'Blow up the opera houses!': 100 years of Pierre Boulez

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It was in 2004 at the Bayreuth Festival, which celebrates the music of Richard Wagner: Christoph Schlingensief, "enfant terrible" of German stage directors, was directing the opera "Parsifal," a work particularly treasured by many Wagner fans. His production was provocative, daring, bizarre. When the director took the stage at the end of performance, he was met with a wave of outrage.

Schlingensief and his team stood there on the barren stage looking a little lost. Only one person seemed to be enjoying the Wagnerian outcry: Pierre Boulez. The classical conductor and composer, 79 at the time, couldn't get enough of the boos that weren't even aimed at him, a favorite of Bayreuth audiences.

It was exactly what Boulez loved about creative endeavors. Art, especially music, should — or rather must — surprise, confuse and also affront; anything but lull the public or ossify.

For Boulez, music was the "architecture of the future." "Blow up the opera houses!" he said provocatively in 1967 in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel. Years later, in a 2003 interview with DW, he said, a little more restrained, "When you are young, you want to remake the world. But I think constant protest against the establishment isn't fruitful, and I don't like such unfruitfulness."

"I joined established institutions so I could usher in innovation," he continued. "I tried to foster direct communication between music and contemporary audiences."

Boulez poses with US composer and guitarist Frank Zappa in Paris in 1984

As a composer and conductor, but also as a theorist, cultural politician, and the founder and director of various institutions, Pierre Boulez embodied the contemporary new music movement. French music critic Christian Merlin described him as, "a type of commander for generations of music lovers, composers and performers."

An embodiment of the contemporary

Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez was born on March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, a picturesque town not far from Lyon. His family was well-off, and he was expected to go into engineering, the family profession. He showed a talent for math and analytical thinking at a young age, as well as a passion for music — disciplines that would influence him all his life.

An old photograph showing Pierre Boulez as a child with his sister Jeanne and father Léon in front of an old car

In 1946, after dropping out of his mathematics degree, Boulez enrolled in the Paris Conservatory, in the composition track. While in the French capital, his teachers included musical greats like Rene Leibowitz and Olivier Messiaen, who had furthered the ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern — both considered revolutionary in their times.

But Boulez soon found even these ideas too constraining. He was searching for radical new beginnings, and he found that in the ruins of neighboring Germany, where a new young generation was taking the reins.

A new musical homeland in Germany

In 1952, then 27-year-old Boulez became a lecturer at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, a contemporary summer classical music event that served as a laboratory for new music in postwar Germany. His breakthrough as a composer came three years later, in 1955, with the cantata "Le marteau sans maître" ("The hammer without a master").

In Germany, Boulez found not only colleagues who shared his ideas but also close to ideal conditions for his work. He eventually settled in Baden-Baden, in the country's Southwest.

He had no admiration for the conservative political culture of his homeland. He once referred to the Paris Opera House as a "ghetto full of filth and dust." And in the 1960s, after reforms put forth by then-Minister of Culture Andre Malraux failed to pass, Boulez forbade his works from being performed in France.

Pierre Boulez discusses a scene from Wagner's opera 'Tannhäuser' with the singers in a 1977 Bayreuth production

Reconciliation took place in the late 1970s with French government support for his founding of the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustic/Music (IRCAM), a Paris-based center for new music that remains one of the most important in Europe to this day.

Yet as Boulez's influence grew, so did uneasiness in musical circles. "He wanted a certain kind of music," conductor Jonathan Nott, who led the Boulez-founded ensemble intercontemporain, told DW. Composers whose works didn't reflect Boulez's expectations didn't have it easy — and Boulez knew this. "My verdict can kill," he once said in an interview.

Conductor by force of circumstance?

Boulez, who saw himself primarily as a composer, said on various occasions that he took up conducting only because other conductors resisted programming new music. "I had to become a conductor to get my own works performed!" he told Der Spiegel in 2006.

Though self-taught, he became one of the most desired conductors of his era, with world-class orchestras competing to book him. His minimalist conducting style, free of grandiose gestures, influenced the next generation of conductors, among them Daniel Barenboim, who named a concert hall in Berlin after him: the Pierre Boulez Hall.

A lasting legacy — and one worth hearing

Boulez died on January 5, 2016. According to music manager and author Patrick Hahn, Boulez changed the world more through his work as an intellectual and founder of institutions than as a composer. "This could be because his oeuvre was, in the end, relatively small," he told DW.

Boulez's large-scale works are rarely performed. Still, Hahn says no music lover should miss a chance to hear one of Boulez's compositions in a concert hall. It is "music that is full of surreal fantasy, spirit and yearning for new worlds."

This article has been translated from German.

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