Pierre Boulez spent a great deal of time in post-war Germany. His close connection with the country began when Heinrich Strobel commissioned him to compose Polyphonie X, initiating his ongoing close contact with both Strobel and the city of Baden-Baden, where he would take up residence in 1958. The chapter considers the 1951 premiere of Polyphonie X at Donaueschingen and the controversy which followed. It also contextualises the piece within the various compositional projects Boulez was preoccupied with at the time. The chapter considers Boulez’s attitude towards dodecaphony as focused on the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress of 1951 and his reflections on how Webern might be approached profitably by composers of new music. Given Boulez’s move to Germany in the late 1950s, the chapter reviews his disillusionment with the musical scene in France and the fact that a number of his most important compositions were first premiered in Germany.

The second half of the eighteenth century: ‘adoption’ – ‘classical’ rephrasing – Mozart's image of Bach

The historical location of Bach in the music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the accompanying radical changes are determined by his position in the second half of the eighteenth century. The caesura ‘1750’ could indicate a break in the influence of Bach's music, or the beginning of a tradition where it and his understanding of it are transmitted to his sons, students and future generations in a linear, undisturbed fashion, or, conversely, the beginning of the process of reinterpretation that is more familiar after the turn of the nineteenth century. Each of these three positions has consequences for the writing of music history in the second half of the eighteenth century and for the development of a ‘Romantic Bach interpretation’ in the early nineteenth century. In the first case, the phase 1750–1800 can be portrayed without Bach, which, given the minor influence of Bach's music on the general public, would be correct. In the second case, the preservation of the Bach tradition, there is the danger that the ‘shift’ of the divergent horizons of expectation, in Blumenberg's sense, would be exaggerated and the historical portrayal would be focused too much on the monument ‘Bach’. The third position has the advantage of differentiating between the ideas of breaking with the past and continuity and sees the process of reinterpretation during the eighteenth century as the decisive precondition for the means whereby Bach's music, once functional and rhetorical, now becomes autonomous.

To raise objections about the very topic one has been asked to write about is surely unusual; perhaps it would be better not to address the topic at all. But that would be far too simple a solution. It makes more sense to formulate the discontent, not as a disclaimer soon to be forgotten, but rather as a critical undercurrent that will run throughout both this chapter and the next.

Three fundamental objections can be raised against the assigned topic. First, much of the material is ubiquitous, given that there is hardly a composer of the nineteenth or twentieth century who has not occupied himself with Bach, whether it be by choice or requirement. Perhaps it would therefore be more feasible to investigate those who have given Bach a wide berth. Delimiting the material in this manner would serve as a corrective to the unattainable goal of comprehensively listing and critically interpreting all forms of Bach reception. Secondly, there is the danger of mythologising Bach by producing yet another historiographically out-moded description of great heroes, a monocausal, linear music history delineated by monuments, Bach – Beethoven – Brahms – Schoenberg – Boulez. Thirdly, there is the historical and ontological difference between Bach's horizon of expectation and that of the present day; the ubiquity of Bach's music and the mythologising of Bach today contradict the situation in his own time.