Interview with Boulez
Ian Pace
interview might be of interest.
The Sunday Times
March 13, 2005
Interview: The master of the modern
He was the radical outsider who wanted to reshape
the world's taste in music. At 80, Pierre Boulez may be more charming than
rebellious, but he is still absolutely committed to the new, says Bryan
Appleyard
"I have not mellowed," says Pierre Boulez, "but I am
less aggressive in a way. When you are young, you are like a dog barking
outside the house to make people aware you are outside. Later, you don't
need to bark because you are in the house." This is, of course, the man who
advocated burning down the world's opera houses and dismissed any music that
did not fully embrace the high modernism of Schoenberg as inutile: useless.
Now this is the man who, at 80, dominates his art and its institutions,
through talent, certainly, but also through charm. In the business, he is
talked about with a reverence bordering on love. "He's as uncompromising as
ever, but utterly charming," says an insider. "Orchestras worship him, even
when they don't particularly want to play his music."
I've always regarded myself as invulnerable to
charm, especially when it's French, so let's see. Here is he, sitting in
front of me in La Cité de la Musique in Paris. His clothes have an odd,
raffish air of les vacances - a blue polo shirt with oversized white
buttons, a maroon jacket and grey flannel trousers. He has combed-over grey
hair and large brown eyes that, thanks to a cataract operation, look
amazingly clear and lively for a man of his age. His English is fluent,
literate and amiably idiosyncratic. His manner is genial, confident and
cultivated. He is very taken with my digital recorder - "This is fantastic!"
When I come up with an apposite quote from TS Eliot, he caps it with
another, equally apposite. He is - okay, okay, I give up - absolutely
charming.
So, I ask, is he surprised to find himself 80? "I'm
not surprised, except when I see it written down. I feel still very lively.
I like to be aware of what is going on. I have contact with young people,
and therefore I do not feel like an old man, a little bit far from the
world. I was at a concert for the 80th birthday of Messiaen in 1988, and now
it's my turn."
The long life has been more eventful and varied than
most, but, unlike most, it has been driven by an absolute singleness of
purpose. Boulez is committed to modernism in music the way others are
committed to God or money. The Roman Catholicism of his upbringing ("I did
not have to reject it, it was just away from me"), the communism of his
early years ("By 1948, I was disillusioned"), even the hard scientific
rationalism with which he justified his first experiments ("The excess of
rationalism brings on chaos") all fell away. But modernism, the absolute
commitment to the new, has survived untouched. To understand exactly what
this means is to understand Boulez the artist as well as Boulez the great
cultural symbol of our age.
"Modernism" means different things in different
arts, though all its practitioners were inspired by the conviction that
their destiny was, in Ezra Pound's words, to "make it new". But there is an
ambiguity in that "it". Pound, like Eliot, intended "it" to mean the vast
inherited edifice of artistic forms and meanings. These were to be reshaped
for the modern world; the past would, nevertheless, remain more or less
intact and suffuse the work of the present. In other forms of modernism, and
especially in music, the modernist project was more radical. "It" in this
case means the work of art itself, not the past from which it springs.
In music, this radical modernist rupture was
symbolised by the development of atonality - the departure from old tonal
hierarchies - by the Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. This
technical change meant that musical modernism was more profoundly separated
from its antecedents than any other form of modernism. The insistence of the
young Boulez that it was inutile not to follow the precedent of atonalism
was a restatement for the post-war period of the belief that this hard, high
modernism was not just a style among others, it was the only possible
approach. He restates it in slightly more genial terms.
"I don't want to destroy the past. It should simply
be the past. I am very happy to be with the past, but I don't want to be
eaten by the past." But (and this is where we swap quotes) Eliot argued that
the past, in the form of tradition, was necessary, otherwise all new art
would tend to be merely original and therefore quite incomprehensible. One
has to know something in advance; one can only understand with tradition. "I
prefer to say 'with history'," Boulez responds. "Tradition is a kind of
imitation: you just imitate the external characters, not the inside views.
Eliot also said that a new, very important work makes the whole of history
look different. I think that is right. If you hear Schoenberg's Pierrot
Lunaire, you see Wagner differently, you see how and where it went. The
first time is a shock, you think it is a break, but, finally, it is a
continuity.
Tradition is foreseeable. But a great work ..." he
pauses to drive the point home, "is something that is unforeseeable and
absolutely necessary retrospectively." The new, therefore, remakes the past
in its own image. You can see this in Boulez's own conducting. In other
hands, for example, the works of Mahler can sound like lush late
Romanticism; in his hands, they are remade as icy early modernism.
The absolutism of his position is striking and
unfashionable. High modernism has largely vanished from the artistic
mainstream, to be replaced by various kinds of postmodernism, a style that
plays games with the styles and forms of the past. Boulez, unsurprisingly,
has no time for this. "You have this postmodern architecture. That, for me,
is horrible. They use columns like in the 16th century or Greece, and
distort them. That's not new, that's not old, that's nothing. Postmodernism,
that is a kind of exhaustion." But isn't he just saying that being new is
all that matters, that history is the sole judge of a work? That would mean
the contemporary was always better than the old. "No. There is no progress.
