Pierre Boulez – A Portrait

The Swiss authorities had shown a keen eye for potential agitators – though, in this case, they had conflated artistic radicalism with political extremism. A 1967 interview with the German magazine »Der Spiegel« was titled »Blow up the Opera Houses«. In fact, the Boulez of those years was notorious for his extreme views and stances, his desire to execute by way of verbal guillotine earning him the nickname »Robespierre Boulez«. His boldness was evident as early as 1952 when, shortly after Arnold Schoenberg’s death, he published an obituary titled »Schoenberg is Dead«, effectively declaring the pioneer of twelve-tone music artistically obsolete.

Boulez, the Robespierre of the avant-garde, dismissed any composer who didn’t align with his vision as simply »unnecessary«. In the »Der Spiegel« interview that likely brought him to the attention of Swiss authorities, he was the art executioner at his most provocative. He called fellow composer Hans Werner Henze a »varnished hairdresser«, condemned the Paris Opera as »full of dust and shit«, and openly fantasised about a cultural revolution of his own: » A whole lot of Red Guards should be brought in! Don’t forget, the French Revolution destroyed many things – and that was very healthy.«

Boulez was innocent of one accusation though. The »Spiegel« journalists had twisted his most infamous quote. When asked about the future of opera, he had actually said: »The most expensive solution would be to blow up the opera houses. But don’t you also think that would be the most elegant?« These two sentences capture the essence of Boulez’s artistic philosophy as a conductor, composer and cultural activist: only truly radical ideas remain relevant – but always with style. He was, in a way, a terrorist of aesthetic shock – but an elegant one, of course.

His attacks on everything old and outdated were both conceptually sharp and perfectly stylised in musical terms. A 1960s documentary captures him in two striking moments: first, as a devoted ascetic yet also speed junkie – his fridge empty, yet a sleek sports car parked outside his villa; and second, as the commanding conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Without a baton or formal tailcoat, he leads with razor-sharp precision, dressed in a business shirt and dark aviator glasses. Cool in the extreme.

There appears to be a contradiction between the young radical of the past and the jovial grand seigneur abruptly awakened by security services back in 2001. By the 1970s, Boulez had become a star in the very musical world he once sought to blow up. He conducted top international orchestras, even conducted in the former »living room of the ›Führer‹« on Bayreuth’s Green Hill, held high-profile discussions with intellectual giants of the day such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and was even installed by President Pompidou as Director of the Institute for Electronic Music IRCAM in the futuristic cultural hub that was the Centre Pompidou. Boulez was establishment. Was that why he had been unfaithful to himself? Probably not, as whatever he did was always radically in the service of the new.

His religion was to create something uncompromisingly contemporary. In Bayreuth in 1976, he conducted the »Jahrhundert-Ring«, the centenary production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Under the direction of Patrice Chéreau, Wagner’s mythical world was sociologically examined beyond all bearskin Germanism. The scandal was huge. Though he dismissed popular music snobbishly as simplistic, Boulez still collaborated with the avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa. Rather than blow up opera houses, he later sought to blow up the genre of opera itself. As librettist for his own (never realised) music theatre project, he chose Jean Genet, a novelist, openly gay former hustler and petty criminal, who might be considered the most contemporary embodiment of the poetè maudite, the outsider artist. Boulez was always pushing boundaries, right to the edge of discomfort.

In May and June 2025, the Elbphilharmonie shines a spotlight on the composer Pierre Boulez, tracing important stages in his career. The programme begins chronologically with his Second Piano Sonata written in 1947/48, where the young Boulez shatters classical convention – aptly illustrated by the performance direction »pulverise the sound«. While outwardly referencing Beethoven’s monumental »Hammerklavier« Sonata op. 106, the work erupts into a chaotic riot of tone cells and fragmented motifs, so hair-raisingly dense and complex that the pianist at its premiere reportedly wept upon seeing the score. The composer would certainly have seen this as confirmation of his aesthetic position, because for him, art was »organised delirium«.

Boulez achieved his breakthrough with the chamber cantata »Le Marteau sans maître« (1954/55), which clearly demonstrates the strong influence of surrealist aesthetics on his work. He was equally fascinated by Antoine Artaud’s »Theatre of Cruelty« and the poetry of René Char, the librettist for »Le Marteau«, whose writing intertwines violence and creativity. The music itself blends elements of African and Asian musical traditions with the abstract-serial idiom of the 1950s, creating a distinctive sound that is both delicate and sensually expressive. Composer György Ligeti, with a touch of envious insight, described »Le Marteau« as a »voluptuous exercise in aestheticising cruelty, carried out by a truly aristocratic torturer with tweezers instead of a cleaver«.