Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ lwi ʒozεf bulɛz]; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Born in Montbrison, in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as music director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. He was a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism in the 1950s, controlled chance music in the 1960s and the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time from the 1970s onwards. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of work was relatively small, but it included pieces considered landmarks of twentieth-century music, such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli and Répons. His uncompromising commitment to modernism and the trenchant, polemical tone in which he expressed his views on music led some to criticise him as a dogmatist.
Boulez was also one of the most prominent conductors of his generation. In a career lasting more than sixty years, he was music director of the New York Philharmonic, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. He made frequent appearances with many other orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. He was known for his performances of the music of the first half of the twentieth century—including Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók, and the Second Viennese School—as well as that of his contemporaries, such as Ligeti, Berio and Carter. His work in the opera house included the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, and the world premiere of the three-act version of Berg's opera Lulu. His recorded legacy is extensive.
He also founded several musical institutions. In Paris he set up the Domaine musical in the 1950s to promote new music; in the 1970s he established the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM), to foster research and innovation in music, and the Ensemble intercontemporain, a chamber orchestra specialising in contemporary music. Later he co-founded the Cité de la musique, a concert hall, museum and library dedicated to music in the Parc de la Villette in Paris and, in Switzerland, the Lucerne Festival Academy, an international orchestra of young musicians, with which he gave first performances of many new works.
Biography[edit]
1925–1943: Childhood and school days[edit]
Pierre Boulez was born on 26 March 1925, in Montbrison, a small town
in the Loire department of east-central France, to Léon and Marcelle (née Calabre) Boulez.[1] He was the third of four children: an older sister, Jeanne (1922–2018)[2] and younger brother, Roger (b. 1936) were preceded by another child 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, and Marcelle (1897–1985) as an outgoing, good-humoured woman, who deferred to her husband's strict Catholic beliefs, while not necessarily sharing them. The family prospered, moving in 1929 from the apartment above a pharmacy, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house, where he spent most of his childhood.[3]
From the age of seven Boulez went to school at the Institut Victor de Laprade, a Catholic seminary where the thirteen-hour school day was filled with study and prayer. By the age of eighteen he had repudiated Catholicism;[4] later in life he described himself as an agnostic.[5]
As a child, Boulez took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir.[6] After completing the first part of his baccalaureate a year early, he spent the academic year of 1940–41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby Saint-Étienne. The following year he took classes in advanced mathematics at the Cours Sogno in Lyon (a school established by the Lazaristes)[7] with a view to gaining admission to the École Polytechnique in Paris. His father hoped this would lead to a career in engineering.[8] Wartime conditions in Lyon were already harsh; they became harsher still when the Vichy government fell, the Germans took over and the city became a centre of the resistance.[9]
In Lyon, Boulez first heard an orchestra, saw his first operas (Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg)[10] and met the soprano Ninon Vallin, who asked him to play for her. Impressed by his ability, she persuaded his father to allow him to apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He was rejected but was determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir de Pachmann).[11] "Our parents were strong, but finally we were stronger than they", Boulez later said.[12] In the event, when he moved to Paris in the autumn of 1943, hoping to enrol at the Conservatoire de Paris, his father accompanied him, helped him to find a room (in the 7th arrondissement) and subsidised him until he could earn a living.[13]
1943–1946: Musical education[edit]
In October 1943, Boulez auditioned unsuccessfully for the advanced piano class at the Conservatoire, but he was admitted in January 1944 to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. He made rapid progress, and by May 1944 Dandelot was describing him as "the best of the class".[14]
Conducting[edit]
Approach to conducting[edit]
Boulez was 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. He was entirely self-taught, although he said that he learnt a great deal from attending Désormière's and Hans Rosbaud's rehearsals.[194] He also cited George Szell as an influential mentor.[195]
Writing and teaching[edit]
According to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Boulez was one of two twentieth-century composers who wrote most prolifically about music, the other being Schoenberg.[224] It was with a 1952 article with the inflammatory title "Schoenberg is Dead", published in the British journal The Score shortly after the older composer's death, that Boulez first attracted international attention as a writer.[225] This highly polemical piece, in which he attacked Schoenberg for his conservatism, contrasting it with Webern's radicalism, caused widespread controversy.[226]
Jonathan Goldman points out that, over the decades, Boulez's writings addressed very different readerships: in the 1950s the cultured Parisian attendees of the Domaine musical; in the 1960s the specialised avant-garde composers and performers of the Darmstadt and Basel courses; and, between 1976 and 1995, the highly literate but non-specialist audience of the lectures he gave as Professor of the Collège de France.[227] Much of Boulez's writing was linked to specific occasions, whether a first performance of a new piece, notes for a recording or a eulogy for a lost colleague. Generally he avoided publishing detailed analyses, other than one of The Rite of Spring. As Nattiez points out: "as a writer Boulez is a communicator of ideas rather than of technical information. This may sometimes prove disappointing to composition students, but it is no doubt a peculiarity of his writing that explains its popularity with non-musicians."[228]
Boulez's writings have appeared in English as Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Boulez on Music Today, Orientations: Collected Writings and Pierre Boulez, Music Lessons: The Complete Collège de France Lectures. Throughout his career he also expressed himself through long-form interviews, of which perhaps the most substantial are those with Antoine Goléa (1958), Célestin Deliège (1975) and Jean Vermeil (1989).[229] Two volumes of correspondence have been published: with the composer John Cage (from the period 1949–62);[230] and with the anthropologist and ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner (from 1954 to 1970).[231]
Boulez taught at the Darmstadt Summer School most years between 1954 and 1965.[232] He was professor of composition at the Basel Music Academy in Switzerland (1960–63) and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1963. He also taught privately in the early part of his career.[152] Students included the composers Richard Rodney Bennett,[233] Jean-Claude Éloy and Heinz Holliger.[154]
Honours and awards[edit]
State honours awarded to Boulez included Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE); and Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Among his many awards, Boulez listed the following in his Who's Who entry: Grand Prix de la Musique, Paris, 1982; Charles Heidsieck Award for Outstanding Contribution to Franco-British Music, 1989; Polar Music Prize, Stockholm, 1996; Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, 1999; Wolf Prize, Israel, 2000; Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, University of Louisville, 2001; Glenn Gould Prize, Glenn Gould Foundation, 2002; Kyoto Prize, Japan, 2009; De Gaulle-Adenauer Prize, 2011; Giga-Hertz Prize, 2011; Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Venice Biennale, 2012; Gold Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture, 2012; Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, 2012; Karol Szymanowski Prize, Foundation Karol Szymanowski, 2012; Frontiers of Knowledge Award, BBVA Foundation, 2013, and nine honorary doctorates from universities and conservatoires in Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic and the United States.[263]