I have an evolutionary view of history. We cannot do better than Beethoven's
last quartets: they are a peak of invention, and you cannot say now we can
do better. But we do do different, you can never stop that. In architecture,
there are new materials that weren't possible before. But you don't say we
are better, you say we are different. We have to be different."
All this absolutism is, of course, very French. From
Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, post-war French
intellectual life has been marked by a commitment to extremism. Though
Boulez sees few connections with such figures, his account of his own
development makes clear the historical context that bred this radicalism.
"The communist party was instrumental in fighting the Nazis, and there was a
great deal of idealism to construct a new society and give it new goals.
It was very attractive. The church was compromised
with the extreme right or with Vichy. You could not believe in this kind of
hierarchy." But Stalin's philistinism soon disillusioned Boulez, and he went
on to pursue the new exclusively through his art. He disdained the condition
of post-war French music and worked to resurrect the high modernism that had
flourished immediately before the first world war.
In the 1950s, he was a leading figure at Darmstadt,
the German town that gave its name to a new school of neomodernists. To
return to Germany in response to German occupation seems odd, doesn't it?
"No. I saw Nazism as a malignant tumour in the German organism. I didn't
make Gemany responsible for this tumour."
He went through a phase of identifying music as
science, of trying to find a way of composing that would match the precision
of scientific analysis. It was futile, of course: there may be a science of
sound and its production, but there is none of its reception. It was, he
says, just a necessary phase. "In the beginning, science helped to get rid
of many clichés, Romantic clichés about the power of music. You can plot
some composers' music using mathematical curves, but those curves are
totally different to a Mozart melody or a Debussy melody or Schoenberg. I
was a very rational figure between 1950 and 1952, but I tried to rationalise
to excess, and the excess of rationalism brings on chaos." Boulez's
compositions began to turn the somewhat somnolent tide of French musical
taste. With Le Marteau sans maître and his third piano sonata, he achieved a
mature, distinctive style and won the endorsement of, among others,
Stravinsky, who effectively crowned him as the true successor to the heroes
of early modernism.
Studying Boulez as a composer can be a slightly
confusing experience, though. He never leaves his works alone, constantly
changing them, and it is frequently difficult to be sure what people mean
when they refer to a specific piece. I ask him about this slightly
bewildering perfectionism. "It's more than perfectionism. Perfectionism
means seeking something that is satisfying in a certain way. But it's not
only about a kind of satisfaction. It's finding the content that is not
completely in the work."
He was drawn back into the fold of the French
musical establishment in the 1960s. The Pompidou Centre, in Paris, was built
to include Ircam, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination
Acoustique/Musique. That and the Cité de la Musique have become the great
concrete monuments to his reign at the top of the French, and the world's,
musical hierarchy. For 40 years, he has not had to bark outside any houses,
though he does, periodically, still growl a little. Charming as he may be,
he remains single-minded in his tastes. "He's quite dismissive," says my
friend, "of anything of which he doesn't approve."
As for the position of music, especially modernist
music, in the world, he seems sanguine. The pop of the young he dismisses as
a kind of idiocy. "You see MTV, and every five minutes the same thing comes
back, like some concerti of Vivaldi. It's not antisocial any more, it's just
kind of establishment, institutionalised." Meanwhile, he sees a steady
growth in the numbers of good young modernist composers and musicians. The
concerts are full: "Not
20,000 people - we get fewer people than you would
for a tennis match at Wimbledon. But that's also true if you play Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony."
He is the supreme living exemplar of the modernist
commitment to "make it new". Many, myself included, see high modernism as a
moment that has passed. It was the last great climax of western art, but it
has receded into the distance, the icy grandeur of its peaks replaced by
warmer but lower summits. Boulez is here to remind us of how high we once
climbed. And, of course, to charm our socks off.
Vaneyes
Ian Pace wrote:
> In light of the long Boulez-related thread, I thought the following
> interview might be of interest.
>
>
>Interview: The master of the modern
>
Thanks.
Boulez...
"When you are young, you are like a dog barking
outside the house to make people aware you are outside. Later, you
don't
need to bark because you are in the house."
"I don't want to destroy the past. It should simply
be the past. I am very happy to be with the past, but I don't want to
be
eaten by the past."
Interviewer...
"The absolutism of his position is striking and
unfashionable. High modernism has largely vanished from the artistic
mainstream, to be replaced by various kinds of postmodernism, a style
that
plays games with the styles and forms of the past."
Interviewer (maybe too much credit for Boulez Mahler)...
"The works of Mahler can sound like lush late
Romanticism; in his hands, they are remade as icy early modernism."
Regards