His Conservatoire teacher, Olivier Messiaen, was all too well aware that Boulez had dubbed his Turangalîla Symphony “brothel music”; but Boulez made amends by lifelong courtesies to the older man and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, taking her lonely, demented calls far into the night. Intimacy, though, was withheld. Daniel Barenboim, a friend for 52 years, said Boulez only ever used the formal “vous”.
A composer first and last, writing in the tiniest notation an editor could decipher, he began conducting because no one else could make sense of modern music. He never took a class in technique, never used a baton. “At the beginning,” he told me, “it was just a kind of agreement between me and the musicians, starting, finishing and so on.” He took posts with the BBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s because “one cannot forever bark outside like a dog . . . if you persist, it’s a sign of impotence.”
In London and in New York he invited audiences to carpet concerts, where they sat on the stage for hours after the concert and debated the fine points with musicians. In the Soviet Union, which he visited with the BBC in 1966, he demonstrated prohibited sonorities to a new generation of composers, breaching the thick membranes of Communist isolationism.
Later, he signed contracts with record companies and yielded to their persuasion to conduct popular fare; in his eighties he even directed a Mozart piece, on condition it was coupled with Alban Berg. He was a fixture at the Lucerne and Salzburg festivals, watering holes for the detested haute bourgeoisie. His jackets were still off the peg and his sympathies with young firebrands, few as they had become.
For Barenboim he was the perfect paradox, who “felt with his head and thought with his heart”. For the rest of us he was a historic personality, the embodiment of a faith that was fading as he preached it, a false god that would have failed much sooner had Boulez not lived so long.
He assured me that Ircam would vanish when he was gone; it certainly will. So, too, the rest of his empire. Aside from Pli selon pli (1962), Rituel (1975), and some of the works for solo instruments, his music will never find regular outlets. To listen to Boulez is to experience a deep cleaning of the aural canals, an equivalent of an eye test with ever-shrinking lines of text, by no means an unpleasant experience but not one to be repeated very often. In Rituel, his aching tribute to the short-lived Bruno Maderna and his most attractive piece, emotion is tempered at the last by an overwhelming debt to reason. Boulez was temperamentally incapable of letting go. What remains of his revolution is the aura of a man who insisted the world had to change, and that he alone could change it. Probably, he was right. No one today speaks about the future of music, except with a defeatist tone.
A composer first and last, writing in the tiniest notation an editor could decipher, he began conducting because no one else could make sense of modern music. He never took a class in technique, never used a baton. “At the beginning,” he told me, “it was just a kind of agreement between me and the musicians, starting, finishing and so on.” He took posts with the BBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s because “one cannot forever bark outside like a dog . . . if you persist, it’s a sign of impotence.”
In London and in New York he invited audiences to carpet concerts, where they sat on the stage for hours after the concert and debated the fine points with musicians. In the Soviet Union, which he visited with the BBC in 1966, he demonstrated prohibited sonorities to a new generation of composers, breaching the thick membranes of Communist isolationism.
Later, he signed contracts with record companies and yielded to their persuasion to conduct popular fare; in his eighties he even directed a Mozart piece, on condition it was coupled with Alban Berg. He was a fixture at the Lucerne and Salzburg festivals, watering holes for the detested haute bourgeoisie. His jackets were still off the peg and his sympathies with young firebrands, few as they had become.
For Barenboim he was the perfect paradox, who “felt with his head and thought with his heart”. For the rest of us he was a historic personality, the embodiment of a faith that was fading as he preached it, a false god that would have failed much sooner had Boulez not lived so long.
He assured me that Ircam would vanish when he was gone; it certainly will. So, too, the rest of his empire. Aside from Pli selon pli (1962), Rituel (1975), and some of the works for solo instruments, his music will never find regular outlets. To listen to Boulez is to experience a deep cleaning of the aural canals, an equivalent of an eye test with ever-shrinking lines of text, by no means an unpleasant experience but not one to be repeated very often. In Rituel, his aching tribute to the short-lived Bruno Maderna and his most attractive piece, emotion is tempered at the last by an overwhelming debt to reason. Boulez was temperamentally incapable of letting go. What remains of his revolution is the aura of a man who insisted the world had to change, and that he alone could change it. Probably, he was right. No one today speaks about the future of music, except with a defeatist tone.
Layer upon layer of contradiction, pli selon pli, more than we will ever uncover, Boulez was more a romantic than a rationalist, dreamer more than doer. In my ear, and those of all who spent time with him, his voice will never fade. He was a compelling conversationalist, a virtuoso of mind-to-mind volleyball along a pre-set mental workout. We will not see his like again. And should we haplessly stumble into a naval war with France, let us beware, if not be too afraid, that one of their nuclear Exocets may have Boulez’s minuscule script embedded in its operating system.
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