He was a radical musical innovator, created in Bayreuth an event of the century. On the death of the French composer and conductor.
Since now sits this elegant and rather small man in a chair of the Munich luxury hotels and even speaks wistfully of his youth, his preferences, his favorite pieces. Its German, colored only by a slight French accent, nestles easily the thought of the speaker to flight, finds himself for the finest shades nor the apt expression. The so asks in amazement of the interviewees, is the most hated composer of the postwar period be? That Pierre Boulez, who once demanded to blow up the opera houses in the air and his colleagues Hans Werner Henze as a “painted barber” dubbed? But all this was back in 2005, Boulez was shortly before his 80th birthday, already long history
Just as in 1976, developed by him together with director Patrice Chéreau for Bayreuth “century-Ring”.: Although the name was aimed at the 100-year celebration of the festival and the premiere of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. These documented as film work but is still considered to be the greatest Bayreuth performance since 1945. It is in fact an event of the century. The composer Boulez then experienced his greatest triumph as a conductor.
Conductor but he was only made because not only in Paris in the 1950s and 60s someone was hardly ready with all tradition-breaking pieces of deeply distraught and deeply to play with the establishment decaying composers shaft. Boulez was next to Karlheinz Stockhausen their spokesman: harsh, direct, undiplomatic – but from an artistic scrupulosity as they possibly still be found in one of his biggest role models in Anton Webern
After long career conductor and composer Pierre Boulez is dead
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”.
Boulez worked many of his pieces always order up some retired, brought not completed a planned only with Jean Genet and then with Heiner Müller Opera. When a few years ago with Deutsche Grammophon, the complete edition of his work appeared since filled the nearly 40 pieces just 13 CDs, interview and historic recordings included. That is, the yield of 70 composers years, numerically although lean, compositionally but always independently, never losing itself in repetitions or platitudes. . And also extremely demanding for the listener
His name, synonymous with Bürgerschreck, everyone is familiar
Today it is no longer imagine the unrest Boulez & amp; Co. brought in 1945 in the so peaceful affirmative classical music scene, which has been increasingly dominated by Herbert von Karajan, trying hinwegzutrösten especially about the horrors of the Nazi era. But exactly what was Boulez and his colleagues impossible. They could no longer make music as their predecessors to Auschwitz. So they invented the composition in all respects new. Not the harmony was them guidance, but the modern natural sciences. They proceeded to shred the hierarchic model of melody and accompaniment, radicalized Schönberg’s anyway radical twelve-tone technique, they did the traditional concepts of setting text to music and musical theater, they invented the electronic music. All this was terrific verschreckend, and the majority of the audience understood this do exactly as those relentless challenge to the bourgeois aesthetics of music, than it was meant. Scandals, polemics and insults were common, which is why the name of Boulez and Stockhausen, unlike their music, yet everyone is familiar today as synonyms for Bürgerschreck.
But Boulez wanted to be no Bürgerschreck he wanted catapult his new aesthetic into the social center. So he went to the hall by the institutions and was a matter of a, especially in France. At most Nikolaus Harnoncourt has so lastingly changed the music scene of the past decades as Pierre Boulez. The debut in Bayreuth in 1966 with the “Parsifal”, which he along with its cognate Christoph Schlingensief produced there again of 2004. In the New York Philharmonic, he was obligated as the successor to Leonard Bernstein. Above all, he pressed his stamp on Paris. There he founded the music research center IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the two still unrivaled best standard-bearer of modern music.
The baton was hated him, he formed sounds with his hands
Then there was because even the strictly oriented only in the matter educator Boulez. It has always been a fascinating experience frightening when he taught young conductors. The view fix directed to the usually highly complex score, he formed with his hands, the baton was hated him as ruler instrument of tradition, the sounds and beat the craziest rhythms.
Because in the late years was Boulez a brilliant Dirigiervirtuose which increasingly the once hated sound sensuality arose – without, however, ever to be anything else than the most intellectual and most striking among musicians. Whichever way he had gone there, you Appraises to his early recordings, when he was still wooden auschoreografierte the fussy accurately recorded in his scores conducting motions. From the fighter a big world Weiser was recently become.
The same trend is also reflected in his compositions, in those pieces so for which Boulez has once taken the passage through the institutions and their rebuilding on itself. The detachment, the resourcefulness and the serene poetry of twelve short “Notations” for piano in 1945, his first and later partially orchestrated masterpiece, it was always a guide. Related you are less “Pli selon pli,” the abstract barren Wortkosmen Stéphane Mallarmé evokes, but “Le Marteau sans maître”, where Asian Chamber music worlds meet on fragments of poems of René Char active in the resistance. These two great song cycles denote the outermost pole in his work. But at last won the light in “sur Encises” an orgiastic dance joy splintering harp, piano and percussion sounds, which again evokes remotely Asia.
So has Boulez in his plays a distinctive realm of poetry created, far from any known acoustic images. This music is becoming a bit repellent and proud. For a Don Juan, a sensual seducer, this composer has never been quite sure. Therefore, the listener has the composer discomfort at status quo feel, he must be able to engage in the completely new and unexpected, pleasure must have in mind to follow unfamiliar sound speculation mithörend and Thoughtfully. This immense claim will always bring only a small number of followers Boulez. On the other hand the inventiveness of this music, it is always a new birthing ingenuity, the austere charm, and the visionary lightness will probably never leave this oeuvre disappear from the art consciousness of humanity completely.
Boulez is one of those rare artists who as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé or the composer Louis Couperin lead an existence in the dark, but those who get involved in their migrations into the terra incognita of the human imagination, prepare an inexhaustible and over time increasingly greater joy. Even, or perhaps because such artists renounce something that is primary for many art lovers: the immediate sensual accessibility of their art. On Tuesday Pierre Boulez has died at the age of 90 in Baden-Baden.
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