Pierre Boulez was born into a bourgeois Catholic family. His father was an industrialist who hoped that his son would become an engineer, and Pierre’s closest relationship was with his eldest sister Jeanne, whom he considered to be the ‘real intellect’ in his family: he studied the piano with her from the age of seven. His secondary education took place within a Catholic school at St Etienne, where he played chamber music and sang in the school choir. Adept at mathematics as well as music, in 1941 he took engineering and mathematics classes at the University of Lyons to prepare for entry to the Ecole Polytechnique while continuing his musical activities. After several unsuccessful attempts at acceptance by the conservatoires of Lyons and Paris to study the piano, he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1942 as a composition student, rather than the Ecole Polytechnique as his father would have preferred.

Paris during this time was under German occupation. Developing a strongly iconoclastic stance, Boulez welcomed German culture, ridiculed the political leadership of France, allied himself with the Communist party, rejected Catholicism, and made fun of the contemporary musical heroes. At the Conservatoire he was a member of Messiaen’s harmony class, while also studying counterpoint privately with Andree Vaurabourg, the wife of Arthur Honegger. Respected and encouraged by Messiaen, Boulez took the view that composition should be conducted along scientific and strictly logical lines, and abandoned the idea of personal aesthetic expression. In 1945 he took first prize in harmony at the Conservatoire.

During the same year Boulez heard Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, conducted by Rene Leibowitz. As a result of this experience, he applied to study twelve-tone techniques with Leibowitz, and began to develop his own ideas for serial music. He took up the cause of the Second Viennese School with the true intensity of the convert, a zeal typified by his comment made in 1952: ‘Anyone who has not felt – I do not say understood – but felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is OF NO USE.’

Boulez’s performing career commenced in 1946 when he was recommended by Honegger to be the music director of the new drama company led by two of France’s finest actors, Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. Here he directed incidental music especially composed for the company’s productions by, amongst others, Auric, Milhaud, Poulenc and Honegger himself. He also received instruction in conducting technique from Roger Desormiere, his only formal training in this field. His period with the Barrault-Renaud company gave him time to compose, experience of working with musicians and composers, and the opportunity to travel with the company on its international tours.

In 1954 the company launched a small but distinguished series of concerts of which Boulez was the director. The following year these became known as the Domaine Musical concerts. They quickly established an international reputation for the performance of contemporary music, and were soon extensively recorded. Boulez maintained the musical directorship of the series until 1964. In 1955 he produced an undoubted masterpiece, Le Marteau sans maitre, which combined originality of form, rhythm and instrumentation, with direct musical expression. During this period Boulez (as a composer) was to go through a repeated pattern of violently breaking with those with whom he had previously developed close relationships. This happened firstly with Leibowitz, then with the American composer John Cage, and finally with the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The success of Le Marteau increased demand for Boulez as a teacher. He became a regular fixture at Darmstadt, and also taught at Basle and Harvard. At the same time his conducting career began to take off. In 1957 Hermann Scherchen, a fearless supporter of the new, asked Boulez to conduct the first performance of his Le Visage nuptial in Cologne, and the following year Hans Rosbaud, another supporter of the avant-garde, invited him to conduct his South West German Radio Orchestra at its base in Baden-Baden. In 1959 Boulez left France in protest at its perceived cultural conservatism and settled in this German spa town, which was to be his home for the next twenty years. Here he was able to compose as well as to conduct. Boulez’s performing repertoire gradually expanded to include not only his own music, but also that of twentieth-century masters such as Debussy, Webern, Stravinsky and his teacher Messiaen, as well as that of historic figures such as Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. This experience proved to be formative: gradually conducting came to replace composing as Boulez’s principal activity, at least in the eyes of the public. Boulez explained his rapid success as a conductor thus: ‘The thing began to snowball. There is such a need for conductors today that if you are just a little bit gifted you get sucked into the machinery.’

In 1963 Boulez returned to Paris to conduct a powerful reading of Berg’s opera Wozzeck at the Paris Opera. The success of this and its subsequent recording by Columbia rapidly led to many guest invitations to conduct internationally, and by 1966 he was directing Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival. The following year he took up the post of guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra alongside George Szell, and numerous recordings soon followed. By 1971 Boulez had reached the top of the international conducting profession: he was appointed chief conductor of both the BBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic Orchestras, positions that he maintained until 1974 and 1977 respectively. Other landmarks from this period included his direction of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande at Covent Garden (1969) and of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth (1976).

Boulez also became reconciled to France: in 1970 the French President Georges Pompidou offered him the directorship of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Co-ordination Acoustique/ Musique) to be based in the enormous Pompidou Centre, then under construction. Boulez accepted and settled into this post in 1977. At the same time he joined the staff of the College de France and formed the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a performing group devoted exclusively to contemporary music. In 1979 he conducted the world premiere of the completion of Berg’s Lulu, again at the Paris Opera, but by now he had cut back significantly upon his conducting engagements to devote himself to composition and teaching. In 1992 he gave up the directorship of IRCAM, but soon became closely involved in the direction of the Cite de la Musique, the new home for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and described by Boulez as ‘…a media centre with many recordings, video, connections to the internet, and connections to museums of music and science’. Gradually during the 1990s Boulez re-expanded his conducting calendar, and the repertoire which he now performed and recorded included composers such as Bruckner and Scriabin, who forty years previously would have been anathema to him. In 2000 he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday with a global series of concerts at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra, and in 2001 he became the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor.

The performances of Pierre Boulez are notable for their unusual clarity, which follows from his extraordinarily sharp ear and his over-riding concern for balance. As might be expected from a composer, he has a complete mastery of structure and rejects any excessive subjective intervention by the conductor, seeking as far as possible a completely faithful rendition of the written score. Not only does this interpretative approach suit the music of the period from the end of World War II to the turn of the century extremely well, it also pays dividends in performances of music by composers such as Debussy, in which impressionism is replaced by a clarity that is at times startling.

Boulez’s discography is huge. He has been extensively recorded by two major companies, firstly American Columbia, and more recently Deutsche Grammophon. Not surprisingly the repertoire is dominated by the music of the twentieth century. His recordings of the music of the Second Viennese School are particularly notable, as are those of his compatriots Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen. Among earlier composers Stravinsky and Bartok are well represented, as is Mahler. Boulez’s operatic recordings, although relatively few in number and often criticised on their first appearance, are outstanding. Also of interest are his earlier recordings, such as three that he made for Concert Hall/La Guilde internationale du Disque, of Handel’s Water Music, and two seminal works by Stravinsky: Les Noces and The Rite of Spring. Whatever reaction one has to Boulez’s often impersonal style of conducting, there can be no question that he has been a major influence upon musical life across Europe, and to a lesser extent, America, during the post-war period. He has been a tireless propagandist for contemporary music and has never shied away from confrontation and controversy. In some respects his role in the twentieth century has been similar to that of Berlioz in the nineteenth: he has stirred international opinions at the same time as maintaining a major musical presence.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).