Boulez service is announced
mainThere will be an Hommage for Pierre Boulez on Thursday at 4pm at Saint-Sulpice church, Paris 6.
The funeral will be strictly private, at Baden-Baden.
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I am curious to know why this event is taking place in a church, and whether the “hommage” will be Christian in nature. It’s my understanding that Boulez was not a religious man, and in France, unlike the UK, I would expect public commemoration to be of a strictly secular character. The only details I can find are in a brief statement by Agence France-Presse published in various places on the internet.
I should think that this is to meet the demands of his very middle-class, seeped-in-tradition family. Boulez’s religion was modernism.
Interesting. I had thought that the private family funeral was the one in Baden-Baden. I had assumed that this was organised by the French state/classical music establishment, much as if he had been British there would have been a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. That is if the British do Westminster Abbey memorial services for musicians. We are, after all, not a society to take much notice of culture.
I had been thinking along exactly the same lines as Alexander. A lovely (and appropriately spiritual) way to say farewell would be a performance of Boulez’s own Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.
I meant: “steeped in tradition”. The French musical establishment is organising a concert at the new Philharmonie, which Boulez encouraged the building of. I can’t imagine it being behind holding a religious service at a church. That just isn’t done here in France, which is almost fierce in its respect of secularism: “la laïcité”.