Pierre Boulez: an all-purpose iconoclast
The death of Pierre Boulez at the age 90 robs the classical music world of one of its most talented, and controversial, characters
by Neil Norman
French composer Pierre Boulez conducts the Paris Orchestra at the Louvre Museum, Paris, 2011 ©Christophe Ena/AP/Press Association Images
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.