Pierre Boulez @ 100: Éminence grise

This year, as the international music world celebrates the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez, one of history’s most consequential composers and conductors, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra remembers the man we knew as our principal guest conductor (and later conductor emeritus), éminence grise, and beloved member of the family. Nearly every musician who worked with Boulez in Chicago has a vivid memory of his humor and humanity, his formidable intellect and musical knowledge, his never-ending wit and charm — or the devilish complexity of his own music, unexpected perhaps after the bracing clarity of his performances of other composers’ works. He was a man of many surprises. The legendary enfant terrible I was terrified to meet in 1987 was the same man who shimmied his shoulders to the jazzy background music when we had lunch in 2010, the last time he came to Chicago.

Boulez first appeared with the CSO in February 1969, conducting music by Debussy, Bartók, Webern, and his teacher Olivier Messiaen, as well as the U.S. premiere of his own Livre pour cordes. At the time, Boulez was famous as a revolutionary composer, but he was already beginning to earn a reputation as an unusually insightful conductor. By the time he began his annual residencies in 1991, he was known as one of the great conductors of our time. He was named the Orchestra’s principal guest conductor in March 1995, the month he turned 70, and later became conductor emeritus.

Boulez’s hallmarks were the very virtues he once prescribed for the ideal conductor: restrained gestures, good taste, rhythmical accuracy, open-mindedness, exactness, and respect for the music. His programs centered on the classics of 20th-century music, of which he was a uniquely authoritative master with an infallible, razor-sharp ear for detail, possessing the rare ability to make every line and every note audible, as if he were cleaning and restoring a great painting using nothing but his bare hands (he never conducted with a baton).

Boulez transformed repertory standards, dusted off concert rarities, and introduced new works in Chicago under dream conditions, including his own thorny yet exhilarating works, which were at first a challenge for musicians and audiences alike. He even wrote a small but important piece, Notations VII, for the Orchestra. Over time, he became our guide to the modern classics, a valued restorer of familiar landmarks, and a prophet of the new. While in Chicago, Boulez also worked regularly with the Civic Orchestra, gave a popular series of lectures at the Art Institute, and appeared on the Orchestra’s new MusicNOW series. In 1991 he began a new series of recordings with the Orchestra — one of his first releases, an all-Bartók coupling of the Cantata profana and The Wooden Prince, won four Grammy awards in 1993, including Best Classical Album; eight of Boulez’s 26 Grammys are for discs with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. He conducted the Orchestra on tour in Japan in 1995, at the Berlin Festtage in 1999 and in Cologne in 2000, as well as at Carnegie Hall on several occasions. Chicago was one of the few places he conducted regularly, and his devotion to returning year after year provided one of the defining chapters both in his career and in our orchestra’s history.

Boulez made his name as a conductor devoted to the great pioneers of musical modernism — Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Schoenberg — the same figures who were his starting point as a composer. Those composers, along with Ravel and Mahler, were the ones he explored in the greatest depth with the Chicago Symphony. 

But, although we tended to think of Boulez as a specialist, during his Chicago seasons he conducted music by more than 30 composers, from Bach to the present day. He led revelatory Mahler (symphonies nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 7 and 9), blockbuster Berlioz (Romeo and Juliet, his rarely heard requiem, Symphonie fantastique, Les nuits d’été), what many consider definitive readings of the big Stravinsky ballets, newer classics (Berio’s Sinfonia and Ligeti’s Piano Concerto), and operatic landmarks of the 20th century (Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartók — preserved in a Grammy Award–winning recording — and Schoenberg’s formidable Moses und Aron, which he transformed from a notoriously complex 12-tone score into a work of riveting theater.) But he also led music by composers not regularly linked with his name — Haydn, Schubert, Dukas, Roussel, Szymanowski, Scriabin. And, in his last years, he turned his attention to Janáček and Bruckner, whom he had always dismissed outright (he gave his first performances of the Fifth and Ninth symphonies here.)

In the end, Boulez did something no Chicago music director had done: he treated the classics of modernism as if they, not Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms, constituted the traditional canon. In the same way, his recording career in Chicago largely steered away from the 19th-century scores that sit at the heart of most conductors’ recorded legacies, opting instead to leave us revelatory accounts of the modern classics: hair-raising Varèse; crystalline yet fiery Stravinsky; and pristine Mahler, no less stunning for being so lucid and precise. 

Over the years, it was our privilege to learn, to explore, and to grow along with him. He was our invaluable companion in the complex landscape of 20th-century music, a world he knew intimately, from the double vantage point of composer and conductor, and we came to rely on his concerts to help us better understand and love the music of our own time. He taught us to embrace what lies just over the horizon — as forward-looking a legacy as one can imagine. ♦

As we remember Boulez’s legacy, enjoy a digital encore presentation of Mahler’s extravagant Symphony No. 7 performed by the CSO under his baton — originally recorded in Orchestra Hall in October 2010 and featured in a 2011 PBS Great Performances telecast. Stream the full concert March 26 through May 10 — available exclusively on CSOtv.