Wednesday, January 6, 2016

After a long career – conductor and composer Pierre Boulez is dead – Süddeutsche.de

The Frenchman was one of the most important representatives of the musical avant-garde. He was celebrated for his interpretation of Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen”.

At the age of 90 years is the famous French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez died. Boulez died on Tuesday in his home in Baden-Baden, his family announced on Wednesday and his Paris office confirmed. He was one of the most famous contemporary composers in the world and enjoyed as an orchestral conductor high reputation.

In a press release of the Paris Philharmonic his family paid tribute to his “creative energy”, his “artistic standards” and his “generosity”. “His presence will remain alive and intense.”



Boulez was considered the “Robespierre” classical music

In order to on March 26, 1925 born west of Lyon provocateur from France it was last become quiet. Boulez had long health problems and had retired to his retirement home in Baden-Baden. In the spa town on the Black Forest, he had come in the course of his international career over again, to get away from the hustle and bustle of Paris, to rest after the global concert tours and composing.

For more than half a century had the radical innovator the music world roughed up. He has handed over much of his life – to dead and living composers – and also some need to plug in. Put off, he did not let himself in his quest for the new

Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg -. Once upon a time. The Math Freak and son of a steel factory from Montbrison in the Loire Valley developed the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg for so-called serial music on; a flow of new music, which is based on number or proportion rows. His rigid in the 1950s constructed music earned him the nickname “Robespierre” a – an allusion to the French Revolution leader

He wanted to blow up the opera houses -. And directed the “century-ring”

The modernity of his compositions like “Notations” or “Le Marteau sans maître” (“The Hammer without Mr.”) is often perceived as an atonal, chaotic and disorganized by critics and music lovers. Likely Whatever be because Boulez ‘work is easily accessible not necessarily: “Many people have a hard time,” says musicologist Dariusz Szymanski

Anyone who wants to understand and love the work of Boulez, must be curious and. take your time, has his companion, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, once said. “It’s a very rich music.” Cooling – as some say – are his compositions in no way says the Karlsruhe composer Wolfgang Rihm: “It is a music of great smoothness, eloquence and seductive power.”

Boulez has – despite his vehement words at the beginning of his career – no blown opera house, for common prejudices. Approximately about Richard Wagner. In 1976 he conducted in Bayreuth, the legendary “Ring” production by Patrice Chéreau – the so-called century-Ring 100 years after the first Wagner Festival – with very different tempos: “I wanted to consciously break with tradition, but never with the story” he once said

And so has converted many skeptics. “Boulez has reconciled me with Wagner,” said the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus Intendant Andreas Mölich-Zebhauser. “There are not many such people who give us new and can better understand Old.”



Boulez’s career has taken him from Baden-Baden to New York

Boulez has over the years become poetic, but remained faithful to the search for the new. His repertoire ranged from classical through “microtonal” music with computers to concerts with Bruce Springsteen or Frank Zappa. Specifying he never let himself – because he hardly anything so hated as routine

The exceptional musicians understood primarily as a composer.. But he was also praised for his interpretation of art and its precise orchestrations. As a conductor, he renounced it on dress clothes and baton: “you can do more than express a wooden stick with your hands.” Moreover, it was Boulez culture manager, music philosopher, internationally sought-after teacher and founder of the Paris Research Institute of Acoustics / Music IRCAM.

Boulez’s international career has taken him from Symphony of the former Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden on the BBC Symphonic Orchestra in London to towards the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He has received numerous international awards and the 90th anniversary with the honorary citizenship of Baden-Baden. There, the Frenchman had been more than five decades his German residence.

The concert series in honor of his birthday in the spa town and also in Berlin in the spring of 2015 Boulez could not have come himself. The Maestro pursued nevertheless from home via live link on the screen with. His head was still “full of music,” his spokesman said at the time.

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