#serialism

Or his views on minimalist music, “If you want a kind of supermarket aesthetic, OK, do that, nobody will be against it, but everybody will eventually forget it because each generation will create its own supermarket music - like produce that after eight days is rotten and you can’t eat it anymore and have to toss it away.”

Many young composers of his generation in the 1960s and since read his writings, but they didn’t always know his music. And yet what you might not guess from the polemics is the sheer beauty of his compositions.

Messiaen, who taught Boulez, would say of him that, underneath it all, he was simply a poet. Messiaen also believed it would take a long time for the wider public to really understand Boulez’s music, because it has a very particular and original sensibility. Messiaen would talk with pride of his former student, describing him as a formidable and immense talent, though when young “he was like a flayed lion”. Boulez was indeed a very angry young man.

He attacked anything in sight, including those who had taught him, such as René Leibowitz, a Schoenberg disciple who was largely responsible for introducing serialism to Paris. At one point, Boulez even turned against Messiaen, who had done so much to encourage and help him, and it was five years before their relationship was restored.

Boulez grew up in Nazi-occupied France. He was 20 when the Second wWorld War ended. The continent had to make itself anew. Messiaen used to describe travelling home on the Metro with Boulez after classes. Boulez would say “Who’s going to put music right? It’s in such a terrible state.”

And Messiaen would reply: “You.”

He considered himself from his earliest days to have an almost Napoleonic mission regarding music and its cultural role. His ambition was not only to compose, but to change the attitude of the public, institutions in France and - later - the wider western world with regard to modernism. He initially pursued this aim with a heightened form of ideological dogmatism. The works of the Second Viennese School, and composers such as Bartók and Varèse, were not played at all in Paris in the late 40s; that they are now part of the international concert repertoire is in large part due to Boulez.

As a conductor, his approach to the early modernist masterpieces has had a tremendous impact on the way they are considered by younger conductors and heard by audiences. He made stupendous recordings of hundreds of pieces of music – among them works by his illustrious contemporaries Carter, Ligeti, Kurtág, Stockhausen, Berio and Birtwistle - and has inspired and helped generations of younger composers.

Through the power of his personality, the scale of his reputation and his considerable personal charm, Boulez has made big things happen, way beyond the confines of manuscript paper. Paris’s new concert hall, the Philharmonie de Paris, owes its existence to him, as does the rest of the Cité de la Musique, his own group the Ensemble Intercontemporain and IRCAM, the musical research institution attached to the Pompidou Centre.

In his own music, however, he moved away from Serialism, the great rallying cry of his youth, and over the years further distanced himself from the concept, now viewing it with scepticism. For me, his best compositions are not the ones from his early years but the works in which the foundations of his earlier idiom are treated much more freely and with greater fantasy. I believe that only when he accepted he was fundamentally a French composer did he find his true voice.

Le Marteau sans maître (1953-57) was a breakthrough. It is a work in which you can also hear the profound influence of extra-European music, above all from Asia and Africa. This radically alters the sonority and the music’s sense of time and direction, as well as its expressive viewpoint and ethos. Boulez was by no means the first French composer to be open to, and ravished by, eastern music – it had already had a transformative effect on the father of modern music, Debussy, and on succeeding generations – but he took it a stage further, and the curious marriage between his already transforming serial universe and the extra‑European world produced a unique style.

For me, his quasi-symphonic portrait of Pli selon pli, portrait de Mallarmé – completed in the early 60s – is a greater masterpiece, and the decades that followed produced gem after gem: Eclat/Multiples, Cummings Ist der Dichter, explosante-fixe, Sur Incises. There is no better postwar musical piece written for orchestra than Notations, his five hyper-elaborate orchestral canvases, all based on very simple serial pieces he wrote for the piano in his early 20s.

Arguably the most important composer-conductor since Mahler, Boulez knows the orchestra more intimately than any of his colleagues, and these short, dazzling showpieces have an intoxicating exuberance and elegance.

Boulez only published around 30 works in his lifetime. When he died at 90 years old in 2015, I’m sure he regretted that he hadn’t written more. But I suspect he has not had the easiest of relationships with his muse. This is a man with a vastly refined and critical mind. His intelligence is so questioning and extreme, and his aural imagination so sensitive and acute, that composing must have been a taxing experience. The world today doesn’t need huge numbers of pieces, as it did in, say, Haydn’s time. What are needed, surely, are essential statements, singular and unique works. And these he has provided, without question by the time the curtain came down on his life.

Having cultivated the image of the angry young man of new music in the post-war years, it took a long time in public perception for the austere, uncompromising radical to morph into the hugely respected and revered figure Boulez became in the last decades of his life. As he mellowed further over the following decades, he also began to conduct music by a number of composers he would surely have dismissed out of hand in his hardline early years. That inevitably required some quiet revisionism.

I have an enormous regard for his rendition of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It’s a surprising landmark in every sense. Boulez’s performance of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production of the Ring Cycle shocked and then seduced audiences at Bayreuth. Filmed in 1980, it’s still among the most searingly insightful readings of the cycle, musically and dramatically, ever performed. Another of the highlights of Boulez’s operatic career, this 1992 performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Peter Stein’s production at Welsh National Opera revealed the expressivity, focus, and clarity that Boulez brought to everything he conducted.

Like everything he conducted, though, it was the precision and lucidity of his performances that were so revealing, and which illuminated a range of 20th-century music in a way that few conductors before him had ever approached. And while a good handful of Boulez’s own works – the second and third piano sonatas, Le Marteau Sans Maître, Pli Selon Pli, Eclat/Multiples, Sur Incises, the orchestral Notations - will surely endure, it is his achievement as a conductor and educator in moving the music of our time and of the immediate past into the mainstream of our concert life that is likely to be his lasting, crucially important memorial.