Who was Pierre Boulez?

Name: Pierre Boulez
Born: March 26, 1925, Montbrison
Died: January 5, 2016, Baden-Baden
Profession: Composer and conductor
Style: Serialism and electronic music
Notable works: Polyphonie X, Structures, Le marteau sans maître, Répons, …explosante-fixe…, Sur Incises

During World War II, Pierre Boulez entered the Paris Conservatory, full of enthusiasm. But he soon found himself clashing with the institution’s rigid and dogmatic atmosphere. It was his teacher, Olivier Messiaen, who reignited his passion and had a huge impact on his music and ideas. Messiaen was a strong advocate for new music. While Nazi occupation forced music to be more “classical,” Messiaen was deeply interested in pushing boundaries.

Both Messiaen and Boulez were serialists. Serialism is a method of composition based on ordered series—whether of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, or even timbres. For centuries, melody had been the center of music, but that was starting to change. Composers like Boulez and Messiaen began to focus on new elements—like rhythm—that hadn’t been emphasized before.

Boulez was particularly inspired by the music of Arnold Schönberg, the composer who laid the groundwork for serial music. To dive deeper into Schönberg’s techniques, Boulez took private lessons with René Leibowitz, who taught him Schönberg’s twelve-tone system. But for Boulez, this approach wasn’t radical enough. He sought even more abstraction and experimentation in his music, eventually parting ways with Leibowitz. There’s even a story that Boulez tore his dedication to Leibowitz from a new composition with a letter opener. Whether that’s true or not, it’s definitely true that Boulez was known as an “angry young man”—the enfant terrible of the avant-garde music scene.

Boulez was just as radical with his words as he was with his music. He didn’t shy away from harsh critiques of other composers. For example, shortly after Schönberg’s death, he wrote an essay titled Schönberg est mort. But this wasn’t a tribute—it was a sharp critique of his former idol’s methods, which Boulez now felt were too rigid. Boulez used his critical perspective to shape his own style, though it stirred plenty of emotions. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he boldly declared that modern opera couldn’t be performed in traditional opera houses and suggested they should just be blown up.

As Boulez grew older, he became more mellow. His own music became more open, and as a conductor, he bridged the gap between old and new music. However, his metaphor of blowing things up or tearing them apart remained. For him, you had to break things down to understand how they worked and improve them.

Blow up the opera houses

Earlier, you saw that Boulez was known for his provocative statements. After his Der Spiegel interview, the newspaper headlined with “Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft” (Blow up the opera houses). It seems that some people didn’t get that this wasn’t meant literally, and this remark would come back to haunt him on the morning of November 2, when he was arrested in Switzerland.

Six years before the arrest, a journalist had written a critical review of one of Boulez’s performances in Switzerland. Shortly after, the journalist claimed to have received a phone call threatening a bomb attack. By then, Boulez had already left the country, and he was never questioned about it. However, his name remained on the terrorism list. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, police and anti-terrorism units were on high alert. When they saw that Boulez—who had previously talked about bombs in an interview—was staying in Basel, they decided to take no chances.

After a few hours, Boulez was released, and the police offered a formal apology, with one officer dryly commenting, “We understand that many people in Switzerland enjoy his music.”