It was with great emotion that I learned this morning of the death of Pierre Boulez. A huge figure of contemporary music dies out today. An exceptional conductor and composer, who will have profoundly marked his century. I remember the retrospective dedicated to him by the Philharmonie de Paris-Cité de la Musique last year – a Philharmonie of which he was one of the main initiators.
Pierre Boulez is the composer of the Hammer without master, of Fold by fold, or Repons. It is also inspired by Mallarmé, Char and Michaux. It was the Chief of Engineering, who delighted the Bayreuth Festival in 1976 with his direction of the Tetralogy of Richard Wagner, or the Paris Opera with the complete creation of Lulu by Alban Berg. He is the composer and serial theorist, the inventor of the «smooth time», free from the measure. He is the father of IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
Boulez also continued the most fruitful dialogue with the artists of his time: Patrice Chéreau, Maurice Béjart, Pina Bausch or Bartabas, free spirits like him. He was a formidable educator, whose «Leçons de musique», at the Collège de France or in front of apprentice musicians, aimed first of all at «giving oneself rules for the pleasure of transgressing them».
Provoking and secret, rich in its permanent revolutions and elective affinities, Boulez’s work tells the quest and the itinerary, between chords and disagreements, of a child of the century in search of new harmonies.
I extend my condolences to his family, his loved ones and all those who have had the opportunity to work with him.