Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/arts/music/pierre-boulez-french-c...

Pierre Boulez, Classical Music Innovator, Dies at 90 By PAUL GRIFFITHSJAN. 6, 2016

Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who was a dominant figure in classical music for over half a century, died on Tuesday at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his family in a statement to the Philharmonie de Paris. “Audacity, innovation, creativity — that is what Pierre Boulez was for French music, which he helped shine everywhere in the world,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement.

Mr. Boulez belonged to an extraordinary generation of European composers who, while still in their 20s, came to the forefront during the decade or so after World War II. They wanted to change music radically, and Mr. Boulez took a leading role. His “Marteau Sans Maître” (“Hammer Without a Master”) was one of this group’s first major achievements, and it remains a central work of modern music.

Mr. Boulez gradually came to give more attention to conducting, where his keen ear and rhythmic incisiveness would often produce a startling clarity. (There are countless stories of him detecting, for example, faulty intonation from the third oboe in a complex orchestral texture.)

He reached his peak as a conductor in the 1960s, when he began to appear with some of the world’s great orchestras, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. His style was unique. He never used the baton, but manipulated the orchestra by means of his two hands simultaneously, the left indicating phrasing or, in much contemporary music, counterrhythm.

Pierre Boulez's “Marteau Sans Maître” remains a central work of modern music. Video by Marco Pedrazzini His characteristic sound — unemotional on the surface but with undercurrents of intemperateness, at once brilliant in color and rhythmically disciplined — suited his core repertoire of Stravinsky (several of whose works he introduced to Europe), Debussy, Webern, Bartok and Messiaen, and it was refreshing in many of the excursions he took into earlier music. It was a sound that depended on his famously acute ear.

As a young composer, he had matched intelligence with great force of mind: He knew what had to be done, according to his reading of history, and he did it, in defiance of all the norms of French musical culture at the time. To be a conductor, though, meant working with the existing machinery.

He tried to remake that machinery in 1971, when he became music director simultaneously of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. He tried to explore unconventional repertoire, unconventional concert formats and unconventional locations. But he also accepted that he had to rethink some of his own preconceptions, and as his musical outlook broadened, his output as a composer dwindled.

It was his reputation as an avant-garde composer and as a crusader for new music that prompted his unexpected appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding Leonard Bernstein. After the initial shock at his arrival, there was hope that he might, as many said at the time, bring the orchestra into the 20th century and appeal to younger audiences. But his programming often met with hostility in New York, and he left quietly six years later.

His destination was Paris. Dismissive of the French musical establishment, he had spent most of the previous two decades abroad, but President Georges Pompidou, keen to reclaim a native son, had agreed to found a contemporary-music center for him in the capital: the Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, known as Ircam. It had its own 31-piece orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In the 1980s, he gained further government support for his grandest project, the City of Music complex in the Villette district of Paris, housing the Paris Conservatoire, a concert hall and an instrument museum.

Pierre Boulez leading the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York in 2010. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, a town near Lyon, the son of an industrialist, Léon Boulez, and the former Marcelle Calabre. He studied the piano and began to compose in his teens.

A defining moment came when he heard a broadcast of Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale” conducted by Ernest Ansermet; it was a work to which he often returned throughout his conducting career. Against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to study engineering, he went to Paris in 1942 and enrolled at the Conservatoire.

In 1944-45, he took a harmony class taught by Olivier Messiaen, whose impact on him was decisive. Messiaen’s teaching went far beyond traditional harmony to embrace new music that was outlawed both by the stagnant Conservatoire of that period and by the German occupying forces: the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok and Webern. Messiaen also introduced his students to medieval music and the music of Asia and Africa. Mr. Boulez felt his course was set; but he also knew he needed to go further into the 12-tone method that Schoenberg had introduced a generation before.

