Given the name of my blog, it
might be to state the blindingly obvious to say that Pierre Boulez was someone
I greatly admired. It would, however, be to understate the obvious. Certainly –
to use a word of which he was fond, and whose use I have perhaps adopted from
his French-into-English – his was the greatest influence of any living
composer, any living musician, on my musical life. He was, quite simply, the
conscience of what some of us are stubbornly old-fashioned enough still to call
New Music. That does not mean that he was always right, although he was far
more right than wrong, but he knew and he incessantly urged a fearsomely moral,
fearsomely humane doctrine – in the very best, Catholic sense – that nothing
could be further from the truth than the ‘anything goes’ post-modern morass.
Yes, it did matter, as performer, as composer, as listener, as human being,
what one did; no, it was not good enough to pander, to ‘make allowances’, and
so on. Above all, it mattered to educate; in that sense, he stood in the
greatest Western tradition from Plato (at least) onwards.
And how he educated! The angry
young man with charm aplenty revolutionised Parisian music in the 1950s. His
Domaine Musical concerts aimed to present New Music – especially that of the
Second Viennese School – in performances worthy of the name; Boulez felt that
the causes of Schoenberg and Webern in particular had been held back by
well-meaning yet technically insufficient performances. Schoenberg might ‘be
dead’, in the title of one of his most celebrated polemics, but no one did more
to bring him (back) to life. As for Webern, I dread to think where he might be
even today, without Boulez’s advocacy. And yet, the breadth of sympathy – quite
belying lazy, jealous popular misconceptions, eagerly stoked by mediocre
would-be adversaries – that characterised so much of his programming was there
from the start. What any of us would give to hear his Art of Fugue, if only it had been recorded. Like few conductors
before or since, Boulez understood the art of programming (see here).
I avidly attended his concerts, from my first Prom encounter: my first
‘live’ Rite of Spring and my first
‘live’ performance of some of his own music, the orchestral version of Notations. I heard him conduct the Rite several times; every time, it was
different. Indeed, the increasing presence of composers one might superficially
have thought utterly foreign to Stravinsky’s world – not only Wagner but even
Mahler – intrigued me more and more in his ‘late’ performances of such
repertoire. And before that, I had begun to explore his recorded output: first,
I think, came his Vienna Philharmonic Mahler Sixth, still my first choice. Then
his Moses und Aron and so much more…
Yet, despite the incalculable
importance of his conducting life – a conducting life which indeed made
possible so much of his later composing life – it is above all as one of the
greatest composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that his memory
will most of all be treasured. ‘Like a lion who had been flayed alive,’ was
Messiaen’s celebrated description of one of his greatest pupils. (I say ‘one
of’, since what a composition class that was!) And how one heard that flaying
in, say, the Second Piano Sonata, which I got to know through Pollini’s
recording (and later through Pollini’s and others’ performances, as well as
study of the score). The first time I listened, I could not continue, so
alarming was the work. I knew its greatness instinctively, yet it was ‘too
much’; so I left it for a week or two and returned. Then I began to understand
what was meant by the destruction – and yet, in some sense, preservation; perhaps
one might use the German ‘Aufhebung’, for Boulez remained spiritually a
Rhinelander in many respects – of the sonata principle. More to the point, its
searing drama was brought to life and remained, remains, with me forever.
Le
Marteau sans maître: what
can one say? Plenty and, on other occasions, I doubtless will. But this is a
brief tribute upon hearing of Boulez’s death. Stravinsky’s admiration reminds
me of his description of Pierrot lunaire
as the ‘solar plexus’ of twentieth-century music. Le Marteau stands as guarded tribute, but more importantly still,
as one of its few worthy successors. In the best tradition – an idea to which
Boulez rightly always felt at least ambivalent – it killed its father, that it
and, in a sense, he might live. ‘Schoenberg est mort’. Yet the sonorities, the
‘style’, so much else are anything but Schoenbergian. The ‘vagueness’ that lies
at the heart of Debussy’s music is at least as crucial; indeed, partly via
Messiaen yet partly not, the Debussyian inheritance, thereafter transmitted to
subsequent generations, is there not only to hear, but also to enjoy.
