He was often provocative and absolute, only to change his mind and contradict himself with equal conviction. Laurent Bayle, who succeeded Boulez at IRCAM and Cité de la Musique, and recently published the book “Pierre Boulez, Aujourd’hui” (“Pierre Boulez Today”), said, “There is no ideologue in music like him.”
Because Boulez was so powerful, his severity could be poison for any artist who didn’t adhere to his worldview. He disdained vast swaths of repertoire, to the point where he could seem stubbornly incurious, as in his lack of interest in works by Philip Glass and John Adams. Salonen recalled watching Boulez virtually end the career of a composer after hearing his work, but he also said he was attracted, like many of his modernist peers, to the “concept of right and wrong” that Boulez offered.
“It was an ethics of contemporary music,” Salonen said. “Young people want to know the right thing to do, and Boulez was like a moral beacon. He could make you feel like you belonged, like you were one of the good guys.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Boulez is often remembered as a warm, wickedly funny presence. Despite his stature, he wasn’t a haughty maestro. The French critic Christian Merlin, in his excellent but untranslated biography “Pierre Boulez,” describes tours in which he rode in coach with musicians rather than business class, and stayed in the same hotels.
And there was a generosity in his last act, as the founder and leader of the academy at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, at Haefliger’s invitation. Not long after taking over the festival, Haefliger called Boulez, who “knew exactly what he wanted to do,” he recalled. “And I appreciate that this was it, rather than creating polished symphonies or looking for immediate success.”
BOULEZ WROTE RELATIVELY LITTLE music. In Deutsche Grammophon’s set, his catalog takes up only 11 discs. Salonen said that “we’re too close still” to know what among his works will remain in the repertoire, but some are candidates for classics. And the masterpieces came early. Merlin wrote that with the monumentality of the Second Piano Sonata, “the young Boulez didn’t hesitate to assume the legacy of Beethoven: At 22 years old, he wrote his ‘Hammerklavier.’”
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