“I had to learn about that music, to find out how it was made,” he once told Opera News. “It was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

To start on this route, he took lessons in 1945-46 with René Leibowitz, a Schoenbergian who had settled in Paris. Soon, in works like his mighty Second Piano Sonata (1947-48), he was integrating what had been separate paths of development in the music of the previous 40 years: Schoenberg’s serialism with Stravinsky’s rhythmic innovations and Messiaen’s enlarged notion of mode. As he saw it, all these composers had failed to pursue their most radical impulses, and it fell to a new generation — specifically, to him — to pick up the torch.

Though he was outspoken about his historical role, he was much warier of talking about what his music expressed. There was the odd reference in his early writings to the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud; there was also an admitted kinship with the poetry of René Char, which he set to music in “Le Marteau Sans Maître” and other works. But he was also capable of ferocious abstraction, as in the first section of his “Structures” (1951) for two pianos, a test case in applying serial principles to rhythm, volume and color.

About his private life, he remained tightly guarded. Jeanne, his older sister, was important to him; few others were able to break through his reserve.

At the beginning of his career, he was hired as music director of a theater company in Paris run by Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. His 10-year appointment with them was crowned in 1955 by a production of “The Oresteia” of Aeschylus, for which he wrote an ambitious score; they also helped him set up the Domaine Musical concerts in 1953.

The Domaine Musical, intended as a platform for new music, 20th-century classics and early music that was little performed at the time, proved Mr. Boulez’s abilities as an administrator and, later, as a conductor. It also provided a model of the contemporary ensemble that was widely imitated and has remained central to the propagation of new music.

Mr. Boulez made his debut as a concert conductor on March 21, 1956, at a Domaine Musical concert (though the organization was still known then as the Concerts du Petit Marigny, after the theater in Paris in which the concerts took place). The program included “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” which had received its first performance the previous summer in Baden-Baden. At once delectable and stringent, this work united traditions of Austrian-German discipline and French finesse with the sounds of Africa, East Asia and South America, made available by its variegated ensemble (including alto flute, viola, guitar and percussion besides contralto voice). It was widely admired, not least by Stravinsky, who heard it when Mr. Boulez made his North American debut in Los Angeles in March 1957.

Mr. Boulez gave his first concert with a symphony orchestra in June 1956, when he conducted the Orquesta Sinfonica Venezuela on one of his last tours with the Renaud-Barrault company. During the 1957-58 season, he appeared with the West German Radio Symphony in Cologne in his own “Visage Nuptial” and Stockhausen’s “Gruppen.”

He then began a lasting connection with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden, where he made his home. In 1960, he conducted the orchestra in the first performance of his “Pli Selon Pli,” an hourlong setting of poems by Stéphane Mallarmé for soprano, with an orchestra rich in percussion.

That lustrous score allowed the conductor certain flexibilities in assembling its fragments. A musical work should be, Mr. Boulez often said, a labyrinth, with no fixed route. It might also never gain a fixed ending. From then on, he began starting more works than he ever brought to completion, while at the same time submitting older pieces to rounds of revision.

As a conductor, he showed much less hesitation. Where his first concerts had been devoted entirely to 20th-century works, he began to explore earlier repertoires — Haydn, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven — with the Concertgebouw and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra in the early 1960s. In March 1965, he made his debut with an American orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, in a typical program comprising Rameau, his own music (“Figures-Doubles-Prismes”), Debussy and Stravinsky (“The Song of the Nightingale”).

The next year, he conducted his first operas, “Wozzeck” in Frankfurt and Paris, and “Parsifal” at Bayreuth in Germany, and he started recording for Columbia Masterworks. His first releases for the label included “Wozzeck” and albums of Debussy and Messiaen.

His appointment to the New York Philharmonic in 1971 presented great challenges. As music director, he had to enlarge his repertoire rapidly. Until then, he had conducted very little Romantic music other than Berlioz’s; now Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak and Borodin joined his programs, not always convincingly. Though he refused to compromise on Tchaikovsky, he was becoming much more like a regular conductor, and part of his individuality was lost in the colossal task of maintaining important positions on both sides of the Atlantic — and, in 1976, preparing the Bayreuth centenary “Ring.”

