility in the language, as he outlined in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land..." had already led Boulez to refine his compositional language. He loosened the strictness of his total serialism into a more supple and strongly gestural music, and did not publicly reveal much about these techniques, which limited further discussion. His first venture into this new kind of serialism was a work for 12 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.[134]

Le marteau sans maître

Boulez's strongest achievement in this method is Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) for ensemble and voice, from 1953 to 1957, a "keystone of 20th-century music".[132]

Boulez described one of the work's innovations, called "pitch multiplication", in several articles, most importantly in the chapter "Musical Technique" in Boulez 1971. It was Lev Koblyakov, however, who first described its presence in the three "L'artisanat furieux" movements of Le marteau sans maître,[135] in his 1981 doctoral thesis.[136] However, an explanation of the processes themselves was not made until 1993.[137] Other techniques used in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were first described by Ulrich Mosch,[138] and later fully elaborated by him.[139]

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)[140]

From the 1950s, beginning with the Third Piano Sonata (1955–57/63), Boulez experimented with what he called "controlled chance" and he developed his views on aleatoric music in the articles "Aléa" and "Sonate, que me veux-tu?"[141] His use of chance, which he would later employ in compositions like Éclat (1965), Domaines (1961–68) and Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–75), 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 works by Boulez they only get to choose between possibilities that have been written out in detail by the composer‍—‌a method that, when applied to the successional order of sections, is often described as "mobile form", a formal technique innovated by his colleague Earle Brown in 1952 and originally inspired by Alexander Calder's sculptures.[142]

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 at that time: "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."[143] Messiaen said later: "He was in revolt against everything".[144] 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.[26] It was five years before relations were restored.[145]

Boulez had a lifelong interest in the visual arts. He wrote extensively about the painter Paul Klee and was a discerning collector of contemporary art, including works by Miro, Bacon, Nicholas de Staël and Vieira da Silva, all of whom he knew personally.[146] When he was at home in Baden-Baden he spent his late afternoons and much of the weekends walking in the Black Forest.[147]

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".[148] 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,[5] whom he sometimes referred to as his valet.[149] Boulez, who was nevertheless known for his humor, charm, and personal warmth, once said he would be the first composer to die without a biography.[5]

Conducting

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

Boulez was also 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. Clarity, precision, rhythmic agility and a respect for the composers' intentions as notated in the musical score are the hallmarks of his conducting style.[150][151][152][153] 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", wrote The New York Times.[148]

He was particularly known for his polished interpretations of twentieth-century classics‍—‌Alban Berg, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern and Edgard Varèse[154]‍—‌as well as for numerous performances of contemporary music. His 19th-century repertoire focused upon Ludwig van Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann and especially Richard Wagner. His recording of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony met with considerable critical acclaim.[155] In 1984 he collaborated with Frank Zappa, conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain in three of Zappa's pieces.

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 struggled to find time to compose around his conducting commitments.[156] 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".[157]

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."[158] 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."[159]

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".[160]

His experiments included attempts to find or adapt venues where music could be presented more informally and discussed with the audience: in New York he began a series of "Rug Concerts"—when the seats in Avery Fisher Hall were removed and the audience sat on the floor—[161]and a series called "Prospective Encounters" in Greenwich Village.[162] In London he presented 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."[163]

Boulez and Roger Wright, Director of the BBC Proms, returning to the Royal Albert Hall

Opera

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 Parsifal began Wieland was already gravely ill and he died in October 1966.[164]

When their 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[70] 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".[165]

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.[166] Later, in the mid-1980s, Boulez became Vice President of the planned Opéra Bastille in Paris, working with Daniel Barenboim, who was to to be its music director. In 1988 the incoming Culture Minister Jack Lang appointed Pierre Bergé as Director. Bergé, president of Yves Saint Laurent, dismissed Barenboim. Boulez withdrew in solidarity, taking his planned productions with him.[167]

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 with piano.[168]

