Pierre Boulez 1925 - 2016

By Mark Brown/The Guardian-Arts

The composer, conductor, writer and performer, who directed the New York Philharmonic, had been ill for some time.

Pierre Boulez was described as an ‘exemplary man of the future’ by his friend and fellow conductor Daniel Barenboim. 

Pierre Boulez, one of the most influential and significant composers and conductors of the 20th century, has died aged 90.

Boulez died on Tuesday at his adopted home in Baden Baden, Germany. A family statement read: “For all those who knew him and who could appreciate his creative energy, artistic standards, availability and generosity, his presence will remain vivid and intense.”

Boulez had been ill for some time and had been unable to take part in the many celebrations held across the world for his most recent birthday.

As well as composing, Boulez was a prolific writer and pianist and an inspiration for generations of young musicians.

Paying tribute, fellow conductor and musician Daniel Barenboim said: 

"Today, the music world has lost one of its most significant composers and conductors. Personally, I have a lost a great colleague, a deeply admired creative mind and a close friend."

"Pierre Boulez and I first met in Berlin in 1964 and there have been few fellow musicians with whom I have developed such a close and important relationship in the 52 years that followed – even though we always stuck to the formal ‘vous’ when speaking to each other, a rarity in our rather informal world, but from my side, certainly, an expression of my deepest respect and admiration."

“‘Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary’, Pierre Boulez once wrote. With this belief as his paradigm, Pierre Boulez has radically changed music itself as well as its reception in society. He always knew exactly when he had to be radical because it was a necessary requirement for music and society to develop. He was never dogmatic, however, but always retained his ability to develop himself further. His development was based on a deep knowledge of and respect for the past. A true man of the future must know the past, and for me, Pierre Boulez will always remain an exemplary man of the future.

“Pierre Boulez has achieved an ideal paradox: he felt with his head and thought with his heart. We are privileged to experience this through his music. For this, and so much more, I will always be grateful.”

The French president, François Hollande, said: “Pierre Boulez made French music shine throughout the world. As a composer and conductor, he always wanted to reflect on the ages.”

As a conductor, never with a baton, Boulez appeared with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. He led the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971 to 1975 and was simultaneously music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1977, succeeding Leonard Bernstein.

Also in the 1970s, the then French president Georges Pompidou invited him to found a new contemporary music centre called the Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, known as Ircam.

Boulez was a maverick and provocateur, once declaring that that any composer who did not acknowledge the necessity of Schoenberg’s 12-tone system was “useless”. Another of his quotes was: “Operatic tourists make me want to vomit.”

He also dismissed Dmitri Shostakovich as a composer who “plays with cliches most of the time”, and said classical music’s history “seems more than ever to me a great burden. In my opinion we must get rid of it once and for all”.

Boulez was a long way from being stuffy and in 1973 took the chairs away from orchestra members of the New York Philharmonic, replacing them with rugs and cushions so they were more in line with the city’s coffeehouse culture and hippie scene.

George Benjamin on Pierre Boulez: 'He was simply a poet'

In the 1980s, he worked with Frank Zappa, resulting in the album Boulez Conducts Zappa.

One of a generation of pioneering post-second world war composers, Boulez helped steer contemporary music in radical new directions. He pioneered serialism in music, embarked on open-ended and improvisatory music, and experimented with what he called “controlled chance”, in which performers were offered choices about what to perform in music Boulez had written.

Boulez was born in 1925 in the town of Montbrison, near Lyon, and grew up in Nazi-occupied France. He was 20 when the second world war ended, which could offer one explanation for his energy and zeal to make a difference – or as he once said to his teacher Messiaen – “to put music right? It’s in such a terrible state”.

His friend and fellow composer George Benjamin praised Boulez in an article for the Guardian last year. “Through the power of his personality, the scale of his reputation and his considerable personal charm, Boulez has made big things happen, way beyond the confines of manuscript paper,” he wrote.

Boulez even ended up lending his name to Private Eye’s Music and Musicians column, rounding up gossip from the classical world – the column was always bylined “Lunchtime O’Boulez”, to differentiate it from the other regular byline, “Lunchtime O’Booze”.