George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

From his student days, Boulez was fascinated by music from outside Europe, which influenced his piano writing before 1945. He describes his encounter with them as ‘decisive for [his] form of musical thought’, from Le Marteau sans maître to sur Incises, by way of Pli selon pli, Rituel and Répons. Stimulated by Cage’s works for percussion and prepared piano, he investigated timbre and rhythm, leading to new forms of writing and new conceptions of form and time; appreciation of the importance of resonant instruments, autonomous rhythmics, heterophony ensuring the fusion between harmony and polyphony, opposition between ‘striated time’ and ‘smooth time’, ritual and sacred dimensions, and ‘plastic and physical’ (Artaud’s words regarding Balinese theatre), not ‘psychological’ expression. This interest in non-European music, influenced by Messiaen and Jolivet, is part of a French tradition and distinguishes Boulez’s approach from that of most of his contemporaries in the immediate post-war period.

As composer, theoretician, conductor and founder of institutions, Pierre Boulez’s irrepressible desire for modernity marked the second half of the twentieth century. From immediately after the Second World War, he set himself the task of bringing to the fore a France that was deemed musically retrogressive and sclerotic. A man of action, both visionary and pragmatic, fêted and detested, he waged throughout his life collective and altruistic battles and engaged in numerous controversies, all with the explicit goal of shaking the dust off of musical practice and of stimulating a new model of creation and dissemination: the Domaine Musical in the 1950s; IRCAM and the Ensemble Intercontemporain in the 1970s; the Opéra Bastille in the 1980s and both the Cité de la musique and the beginnings of La Philharmonie de Paris in the 1990s. His unique journey remains relevant to our understanding of recent French political history, the history of ideas and of art.

By the early 1950s, Boulez became known for his controversial and outspoken statements, his notorious snipes at non-serial but otherwise progressive contemporaries, creating a rift that divided French composers into competing factions. Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana, as well as others represented not only at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but also the Warsaw Autumn Festival as leading figures in French contemporary music, found themselves excluded from the Concerts du Domaine musical and subject to what has been called the Boulezian ‘aesthetic of refusal’. Contextualising these issues, this chapter considers Jolivet’s influence on the young Boulez, their subsequent rupture in the very public affaire de scandale that followed and Boulez’s later reconciliations. Compositional common denominators linking particular works of Ohana and Dutilleux with Boulez are also explored in relation to Debussy as well as non-serial dodecaphonic techniques and the style incantatoire to reveal closer aesthetic links than any may have wished to admit.

This chapter focuses on Boulez’s relationship to the dramatic arts and the consequences of that involvement on his life and career. He was appointed as musical director, responsible for accompanying the productions, a position he held for ten years, from 1946 to 1956. Boulez contributed to the productions as conductor in Paris and also went on tour with the Company. He was interested in the music of the countries visited especially that of Brazil for its exotic instruments and their timbres. He composed the score of the Oresteia (1955), arranged and wrote the orchestration of different scores and had the opportunity to create the Domaine Musical series of concerts. It was the beginning of his career as a conductor of prestigious orchestras but also of opera and of collaborations with famous stage directors, Wieland Wagner, Patrice Chéreau, Peter Stein and Klaus-Michael Grüber.

The visual arts were of great importance for Pierre Boulez, whether through particular works of art or through encounters with the artists themselves. Indeed, his thinking and writing were nourished by painting and drawing (and to a lesser extent, sculpture, photography and film). It was through the attention he gave to the work of the painter, Paul Klee, that Boulez made explicitly clear the fundamental principle underpinning his approach: an object of reflection must be transcended and considered in terms of an entire network of relationships, such that a distance is always kept from the object under consideration. This comparative ‘ethic’, emblematic of Boulez’s thinking, found its most fertile ground in painting and an unequalled ambassador in Klee. The chapter explores Boulez’s engagement with the work of Klee as well as that of de Staël, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Miró, Vieira da Silva and other significant visual artists.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

Outlines the aims and rationale of this guide to The Rite of Spring, sketching the book’s structure across four parts: The Paris Premiere; Contexts; Performance and Interpretation; and Scholarship. Situates the volume within a scholarly context, exploring how it relates to the enormous quantity of published literature on The Rite of Spring – a literature that can be difficult to navigate, especially for newcomers to the work. Also proposes a new, historically sensitive way of approaching the original 1913 production, combining historical and musical perspectives with a focus on the ballet’s intense corporeal impact as noted by some of the first critics inside the theatre.

Describes how Russian dancer-turned-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky broke free from ballet conventions in his pre-war productions for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), Jeux (1913) and, most famously, The Rite of Spring (1913). Focuses on his characteristically reductive movement vocabulary, the arrangement of dancers on stage and his retreat from the traditions of illusionistic theatre as recognized and understood at the end of the long nineteenth century. Considers various source materials, including press reports, photographs, choreographic notation (where available) and oral testimony. Also explores possible influencing factors within the pre-war theatrical scene (modernist puppet theatre, two-dimensionality, the so-called ‘cinema of attractions’), as well as influences Nijinsky may have had on the choreographers who followed him.

This chapter surveys the fields of musicology and dance studies, examining some of the most influential historically themed scholarship that has emerged within the two disciplines – and echoed across their own disciplinary histories – since the early twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the work of towering musicologist Richard Taruskin and dance expert Lynn Garafola, the chapter provides a useful account of the ballet’s scholarly legacy and the principal themes that have arisen across what has been a stupendous (and seemingly endless) volume of literature. Of these themes, race, gender and national identity prove particularly enduring, as generations of scholars seek to situate the ballet within coterminous histories of rupture and continuity.