For the centenary Ring in Bayreuth, Boulez originally asked Ingmar Bergman then Peter Brook to direct, both of whom refused. Peter Stein initially accepted but withdrew in 1974.[169] 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.[89] 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.[170] 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.[171] 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.[148] 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."[172] Stein realised that vision in his staging for WNO in 1992, the New York Times describing it as "an abstract, angry Pelléas, one perhaps over-intent on emphasizing the score's links to modernity".[173] It described their 1995 production of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in Amsterdam as "theatrically and musically thrilling."[174]

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".[70] 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.[175] 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.[176] He then 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. In a 1996 interview Boulez said that he was thinking of Edward Bond's The War Plays or Lear, “but only thinking.” [70] 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.[175]

Recording

Boulez's first recordings arose out of his concerts with the Domaine Musical and were made for Vega. Between 1966 and 1987 he recorded for Columbia. In the 1980s he made a series of recordings with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, mostly for the Erato label, with a greater emphasis on the music of his contemporaries (Berio, Ligeti, Carter, Donatoni, Xenakis and Kurtag).

In 1992 Boulez began a twenty-year period of intensive conducting and recording, under an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, which centred on the orchestras of Chicago and Cleveland in the United States and Vienna and Berlin in Europe.[177] He re-recorded much of his core repertoire (the orchestral music of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok), as well as the complete works (published and unpublished) of Webern. New additions to his discography included CDs of Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Scriabin and Szymanowski. In 2010, he completed his 18-year, multi-orchestra Mahler cycle for Deutsche Grammophon with the release of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Adagio from Mahler's uncompleted Tenth Symphony performed by the Cleveland Orchestra.[178]

In 2014-15 Columbia Records, Deutsche Grammophon and Erato all issued large box sets of Boulez's recordings to celebrate his 90th birthday.[179][180] The Columbia set ran to 67 CDs, whilst the DG and Erato sets contained 44 and 14 CDs respectively.

Writing

Boulez has been called an articulate, perceptive and sweeping writer on music.[181] He wrote on questions of technique and aesthetics in a reflective if sometimes elliptical manner. These writings have mostly been republished under the titles Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Orientations: Collected Writings, and Boulez on Music Today, 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.[182] Two interviews with Pierre Boulez were published in 2007 and 2008.[183]

Trivia

In December 2001, not long after the attack on the World Trade Centre, 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 had received a threatening call (including references 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.” [184]

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.[185][186]

The British satirical magazine Private Eye borrowed 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.[125]

Selected compositions

The Ensemble InterContemporain after a performance of Sur Incises in Barbican Hall, London, April 2015

Decorations and awards

Bibliography

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  • Wagner, Wolfgang. 1994. Acts. The Autobiography of Wolfgang Wagner. Translated by John Brownjohn. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81349-8.
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References