Both his programming and his handling of an older repertoire met with some resistance from critics, audiences and, it was said, even some of his musicians. Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times called Mr. Boulez “a brainy orchestral technician” whose “scientific approach” lacked heart. Reviewing a 1972 concert that included Edgard Varèse’s 1927 composition “Arcana,” Donal Henahan of The Times reported that “perhaps a quarter of the downstairs audience” at Philharmonic Hall “fled as if from the Black Death” before the piece was performed.

Mr. Boulez wanted to make the orchestra a more flexible institution, and a more modern one. Performances might begin with short programs of chamber music, played by members of the orchestra. More of the repertoire would be explored: During his first season as the Philharmonic’s music director, there was an emphasis on Liszt. Then, to present more contemporary music, concerts consisting entirely of new and recent works were given at downtown venues. There were “informal evenings” of talk, rehearsal and performance featuring 20th-century composers. And there were summer seasons of “rug concerts,” with a different program every night for a week, played to audiences seated on the floor of Philharmonic Hall.

The rug concerts lasted only two years, and none of his other innovations survived his departure. He had given up his post with the BBC Symphony in 1975, leaving as a parting gift his somber “Rituel.” His last concerts with the Philharmonic were in May 1977; on the program was Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.” He went back regularly to conduct in London, but he did not return to the Philharmonic podium until 1986.

His priority after the Philharmonic was Ircam, the Paris research institute, and he severely reduced his conducting commitments; among the few, he retained was the first complete performance of Berg’s “Lulu” in 1979, at the Paris Opera. Believing that music’s development since 1945 had been frustrated by a lack of research into electronic possibilities, he set to work at Ircam on “Répons,” for a small orchestra with six percussion soloists whose sounds are digitally transformed and regenerated. The work had its first performance in October 1981.

The paradox was that the man who had such an extraordinary orchestral imagination — and such extraordinary powers to realize the fruits of that imagination in performance — should have been so convinced of his need for electronic resources. “Répons” is in most respects inferior to “Éclat/Multiples,” a work for a similar percussion-based orchestra he had begun and abandoned a decade before. Nor does it begin to rival the orchestral virtuosity displayed in the arrangements of his early piano cycle “Notations.”

He continued to add to “Répons” during the early 1980s, though much of his creative energy was going into new versions of old scores. In the early 1990s, he emerged from his tumult of rewriting to produce at Ircam the greatest of his late works, a new version of “explosante-fixe” initially conceived as a memorial to Stravinsky — for electronic flute and small orchestra.

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Also in the early 1990s, he began to appear more widely again as a conductor, with orchestras in the United States (Los Angeles, Cleveland, Chicago) and Europe. (The concerts were often associated with recording sessions for Deutsche Grammophon.) He returned to what had always been his main repertoire, while also developing enthusiasm for Mahler and making occasional visits to territory he had not touched before: Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Scriabin, Janacek. At his death, he was the conductor emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Among the honors Mr. Boulez received in his later years were the Kyoto Prize in 2009 and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2013. Over the course of his career, he won dozens of Grammy Awards. He was named a professor at the Collège de France, a renowned research institution.

“He never ceased to think about subjects in relation to one another; he made painting, poetry, architecture, cinema and music communicate with each other, always in the service of a more humane society,” the office of President François Hollande said in a statement.

In 1995, his 70th-birthday year, Mr. Boulez conducted his own and other 20th-century music in London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Brussels and Chicago. In 2005, he spent his 80th birthday in Berlin, which hosted a retrospective of his music. A few pieces were completed during this period, notably “Dérive 2,” a 45-minute score for 11 instruments that took almost two decades to reach its end point, in 2006. Many more projects remained unfinished, while others were never begun, like the opera on which he was to have collaborated first with Jean Genet and later with Heiner Müller.

Even so, the achievements contained in his published works and recordings are formidable, and his influence was incalculable. The tasks he took on were heroic: to continue the great adventure of musical modernism, and to carry with him the great musical institutions and the widest possible audience.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.