Pierre Boulez: an all-purpose iconoclast

It is hard to exaggerate the impact of Pierre Boulez on contemporary classical music. A musical polymath, Boulez was a composer, a pianist, a conductor, an essayist, critic and all-purpose iconoclast.

He was a modernist but his classical roots were unimpeachable. He saw music as a living, breathing art form that must challenge what came before, while building on earlier forms. For him, stasis was anathema. Musical museum pieces did not belong in a modern concert hall. And yet, Boulez was one of the greatest conductors and interpreters of classical composers ranging from Mahler to Wagner, Bach to Beethoven.

Boulez was born on 26th March in 1925 in Montbrison, France. From the age of six, he was educated at the local Catholic school, where he spent 13 hours a day. He prayed in the chapel every day for 10 years. The gruelling schedule instilled an iron discipline, though his religious faith suffered—“the Catholic God was the God that failed,” he said many years later. He enjoyed mathematics and took piano lessons, demonstrating aptitude in both. He studied mathematics at Lyon and then music at the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz. From them, he learnt the principles of 12-tone technique, a compositional method invented by Arnold Schoenberg and the flexible backbone of much contemporary music.

After graduating in 1945 aged 21, he became Musical Director of the theatre company of Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1954, with the support of Barrault, Boulez founded the Domaine musical in Paris—one of the first concert series dedicated entirely to modern music—and remained their Director until 1967.

Increasingly exasperated by what he considered the suffocating conservatism of the French musical world, Boulez left his native country to make his home in Baden-Baden, Germany, where he moved to in the 1960s with his lifelong partner.

Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Baden-Baden. He led the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971-75 and from 1971-77 was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic where, in contrast to the job's previous incumbent Leonard Bernstein, he championed contemporary works.

Even conducting extravagantly romantic music such as Wagner or Mahler, Boulez was a cool, almost academic presence on the podium, preferring a grey business suit to tuxedo and tails. And he became celebrated for using his hands to conduct, rather than a baton.

His conducting covered an enormous range, from his own compositions and those of other moderns such as Stravinsky and Stockhausen to older favourites such as Mahler, Beethoven and Bach. He also worked with the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Boulez founded, and was Director of, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, and was known for his work with leading avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and his former mentor, Messiaen.

In 2009, already aged 83, he joined up with fellow conductor Daniel Barenboim at Carnegie Hall and conducted the complete symphonies of Gustav Mahler.

As a composer, Boulez's work was noted for its difficulty, with one of his most celebrated works, Le marteau sansmaître, being inspired by the complexity and lack of formal structure of surrealist poetry.

When Stravinsky heard the 1957 performance of Le marteau sans maître, he wrote to Nadia Boulanger, saying that, Boulez’s piece, "which he conducted as well here, is an admirable, well-ordered score despite all the aural and written complications (counterpoint, rhythm, length). Without feeling close to Boulez’s music, I frankly find it preferable to many things of his generation.”

Boulez won many honours: along with 26 Grammys, he won France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Sweden's Polar Music Prize and Japan's Praemium Imperiale. In 2012, he was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.

He was given to extravagant and sometimes unwise remarks. Soon after 9/11, he was briefly detained by Swiss police on suspicion of being linked to terrorist activities. Swiss authorities confiscated his passport after discovering he had said in the 1960s that opera houses should be blown up.

His opinions were not only strongly held but caustically expressed. In his survey of 20^th Century music, The Rest is Noise, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross accused Boulez of being a bully.

“Certainly I was a bully,” he replied when asked about the accusation. “I’m not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.”