  1. ↑ "Unreconstructed Modernist". The Atlantic. 1 September 1995. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  2. ↑ Archived 5 February 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ "Pierre Boulez: "enfant terrible" faz 90 anos". Diversao.terra.com.br. 21 December 2015. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  4. ↑ Page, Tim (6 January 2016). "Pierre Boulez, conductor of bracing clarity, dies at 90". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Nichols, Roger (6 January 2016). "Pierre Boulez obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  6. ↑ Peyser (1976), 21-22; Heyworth, 3; Jameux 3.
  7. ↑ Hewett, Ivan (26 March 2015). ""The Modernist Maverick: Pierre Boulez at 90"". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2 April 2016.
  8. ↑ Peyser (1976), 24.
  9. ↑ Boulez (1976), 10-11.
  10. ↑ Peyser (1976), 23-24.
  11. ↑ Jameux, 6–7; Heyworth, 4.
  12. ↑ Peyser (1976), 24
  13. ↑ Heyworth, 4; Hill and Simeone, 139.
  14. ↑ Barbedette, 212.
  15. ↑ Heyworth, 5.
  16. ↑ Jameux, 10.
  17. ↑ Heyworth, 9.
  18. ↑ Barbedette, 212; Peyser, 30.
  19. ↑ Peyser (1976), 32-33; Jameux, 15–16.
  20. ↑ Heyworth, 6.
  21. ↑ Samuel (2002), 24
  22. ↑ Peyser (1976), 39; Barbedette, 212-213.
  23. ↑ Peyser (1976), 31-32.
  24. ↑ Barbedette, 212;
  25. ↑ Culshaw, Peter (10 December 2008). "Pierre Boulez: 'I was a bully, I’m not ashamed'". The Telegraph. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  26. 1 2 3 "Pierre Boulez—obituary". Daily Telegraph. 6 January 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2016.
  27. ↑ Orton and Davies 2001.
  28. ↑ Barrault, 161.
  29. ↑ Barbedette, 213–15; Peyser (1976) 53-53.
  30. ↑ Samuel 2002, 421–22.
  31. ↑ Peyser (1976), 66.
  32. ↑ Samuel 2002, 422–23.
  33. ↑ Peyser (1976), 67.
  34. ↑ Peyser (1976), 60–61; Boulez and Cage (1990), 41–48.
  35. ↑ Barbedette, 214.
  36. ↑ Peyser (1976), 76.
  37. ↑ Scott G. Burnham. "Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception (iii) Political reception.". In Macy, Laura. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. (subscription required)
  38. ↑ Barbedette, 214.
  39. ↑ Peyser (1976) 82–85; Di Pietro, 27–34; Boulez and Cage, 29-33.
  40. ↑ Jameux 61–62, 71–72.
  41. ↑ Heyworth, 21
  42. ↑ Jameux, 62–64.
  43. ↑ Poulenc, Francis (1991). Echo and Source, Selected Correspondence 1915–1963, translated and edited by Sidney Buckland. London: Victor Gollancz. p. 238. ISBN 0-575-05093-4.
  44. ↑ Jameux, 65–67.
  45. ↑ Peyser (1976), 111–12.
  46. ↑ Jameux, 79–80.
  47. ↑ Glock (1991), 132.
  48. ↑ Heyworth, 15.
  49. ↑ Peyser (1976), 109
  50. ↑ Vermeil, 179.
  51. ↑ Hill and Simeone, 202, 211 and 253.
  52. ↑ Walsh (2006), 385–387.
  53. ↑ Glock (1991), 74.
  54. ↑ Steinegger, 64–66.
  55. ↑ Barbedette, 216–18.
  56. ↑ Piencikowski, Robert. "À grands traits et par petites touches" in Barbedette, 46–48.
  57. ↑ Vermeil 1996, 142
  58. ↑ Peyser 1976, 145–46
  59. ↑ Vermeil 1996, 182–86
  60. ↑ Rosenberg, 378.
  61. ↑ Vermeil, 144, note 18
  62. ↑ Rosenberg, 402.
  63. ↑ Vermeil 1996, 188–95
  64. ↑ Randel, Don Michael (2002). The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press. p. 84. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  65. ↑ Steinegger 2012, 260–68.
  66. ↑ Peyser 1976, 170.
  67. ↑ Steinegger 2012, 266
  68. ↑ Weber, Hildegard (September 1966). "The First Boulez-Wagner Production". Opera Magazine. Retrieved 25 April 2016.
  69. ↑ Vermeil 1996, 192–98.
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  72. ↑ Griffiths, Paul (2010). Modern Music and After (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 120n. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
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  75. ↑ Glock (1991), 134.
  76. ↑ Vermeil, 186–194; Glock (1991), 106–110.
  77. ↑ "Boulez to Become B.B.C. Music Chief". New York Times. 23 January 1969. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  78. ↑ Schonberg, Harold C. (14 March 1969). "Music : A First for Boulez". New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
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  80. ↑ Strongen, Theodore (11 June 1969). "Philharmonic Picks Boulez to Succeed Bernstein in 1971". New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
