More than Abbado or Birtwistle or any other musical figure who has died in the last 40 years, I miss Boulez. I miss him almost like a friend in a concert-hall foyer, though I never met him. He kept our ears honest. He set standards by which to judge music and performances, not just his own. He programmed proper, gimmick-free concerts. He drew the best out of orchestras. He was the most congenial of personalities on the platform, whether talking about music or conducting it. He did both, in his last London appearance in 2011, introducing Pli selon pli and defying all the oldest and worst clichés about him as some exterminating angel of modernism.

Anyone who feels similarly will take both pleasure and instruction from Caroline Potter’s investigation of Boulez in his days when he really wanted to be that exterminating angel. This is an important and exciting book. Neither a biography of his early years, nor a close analysis of the pieces that blew up post-war music like unexploded bombs from the war, the study brings life and work together. Potter draws on French and unpublished sources, hitherto unexamined in English, to find an origin story for Boulez’s music in the French and Belgian surrealists of the 1930s.

It can hardly be overstated how rapidly the young Boulez came to a kind of maturity. As an unlikely piano grand-pupil of Vladimir de Pachmann he had made good progress in Lyon, but he did not begin seriously putting notes on a page until he was 17, in 1942. Bear in mind at this point that the Douze Notations for piano, which supplied the genetic material for much of his later music, date from 1945; the Second Piano Sonata from 1948.

In the interim, Boulez had graduated with a hatful of premiers prix; locked horns with Messiaen in composition classes, behaving like ‘a flayed lion’; and most formatively attended a performance by the actor, writer and agitator Antonin Artaud. Lately released from an asylum, in poor mental and physical health, Artaud wrote and performed a show that he recorded for French radio as Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu: ‘To have done with the judgement of God’. Much later on, the piece seized the imagination of Wolfgang Rihm, whose cataclysmic ritual for percussion and orchestra, Tutuguri, takes its title from another Artaud text.

The sound of early Boulez and mid-period Rihm share little in common. What unites them, in the spirit of Artaud’s atheistic and anarchic rant, is a fury not so much tamed as poured through music, like lava. It is said on the one hand that anger is a destructive emotion, and Potter persuasively outlines the form and content of the Second Piano Sonata as a ‘taking back’ of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, in the mould of Thomas Mann’s fictional composer Leverkühn taking back the Ninth Symphony, possessed by a sustained fit of creative rage. On the other hand, architects must destroy in order to create, and the music of Boulez (from the 1940s and ’50s, at any rate) marks out a space of the imagination where a process of demolition and rubble-sorting takes shape in sound, just as it is hurled on to the canvas by the American abstract expressionists.

Potter’s study would be accordingly richer for illustration; not just photographs from the time but reproductions of relevant work by André Breton and the Belgian surrealists who attracted Boulez’s close interest. Though not discussed by Potter, the Austrian artist Sevek painted a series of canvases in response to specific pages from the score of the First Piano Sonata, mirroring ‘the violence of expression that conveys a kind of delirium’, as Boulez would have it.

She is stronger on the relationship between Boulez’s music and poetry; most of all the poetry of René Char, and how he sought not only to paint its fabulously exotic imagery in sound, in pieces such as Le visage nuptial, but also to compose the form of the poetry (closer in this regard to Schubert than he would have admitted). ‘The Bride’s Face’; ‘The Hammer without a Master’; ‘Fold over Fold’ – I wonder if these pieces would retain their mystique, forbidding to some, enticing to others, if they had become known in English. In another world, they could be titles to plays by Beckett or Bond.

Still more illuminating is Potter’s rehabilitation of the underestimated women in Boulez’s life. We meet the pianist and composer Yvette Grimaud, not only giving the premiere of the Second Sonata in ‘a sort of negligee she had made herself’ but also apparently composing with techniques and combinations which Boulez would later make his own; the singer and ethnomusicologist Mady Sauvageot, who introduced the composer to non-Western musics beyond Messiaen’s classes, and in turn their impact on the Notations; most intriguingly of all, the actor María Casares, with whom Boulez may (or may not) have had a brief but intense entanglement around the time of the Second Sonata and Le visage nuptial. Most of all, through Potter’s careful research and lively narrative, we discover, and recover, a speed of thought and intensity of feeling in the 20-something Boulez that should help any of us hear his music through fresh ears. 

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Gramophone today