In this Dec.20, 2011, file photo, French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez conducts the Paris Orchestra at the Louvre museum in Paris.Christophe Ena/The Associated Press
I knew the art of Pierre Boulez mainly through recordings, since neither he nor his music appeared often in Canada. But four encounters I had with this master musician stand out, days after his death at age 90.
The first came during a media scrum in 1991, when Boulez and his Ensemble Intercontemporain were touring Canada. He held court in a Toronto hotel, tossing out aphoristic remarks with the assurance of someone confident that time would prove him right.
"Culture is not like jam," he said. "You have to deserve it." He complained about the artistic malady of the approaching fin de siècle, of a culture "vomiting" up its past, of too many people writing music that sounded like old music. "What was written well before, and in phase with its time, does not need to be rewritten badly, and out of phase with its time," he said.
It was the dogmatic Boulez, a little out of phase with his time, invoking a moral party line for art that he first laid down in the 1950s. Back then, Boulez had said that composers needed to make a "tabula rasa" of the past, that anyone not devoted to the serial method in music was "useless," and that the best way to clear the burden of the past might be to burn down the opera houses.
It was also Boulez who later said, without acknowledging any kind of contradiction, that music had to include "delirium," and who became a master conductor of old music. He served as music director of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Philharmonic, led the first performances of the completed version of Alban Berg's opera Lulu, and was on the podium for the single most influential Ring cycle of his era, at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth in 1976.
That same week in 1991, at Roy Thomson Hall, Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain gave an exceptionally brilliant performance of Oiseaux exotiques by Olivier Messiaen, his teacher of four decades earlier. Boulez's gestures were mostly curt and economical, but the music that formed under those hands gave the lie to the critical cliché that his conducting style was dry and analytic. The performance was precise in an almost mystical way, and passionate too– one of the most passionate accounts of a contemporary masterpiece I've ever heard.
My third encounter came that summer at an open workshop in Halifax, where Boulez had agreed to appear as featured guest at the Scotia Festival of Music. He was genial and relaxed, joking with the musicians while teasing out the complexities of scores by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. When one young conductor repeatedly missed hearing a wrong note, Boulez was sympathetic. "You couldn't help it," he said with a smile. "The problem always with a young conductor is that he is so preoccupied with himself that you can play the Marseillaise and he won't notice." The public line about art as moral obligation seemed to have given way to music-making as a creative way of being social.
The last time I encountered Boulez was in 2002, after a concert given in honour of his receipt of the $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize. He sat on the edge of a bed in his overheated hotel room, still in his concert clothes but minus his jacket, and talked again about the present life of the past. He was then 77, and had long since settled into a habit of mining youthful sketches for ideas and revising pieces begun decades before.
"I am very attracted and even hypnotized by the old material," he said. "Sometimes when you're very young you hit something that is much more difficult to hit later on. Because you are more genuinely yourself, and there is more spontaneity. After that, you are under control much more, and it doesn't have the freshness of the beginning." It seemed a poignant admission from a man who, when young and still making those spontaneous gestures, had been so fierce about exerting more control.
He also had words, again without any sense of contradiction, for those too occupied with the past. "People are very comfortable with their libraries and museums," he said. "But libraries and museums are like phoenixes. They have to burn every day and be reborn from their ashes."
I don't often listen to Boulez's compositions, though I went back to Le Marteau sans maître after he died, and was enchanted again by its fleet, bright-eyed intensity. Pli selon pli, which he wrote and rewrote for three decades, still breathes a mysterious atmosphere that suits the Stéphane Mallarmé poems it enfolds. Boulez's recordings of pieces by Stravinsky, Debussy and the Viennese modernists who inspired him are, for me, irreplaceable, though when I want to listen to Wagner's music, I usually choose another conductor.
Still, I feel like I've lost something personally with Boulez's passing. He was a charismatic presence, even when all one of heard of him was that he was guest-conducting somewhere, or plotting the future of music at IRCAM, the shadowy research institution set up for him in Paris by the French government. He was a heroic figure, respected as such even by composers who didn't follow his path – and who could, when he himself sensed it was a dead end? No one so successful could be called tragic, but in this unique and remarkably gifted artist, there was something of the balked champion. He threw his whole being into what he once called "the essential trial: that of becoming an absolute part of the present" – only to find that the demands of the present could be just as mysterious as the future.