The very brief biography above hardly begins to do justice to this giant of music?— not just Twentieth Century music, but all music.?

This website presentation is being prepared as we celebrate his 90th birthday, and the honors and accolades being heaped upon him are surely appropriate and at the same time inadequate.? He is, quite simply, Boulez, and to speak his name instantly inspires anticipation, reverence, and respect.? The rest of us can simply thank him for all that he has done.

Though generous and open to so many, it was a distinct pleasure for me to greet and chat momentarily with this man on several occasions.? He also graciously allowed me to sit with him twice for lengthy interviews, both of which are presented here.

These two meetings took place in Chicago in the mid-1980s, while he was in town for performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.? He had conducted here regularly and often, but did not yet have the official title which was bestowed about a decade later.

The interests of this man range far and wide, and so did our discussions.? We did not focus on any single item, but in the first conversation we talked quite a bit about opera, and in the second we spoke about his own music and his ideas concerning new music in general.?

I began with something that haunted him even back then, and, as seen in the box at right, later quite seriously disrupted his life . . . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:??? [With a gentle nudge]? First, are you glad that the opera houses were not blown up twenty years ago?

Pierre Boulez:??? [Laughs]? I think the title has done more, in fact, than the article itself, unfortunately.? I don’t accept the conditions of the repertoire theater, generally, when you have no rehearsals and changing casts, and all these kinds of things.? I don’t accept that now any more than I accepted it twenty years ago.? Therefore, I conducted myself only in the specialty concerts, for instance, in Bayreuth, when you don’t have all that and you concentrate for a period of time on the production.? Many people are really sharing this opinion now, that the time for rehearsals should be bigger, that rehearsals should be plenty for performances, and the whole thing should not be in an opera house.? All these conditions are there, and then some in the opera house can go further, I suppose.

BD:??? Even for a piece that the conductor and the orchestra and all in the cast have done many, many times?

PB:??? That depends on what is considered as many, many times.? If you have it in a repertoire theater?—?even a piece which is very well known?—?after six months without any rehearsal the performance cannot be very good.? You have conditions there which no symphony orchestra would accept.? They could give you at least two rehearsals, and they’re done.? One cannot forget the problems of the opera house are much bigger than the ones of the symphony orchestra, because you have the singers, the production, and everything has to be rehearsed.? Otherwise it is kind of a perpetual improvisation.? I am sure that you have seen this type of performance, which is just pure improvisation from beginning to end, thrown together.? I don’t think that’s any way to do it, artistically speaking.

BD:??? [Playing Devil’s advocate]??There’s no spontaneity?? There’s nothing there that holds it together?

PB:??? No.? That’s an idea if it works, but each performer has his own spontaneity and they don’t go together very well.? You have no kind of connection anymore because nobody knows what the next will do, or only knows it very vaguely.? The notion of theater now has grown very tight.? For instance, when I worked with Chéreau we had a singer who was sick, and it was very difficult to replace him with only two days’ notice?because the production is like for actors, and you know very well that actors are not replaced that in their productions.? One should consider that the production of an opera is like the production of a play, which is very intricate at times and should be very enticing.? If you just put one singer on the left and one singer on the right, it is not enough to be very dramatic.

BD:??? Then let me ask the?‘Capriccio?question’.? Which is more important, the text or the music?

PB:??? Strauss didn’t know the answer!? [Laughs]? He was precisely avoiding to give an answer, and I think you cannot give an answer.? The relation between the text and the music is a relation which is constantly changing.? You can’t say today.? In Mozart arias the music is more important, but in the recitative you should understand absolutely what is going on, and you should understand the words.? Otherwise you don’t follow the action and you are always in a fog, and that’s not enticing.? I am sure that in the music, even for Strauss himself, in?Ariadne?you don’t need to hear the words of Zerbinetta to understand what she sings because coloratura is not always for pronounced words.? But the first part, the dialogue with the Composer, especially, is important to understand.? There’s always these fluctuations in the music which the composer composed very thoroughly, sometimes.? Even in the most continuous music, like the music by Wagner, you have places where certainly the words are very important.? In a lot of his prose writings, Wagner says that his text and his music are one entity, and you cannot divide these, and I think he’s right.? Even in Wagner you should be able to understand constantly the action and the words, but it is not, of course, that the music as a second level.

BD:??? Should opera be in translation for the language of the audience?

PB:??? I don’t think that, but in a very funny way television can do justice to the arts.? Subtitles are really the thing which can help.? I had this experience where people who looked at the?Ring?by Chéreau and myself, which was broadcast in France and in England with subtitles.? People never could understand that well the relationship between the text and the music, but the text was conceived with German sonorities, and the sonorities are so really tied with the music that you cannot really take another language?—?especially if people don’t know the story, which is rather complex in the?Ring.? If they don’t understand at all what is going on, it is very difficult, and you cannot oblige people to read all the text before, to memorize every moment.? Even then, they cannot enjoy the music at the same time because they will use such an effort of memory.? Then the music will just be swallowed without really being conscious of it.? All the attention will be for the text, and I don’t think that would be a good thing.? But if you hear the sonorities and you can read the words?—?which are two activities?—?at the same time, you can really manage very well without being disturbed.? Then the audience can react like a musician can react when he reads the score, because he has the time to see all these precise and very fastidiously composed relationships between words and music.? That’s an enjoyment, because when you hear, for instance, a big splash of music, if you understand vaguely, that’s already something, but if you understand precisely, that’s much more satisfying.