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  82. ↑ Heyworth, 36.
  83. ↑ Vermeil, 228 and 239.
  84. ↑ Heyworth, 36.
  85. ↑ Glock (1991), 135; Kenyon, 391–395.
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  88. ↑ Wagner 1994, 165.
  89. 1 2 Kozinn, Allan (7 October 2013). "Patrice Chéreau, Opera, Stage and Film Director, Dies at 68". New York Times. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  90. ↑ Simon (2002), 427.
  91. ↑ Jameux, 187.
  92. ↑ Jameux, 175.
  93. ↑ Barbedette, 219–221
  94. ↑ Barbedette, 221.
  95. ↑ Steinegger 2012, 299–309.
  96. ↑ Vermeil 1996, 220-235
  97. ↑ "Pierre Boulez". College de France. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  98. ↑ Barbedette, 223.
  99. ↑ von Rhein, John (7 January 2016). "CSO conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez dies at 90". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2 May 2016.
  100. ↑ Vermeil, 242—243.
  101. ↑ Rockwell, John (24 February 1992). "Boulez and Stein Stage 'Pelleas' With Modern Nuances in Wales". New York Times. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  102. ↑ Glass, Herbert (10 November 1996). "Schoenberg Masterpiece by Ear Only". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  103. ↑ Samuel 2002, 142—45.
  104. ↑ Stevens, David (13 October 2000). "From Stravinsky to Boulez, a Horse Ballet". Retrieved 3 May 2016.
  105. ↑ "2001—Pierre Boulez". The Grawemeyer Awards. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  106. ↑ Barbedette, 223.
  107. ↑ Barbedette, 223.
  108. ↑ Steinegger 2012, 320-321.
  109. ↑ Ross, Alex (9 August 2004). "Nausea". The New Yorker. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  110. ↑ Service, Tom (26 August 2015). "A day for Boulez: moving tributes and newly composed homages at the Lucerne festival". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  111. ↑ Barbedette, 224.
  112. ↑ Chicago Sun-Times, March 22, 2006
  113. 1 2 Wolfgang Schaufler (December 2010). "Pierre Boulez, About the Music". Universal Edition website. Retrieved 4 May 2016.
  114. ↑ Tom Service: 'You just have to impose your will', interview with Boulez, The Guardian, 28 August 2008
  115. ↑ McCallum, Peter An Interview with Pierre Boulez, The Musical Times Vol. 130, No. 1751 (Jan., 1989), pp. 8-10
  116. ↑ Edwards, Allen. 1989. “Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation.” Tempo (New Series) no. 169 (June), pp. 4–15
  117. ↑ Ross, Alex 'The Magus', The New Yorker, 25th January 2016. Retrieved 26th March 2016
  118. ↑ Tim Ashley (4 June 2007). "From the House of the Dead". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 September 2007.
  119. ↑ Oestreich, James (7 May 2009). "Wagner Masters Offer Mahler Cycle". New York Times. Retrieved 7 May 2016.
  120. 1 2 WQXR Staff, "Pierre Boulez Breaks His Shoulder, Cancels in Lucerne" (Tuesday, 6 August 2013, 12:00 PM). WQXR Blog (accessed 6 January 2016).
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  122. ↑ Hewett, Ivan (4 October 2011). "Exquisite Labyrinth: the music of Pierre Boulez, Southbank Centre, review". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  123. ↑ "Barbara Hannigan Homepage". Barbara Hannigan. Retrieved 26 March 2016.
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  125. 1 2 Mark Brown. "Pierre Boulez, classical music's maverick, dies aged 90". the Guardian. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  126. ↑ Machart, Renaud. "Mort du compositeur et chef d'orchestre Pierre Boulez". Le Monde.fr (in French). Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  127. ↑ Roux, Marie-Aude (15 January 2016). "Pierre Boulez, inhumé à Baden-Baden, célébré à Saint-Sulpice". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 15 January 2016.
  128. ↑ Bennett, 41.
  129. ↑ "Boulez Interview". EdWebProject. Retrieved 18 August 2009.
  130. ↑ "Oxford Music Online". 0-www.oxfordmusiconline.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu. 26 October 2011. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  131. ↑ Boulez 1991b, 113
  132. 1 2 Hopkins and Griffiths 2011.
  133. ↑ Ligeti 1960, 62
  134. ↑ Hopkins, G. W. and Paul Griffiths. 2011. "Pierre Boulez", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy Retrieved on 6 January 2016
  135. ↑ Koblyakov 1977.
  136. ↑ Koblyakov 1981, published as Koblyakov 1990.
