In memoriam: Pierre Boulez

I’ve been very struck over the past couple of days listening to the testimony of so many musicians who worked with Pierre Boulez. They all seem to say the same thing. He had a phenomenal understanding of the music (his own and that of others), he had an extraordinary ear, and he was a joy to work with because he gave so much. You can see evidence for this in footage of him with young musicians at the Lucerne Academy he founded. Yes, he’s tough, because he has the highest of expectations, but at the same time he’s warm, kind, and generous.

It’s rather a pity, then, that – in the popular imagination at least – Boulez’s initial reputation as an ‘angry young man’ seems to have coloured the reception of his entire career. It’s true that in his earlier years he was combative. There was much to which he took exception. And how many students worthy of the name have not fought against the dominant values of the preceding generation? It was certainly clear in 1945 to Boulez (then aged 20) and his avant-garde peers that their forebears had got much wrong. Boulez organized booing and whistle blowing at a performance in Paris of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods. In ‘Schoenberg est mort’, the least generous obituary ever, he condemned the Viennese reformer for having reneged on his own revolutionary ideals. And he famously told his own teacher Messiaen that he thought little of the Turangalîla Symphony, describing it as ‘brothel music’. As recognition and influence came his way, Boulez became less pugilistic, though the tendency never entirely deserted him.

It’s fascinating, then, to look at video footage of Boulez conducting. Early on, his hard, mechanistic gestures (in one film even wearing dark glasses to keep any facial expression hidden) seem to embody his high-modernist aesthetic: no room for emotion; structure is everything. His readings of Webern are instructive in this regard. Structures Ia and the Second Piano Sonata breathe similar air, brazenly rejecting or destroying the traditions of the past in favor of a new structural order. But when you watch later films, you see that his movements have become more fluid, encouraging a balance between the structural and the decorative, the expressive even. And I find the same in his later music. Répons, a work I adore, is on the face of it another product of the high-modernist aesthetic of progress, pushing at boundaries, responding to the challenges of the latest technology. Yet its musical gestures – even those generated by the machines – often appear to take pleasure in the moment, in the shape and color of the sound, dwelling on the beautiful. In fact, that tendency had always been there in Boulez, stemming in part from an understanding of Debussy, so important to anyone who had passed through La classe de Messiaen. If in doubt, then listen to the gorgeous first song of Le Soleil des eaux.

It’s all too easy for musicologists to ‘fix’ through the labels they apply. The ‘avant garde’ and ‘integral serialist’ tickets attached to Boulez (often encouraged, it has to be said, by the man himself) place him squarely within a still-dominant narrative of modernity that goes back at least to Beethoven via Schoenberg and Brahms. But this, for me, hides the richness of the musical legacy he leaves, which opened up a dialogue of exceptional subtlety with all manner of music and ideas from across the 20th century. Boulez as structuralist, Boulez as high modernist: these accounts ultimately fail to do justice to a body of work that, for me, speaks with generosity of the uncertainties, vulnerabilities, and pleasures of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Pierre Boulez
26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016

Image credits: (1) Abstract. (c) dimapf via iStock. (2) Pierre Boulez, 28 February 1968. Photo by Joost Evers / Anefo, Nationaal Archief. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.