Pli
selon pli I heard most
recently in
Vienna, to open the 2015 Wien Modern festival. That was a fine performance,
but the one I shall remember most vividly of all is Boulez’s
last – well, his last in London; I think it might have been his penultimate
in the final Mallarmé concert tour – with his beloved Ensemble
Intercontemporain and the one-and-only Barbara Hannigan (whom I had heard for
the first time with Boulez, in
songs by Berg and Webern). If you will forgive me the indulgence, I should
like to reprint my review of that 2011 Pli
selon pli performance, part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Exquisite Labyrinth’
weekend, since it captures so much of what made Boulez so extraordinary to me
as both conductor and composer. (Forgive any remaining typos too, please! If I
see any, I shall correct them.)
What an embarrassment of riches there has been over this weekend, opening with Rozenne Le Trionnaire’s fine account of the solo version of Domaines, and now climaxing in Pli selon pli, from Barbara Hannigan, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble (another Boulez initiative), and Pierre Boulez himself. This is a work, apparently now complete, whose stature appears to grow with every hearing: there can certainly now be no doubt that it is one of the towering masterpieces of post-war music. But alongside the revisions, it is equally interesting to note Boulez’s transformation of approach as a conductor. His reading certainly does not lack bite, as the ejaculating éclat of both opening and closing chords made clear, but the sonorities seem to have become still more ravishing. More than once I was put in mind of his recent conducting of Szymanowski, and of course his increasingly Romantic approach to the music of the Second Viennese School. For all Boulez’s talk of having devoted too much of his life devoted to conducting, it has clearly enriched his compositional life so greatly that there really are no grounds for such regret and, once again, we heard a conducted performance that was more new composition in the light of recent experience than mere presentation of a work from the museum. (That, by no means incidentally, holds as much for his Wagner and Mahler, his Berlioz and Debussy, as for his own works.)
Following that extraordinary opening chord, we were bathed in the delectable light of Barbara Hannigan’s soprano, her breathing unabashedly sensual, and some truly gorgeous instrumental playing. The Szymanowski-like tapestry unfolded with a perfect balance between clarity and mystery, possibility and purpose: perhaps the essence of what Arnold Whittall has referred to as Boulez’s later ‘modern classicism’. There is something of that quality to his more recent conducting too: contrast the early, angry accounts of Le marteau sans maître and even Pli selon pli, with his more recent work. I do not necessarily prefer one above the other, but experience reaps an undeniably rich harvest. If I thought of Szymanowski, I also thought of Mozart: what ears to envisage such sounds, whether the latter’s Gran Partita, which Boulez has recently recorded with the EIC, or Pli selon pli, let alone to translate such aural imagination into reality! Strings evinced Messiaenesque sweetness, and I fancied that I heard something of a dawn chorus too. The pizzicati of ‘Don’ sounded almost balletic: ‘mellowing’ is not quite the right word to describe the conductor’s development, but a greater willingness to ravish is certainly present and welcome. At another extreme – I was going to say ‘the other’, but Boulez is always more complex than mere binary opposition would allow – there were occasional hints of a viol consort, refracted through the ages.
In the first Improvisation, Hannigan sounded as seductive, as erotic, as a Mélisande, a Salome even, whilst the orchestra surrounding her seemed clearly to draw upon Boulez’s readings of works as apparently different as Das Lied von der Erde – what a contrast with
Lorin Maazel’s latest effort in that work! – and Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi. ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ brought a primal scream upon ‘blême’, yet one whose instrumental aftermath both consoled and aroused. Percussion seemed to foreshadow, and yet in performance already go beyond, a work such as Rituel. Of course, the words are almost as beautiful as the music, and the melismatic writing of the third Improvisation heightened our sense of both, especially when so expertly delivered as by Hannigan. Percussion once again came to the fore, both a visual spectacular – the coordination of the players – as well as an aural banquet. ‘Tombeau’ sounded inevitable resonances with other tombeaux, whether Boulez’s own or those of other composers: again I thought of Das Lied von der Erde and Rituel, but also of the bells in Boris Godunov, rejoicing now turned to other ends. The final horn call seemed to evoke Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, one of many farewells to German Romanticism that are yet not quite farewells. For its æsthetic has probably never quite been negated, certainly not by Boulez; via Mallarmé, it may even have been dialectically reinstated, ‘aufgehoben’. Certainly the final blow, cataclysmic yet undeniably pleasurable, suggested less a final full circle than an Hegelian spiral.
