The man behind Pierre Boulez
Daily Comfort ZoneI once offended the great man by deprecating the jacket he wore to work at IRCAM. It was a rumpled tweedy garment, half-town, half-country.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ he cried.
‘It lacks style,’ I said, digging a deeper hole.
Boulez looked pained.
‘But Hans bought it for me. He buys all my clothes.’
Hans Messner was his live-in companion, referred to as ‘my valet’.
VAN magazine has tracked him down, but he won’t say a word about ‘Monsieur.’ Read here.
This is a very well written article. Thanks for the link.
Hans was wonderful …
Half my weight is the secrets I keep.
“Er strotzt nur so vor Selbstbewusstsein, es wirkt, so Craft, als trage er einen ausgearbeiteten Plan zur Eroberung der Welt mit sich herum.”
PB seems to have been entirely convinced of his importance in the developments of classical music as a ‘high art form’, seeing music history as a line from the past via the unstable present into the promising, glorious modern future. All of this is, of course, pure nonsense for anybody who takes the trouble to look into the reality of music history and the influences of the modern world on the art form. It is not hard to see through the utopianism of such thinking.
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2016/01/notes-on-boulez.html
As for PB’s personal emotional make-up and the relationship with his ‘valet’: it seems very convincing to consider that relationship as indeed purely formal, with mutual respect and dependency behind the façade, nothing more. A psychologist would, reading all the available material – not merely this VAN article but everything PB has written and understanding of his works – as a very clear case of immense suppression of all the layers of the psyche beneath the intellectual, an enormous damaging of the Self, including the erotic. The result is neurosis, and that is clearly audible in all of PB’s works, and this reflects the collective neurosis of the Western world in its aspects of obsession with surface, control, fight against nature, and domination.
Bingo. A good call.
I fully agree with your assessment. I have never been touched by Boulez’s compositions, although I have found some of them interesting and even at times enjoyable, but there still remains a coldness and dryness to his music that feels insurmontable to me. His music comes strictly from the brain — not the heart. The heart is not involved, and your comment about the suppression of the Self, including the erotic, is just spot on. It is noteworthy that he could get such good results conducting works by a composer such as Ravel, who in many ways is his complete opposite, but that’s because Boulez did have an incredible ear and understood balance as few conductors can, but his approach to works rarely involved any sort of emotion or sensuality.
This absence of sensuality, as you put it, is the symptom of a greater problem with the Self, which now confines itself to self-control, analysis, thus becoming emotionally stunted, whereas major composers usually do the opposite, injecting their entire selves in their works.
It is also the sign of a man who found a way to dominate the French musical scene and had immense political, and thus financial, support. I am leaving for your interest a link to a video (in French) where Boulez confronts the then head of Music in the French Minister of Culture, Michel Schneider, appearing quite defensive when Schneider questions the funding allocated to IRCAM. There, somehow, Boulez shows a more human face. It also reminds me of his reaction, upon Jerome Ducros’s famous conference on atonality, on how threatened he felt by Ducros’s attack on contemporary music, which is truly stunning to see as Boulez, in such confrontation, was truly the Goliath and should have had literally nothing to fear. Boulez’s response starts around 17 minutes, but the whole thing is worth watching. https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i11124843/altercation-entre-michel-schneider-et-pierre-boulez
Thanks for the link… very revealing.
PB gets very excited because IRCAM’s existence is put into doubt because it produces minimal minutes of music in relation to the budget it gets from the state. Thinking of PB’s plans for IRCAM, which had at its heart a totalitarian ideology entirely void of understanding what music actually is, he feared that his Great Plan to have his ideas get absolute dominance would get undermined.
If anybody would doubt the fascistoid mentality of IRCAM, here are some quotes from PB’s own description of what IRCAM is:
“The creator’s intuition alone is powerless to provide a comprehensive translation of musical invention. It is thus necessary for him to collaborate with the scientific research worker in order to envision
the distant future, to imagine less personal, and thus broader, solutions. .. . The musician must assimilate a certain scientific knowledge, making it an integral part of his creative imagination….”
“Technology and the composer: collaboration between scientists and musicians … is, therefore, a necessity…. Our grand design today … is to prepare the way for their integration and, through an
increasingly pertinent dialogue, to reach a common language….” So, a ‘language used by every composer’, no pluralism, no individual approach, no individual expression or taste. Everything streamlined.
“No individual, however gifted, could produce a solution to all the problems posed by the present evolution of musical expression. Research/invention, individual/collective, the multiple resources of this double dialectic are capable of engendering infinite possibilities.” No individual creation but group research, as in science, to get the best results.
“What is absolutely necessary is that
we should move towards global, generalizable solutions.” So: ALL composers should then be forced to accept what we at IRCAM have invented as the best possible musical language. A purely technological, quasi-scientific enterprise to stamp-out individualism and to get control of musical production.
All this is insane, and reflecting the ‘functionalism’ of modernism.
Source: Pierre Boulez, from IRCAM publicity 1976 and from Boulez (1977) quoted in publicity ca. 1981.
https://monoskop.org/images/b/b9/Born_Georgina_Rationalizing_Culture_IRCAM_Boulez_and_the_Institutionalization_of_the_Musical_Avantgarde_1995.pdf
A lot of money spent for music which no-one wants to listen to, ultimately. How many of these works will actually survive? Very few, if any.
It sounded nevertheless quite impressive to politicians who either understood nothing about music (but pretended to) or who felt that being in touch with the latest trends would boost their image.
The saddest thing is that there are several great composers in France, though I doubt they were ever associated with IRCAM.
Errata: Boulez’s intervention in the video starts around 5 mn 45.
” live-in companion”???
Geez NL, you can do better.
An Englishman telling a Frenchman he lacks style.
“I’ll fart in your general direction!”
OK, I read the entire article:
Their relationship reminds me of all those stories about then-Prince Charles and his butlers/valets, how they squeeze his toothpaste for him every morning, how they hold his chamberpot for him to urinate in…
It’s that type of English démodé master/servant intimate-and-private-but-not-at-all-sexual relationship that exists today only in a royal household… in the sense that no ordinary person, not even a billionaire, can find that type of discretion and devotion in service except for a direct heir to the throne… or Pierre Boulez.
We learn that Boulez apparently never bothered to leave the devoted Hans anything out of his multi-million dollar estate. After PB’s death, others had to provide for the old man. They didn’t call PB the Iceman for nothing.
Alexander Goehr told about his time in Messiaen’s class together with, among others, PB, that Pierre always tried to create the impression that he was 100% sure of everything he thought or did, and that there never was a shadow of doubt about anything whatsoever. Of course such people attract very insecure people, looking for a leader. And, of course, a valet whose ideal is to completely disappear in the service of what he thinks is a great mind.
” a valet whose ideal is to completely disappear in the service ”
I’m seeing Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day in the role of Hans.
I’d like to see Norman Lebrecht in the role of Pierre Boulez in this biopic.
With Ryan Murphy directing for Netflix. He would find a very interesting angle, to say the least, to explain the relationship of the valet.
=Boulez is increasingly physically and mentally impaired by various illnesses, becomes bedridden, and Messner selflessly cares for him. But Boulez’s refusal to accept the end of his own life and thus also of his work means that Hans is virtually on the street in 2016.=
I read once that PB’s relatives paid a fortune in death duties and that with a good estate planning lawyer he could hae avoided much of this. He was a very vain person