  137. ↑ Heinemann 1993
  138. ↑ Mosch 1997
  139. ↑ Mosch 2004.
  140. ↑ Boulez 1986, 143.
  141. ↑ Boulez 1991c and 1986.
  142. ↑ Audio Culture: Reading in Modern Music by Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner, 2004, p 189–94.
  143. ↑ Barrault, 205.
  144. ↑ Samuel (1976), 111.
  145. ↑ Benjamin, George (20 March 2015). "George Benjamin on Pierre Boulez: ‘He was simply a poet’". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
  146. ↑ Barbedette, 222, 149−151, 34−35, 117, 153.
  147. ↑ Peyser (1976), 171.
  148. 1 2 3 Griffiths, Paul (6 January 2016). "Pierre Boulez, French Composer, Dies at 90". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  149. ↑ Lebrecht, Norman. The Maestro Myth (ISBN 0-8065-2088-4), Citadel Press (New York, USA), p 183 (2001).
  150. ↑ "Press Quotes for Bartók Piano Concertos Nos.1–3 Boulez 4775330". Deutsche Grammophon. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  151. ↑ Kozinn, Allan (1 February 2005). "Peering into the Mechanism of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  152. ↑ Oestreich, James (16 March 2000). "Music Review; Colorful Sounds, Tuned by a Dynamo". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  153. ↑ Tommasini, Anthony (29 January 2005). "A Good Scrubbing for Mahler". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  154. ↑ Vermeil 1996.
  155. ↑ Marc Bridle. "Review of Boulez's Bruckner 8th Symphony on CD". MusicWeb International. Retrieved 15 July 2007.
  156. ↑ Glock (1991), 133.
  157. ↑ Peyser (1976), 147.
  158. ↑ Heyworth, Peter. (ed.) 1973. Conversations with Klemperer, 120. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0–571–13561–7.
  159. ↑ Vermeil, 169.
  160. ↑ Henahan, Donal (5 December 1967). "Tables are Turned on Avant-Garde Conductor". New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  161. ↑ Peyser, 245–246
  162. ↑ Vermeil, 150.
  163. ↑ Glock (1991), 141.
  164. ↑ Gilly 2003, 8.
  165. ↑ "Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!". Der Spiegel. 25 September 1967. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  166. ↑ Heyworth, 31-32.
  167. ↑ Rockwell, John (10 June 1992). "Suddenly, Opera Is Everywhere in Paris". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  168. ↑ Jampol, Joshua (2010). Living Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-19-538138-2.
  169. ↑ Boulez, Chéreau, Peduzzi and Schmidt 1980, 15–16.
  170. ↑ Boulez, Chéreau, Peduzzi and Schmidt 1980, 22–23.
  171. ↑ Wagner 1994, 167
  172. ↑ Heyworth, 30.
  173. ↑ Rockwell, John (24 February 1992). "Boulez and Stein Stage 'Pelleas' With Modern Nuances in Wales". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  174. ↑ Stevens, David (11 October 1995). "Schoenberg's Gift of Eloquence: Thrilling Staging of 'Moses'". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  175. 1 2 Clements, Andrew Pierre Boulez, 1925–2016, Opera Magazine, March 2016.
  176. ↑ Barulich 1988, 52; Boulez 1981, 26.
  177. ↑ "Deutsche Grammophon". Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  178. ↑ Cookson, Michael. "Review". MusicWeb. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
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  180. ↑ Clements, Andrew (26 March 2015). "Pierre Boulez: 60 Years on Record". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  181. ↑ Barulich 1988, 50; Blaustein 1989, 273; Harvey 1971, 557; Hayes 1992, 29; McNamee 1992, 286 all cite his writing as "perceptive".
  182. ↑ Boulez 1995, 2005a, and 2005b.
  183. ↑ Boulez and Albertson 2007; Obrist and Parreno 2008.
  184. ↑ Riding, Alan (7 December 2001). "Police Raid Boulez, but Not for His Music, Exactly". New York Times. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
  185. ↑ "An artistic conversation of brillianace [sic]" by Kelly McNoldy, The Sandspur, October 17, 2008
  186. ↑ Eliot, Marc (2010). Paul Simon: A Life. John Wiley & Sons. p. 194. ISBN 9780470900871.
  187. ↑ "Leading clarinetist to receive Sanford Medal". Tourdates.co.uk. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
  188. ↑ "Reply to a parliamentary question" (PDF) (in German). p. 689. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  189. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2016.
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