I should not stop,
however, with Pli selon pli –
‘masterpiece’ in the highest, most emphatic sense though it may be, a completed
work in a catalogue characterised by so many ‘works in progress’, a consequence
of Boulez’s own, relentlessly open-ended conception of serialism. For that
would be to give in to the canard that he lost his way as composer, that he
took refuge in conducting, and so on. There is so much else in which to lose
oneself: the electronic explorations of Répons,
which I was fortunate enough to hear ‘live’ for the first time this year in
Salzburg; the ravishing audio-visual musical
squares of sur Incises;
and, perhaps most personally important to me, Dérive 2, which for a long time I failed to ‘get’. It was a
magnificent performance from Boulez’s long-time friend and collaborator, Daniel
Barenboim, which, as it were, sealed the deal for me, again this summer in
Salzburg. I should like, again, to reproduce the relevant section of my review
of that concert:
It continued in a performance of Boulez’s Dérive 2, which was little short of miraculous. (I am sad to report that it was marred by the worst audience behaviour I have experienced at this Festival, a selfish minority fidgeting, chattering, noisily flicking programme pages, exiting the hall. They should not have been allowed back in after the interval.) Not the least of my reasons for never forgetting this concert will be that it was the moment when I felt, not that I had suddenly grasped this protean work, but that I had, at long last, began to grasp it, in its perhaps uniquely challenging dialectic between the most insistent motivic (?) unity I know in a work by Boulez and its extraordinary variety. Doubtless it was partly a matter that I had somehow become ‘ready’ for this epiphany. But it was not just that; it was more, I think, a reflection of the quality of burningly committed performance from Barenboim and his players (Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), Adi Tal (cello), Emmanuel Danan (English horn), Jussef Eisa (clarinet), Mor Biron (bassoon), Sharon Polyak (horn), Michael Wendeberg (yes, him: piano), Lev Loftus (marimba), Dominic Oelze (vibraphone), Aline Khouri (harp)). I only read Paul Griffiths’s programme note after the performance, so this offered no key to my experience at the time, but Boulez’s ‘starting point … in some examples … sketched for lectures he was giving at the Collège de France’ seemed more than a mere starting point: ‘When I reflected,’ Boulez had explained, ‘on some of Ligeti’s compositions, I felt the desire to dedicate myself to some almost theoretical research into periodicity in order to systematically examine its overlays, its shifts, and its exchanges’. The brilliance, the (unavoidable word!) éclat of ever-shifting, yet apparently continuous sonorities seemed magnified, extended in rhythmic and harmonic progress – if, indeed, ‘progress’ it be. Something not entirely unlike post-Lisztian thematic transformation seemed at times the generative force, albeit somehow mapped out in a dizzying array, or so it seemed, of dimensions: as if the spatial games of sur Incises were extended yet, in the spirit of Debussy’s Prélude, subverted by the apparently arbitrary.
My
(perhaps) laboured talk of ‘seemed’, ‘apparently’: such was a good part of the
magic. What was glittering ‘surface’? What was deeper, generative? Those
questions may have been the wrong ones, but it seemed as though one was
intended to ask them. Barenboim and his players demanded that one listen,
whatever the selfish behaviour of some in the audience; indeed, such was the
strength, the security of the performance that one almost had the sense that
what we heard lived only in that, not in the score, however erroneous that
sense might have been. Snatches of remembered, half-remembered figures from
other favourite Boulez works – more Wagner, The
Rite of Spring – hovered, transmuted whilst we waited, before our ears.
There could hardly have been a more vivid, more inviting demonstration of the
truth of Boulez’s claim that serial procedures might extend material and its
progress indefinitely, nor of his claim, with us since the Domaine musical years, that what New Music most desperately needs
is excellence in performance. That early dissatisfaction with the few
performances of, say, Webern he heard, so unsatisfactory that one could not
discern the musical sense, seemed compositionally manifest, set free as a
flight of post-Debussyan fantasy. My doubts about this work, about my ability
it not to understand it then at least to begin
to appreciate it, were banished forever.
For that was, for me, perhaps
the greatest discovery of the 2015 Boulez anniversary celebrations. The maître might have been a ghostly
presence, no longer well enough to attend, let alone to conduct. But his
compositions seemed to have gained a new lease of life. Suddenly, everyone,
everywhere seemed to wish to conduct them. (Well, not quite ‘suddenly’, but
there had been a definite gear change.) The Barbican could sell out a concert
of his music earlier in the year. The old lie that this was music only for
devotees, unable to discern or unwilling to admit that the serial
emperor had no clothes, had been shown up not only for its lack of
clothes, but straightforwardly forgotten: an irrelevance. Audiences, especially
young audiences, simply adore his music. Not everyone does, but not everyone
does Mozart. Boulez est mort; vive Boulez!