BD:??? Have you worked with the supertitles in the theater?? [Remember, this interview dates from February of 1986.]

PB:??? No.? By and large you cannot work with subtitles.? You can understand when it’s in the sanctuary of German art you cannot really make them.? You would have to have subtitles in three or four or five languages.? The stage would be full of subtitles, and you cannot see the singers anymore!

BD:??? But here in America there is this movement towards using supertitles in the theater.? I just wondered if this would carry out the translation very well.

PB:??? I suppose yes.? If it is properly done I suppose it is a good thing, only it should not be obnoxious.? For television it’s very simple because you put the subtitles down on the screen and it does not impair the image so much.? Sometimes, if you have very subtle or very dark lightings and you have subtitles really in white, it distorts the image.? But distortion of the image is not so terrible if you understand everything which is going on.? In the theater, you’d have to put the subtitles at the top of the stage.

BD:??? That’s the way it’s done.? It’s put on a small screen at the top of the proscenium.

PB:??? Yes.? On the side?

BD:??? No, at the very top.

PB:??? At the very top, yes.? So it is certainly more difficult to read that in a theater than it is on a television screen because the proportions are not at all the same.? But if it can be done, then I would agree, certainly.

BD:??? Is there any other composer besides Wagner whose text and music are so wedded together?

PB:??? I don’t think there are because he was really the most creative person to have created his own texts.? Although that’s very strange with Wagner because he wrote the text sometimes fifteen or twenty years before he set it to music.? Therefore he was changing some of the words, but not very many.? I have read a book on the difference between the sketches and the finished score, and he doesn’t change that much.? He changed sometimes for the sonority, but that was more toward the end.? Especially in?G?tterd?mmerung, he changed much more for ideological reasons.? He did not know how to finish?G?tterd?mmerung?properly, and he had trouble to finish it because in all these years his ideology has changed completely.? He did not know, really, what to make of it, finally.

BD:??? How do you see the last five minutes of the?Ring?

PB:??? That’s a kind of compressed ending.? For me, the music is wonderful but the theatrical experience is not terribly convincing, because everything happens.? The Rhine is just washing everything out.? The ring has gone back and Brünnhilde goes into the fire.? Dramatically it is certainly not the strongest part, but the music is so beautiful that you forget about it.? As a matter of fact, Chéreau solved this very beautifully.? He finished with a question mark.? All the people, all the crowd was there wondering at once what was happening.? Finally the crowd was turning toward the orchestra, absolutely listening to the music without any movement, and looking at the audience in the dark.? It was really this crowd on the stage looking at the audience, being a mirror of the audience in the middle of this music which was expressing just itself.? It was an extremely beautiful moment.? I think the?Ring, the?G?tterd?mmerung, is finishing on a question mark.? Everything will happen again; there is no conclusion.

*???? *???? *???? *???? *

BD:??? Are you a better conductor because you are also a master composer?

PB:??? Well, no, I don’t think I am a better conductor.? I think simply maybe I conduct in a different way, because I know, really, more in depth what composition means.? I am not the only one... for instance, George Szell, to mention him because I worked with him and was very close to him for some years.? He studied composition and has composed, also.? Furtw?ngler also has composed.? Maybe the compositions of Furtw?ngler are certainly not the best of what he did, but he knew how to manage composition.? Certainly if you really know what composition is as a practical matter, you are paying much more attention to some characteristics which otherwise you would not emphasize.? For instance, if you are a composer you are paying very much attention to the long lines, to the tension of a scene, not only to have the exciting moments and in between you are swimming from exciting moment to exciting moment and reaching them when they are there.? Also, if you are a composer you pay much more attention to the continuity of the development, to what motifs are doing.? My attitude towards a motif in Wagner was not, “Oh, there is a motif so I will throw it out in a very loud way so everybody can recognize it.”? On the contrary, the more I studied Wagner the more I thought that themes were part of the web, and sometimes you have to bring them out because they are very important moments.? For instance, think of? the turning point of a scene when the meaning changes, or when you have a theme which was tied with a situation but the situation has changed and this motif itself is changing, the harmony is changing.? Then you have to emphasize this kind of thing, but otherwise you distort the web if you put always the motifs into a kind of position which is too prominent.? Then you don’t perceive texture anymore, but you perceive only these important themes.? So for me, as a composer, I’m very careful to bring the continuity, and I am also very careful with the instrumentation.? That may be because when you write an orchestral score, you give a great deal of attention to the balance, to what instrument is more important than the other and to how the instrument should meld together.? You don’t simply give a general impression of the orchestration, but I try to be as precise as possible, to observe as precisely as possible, the indications of Wagner himself.? There is a book on Wagner by Nietzsche.? He meant it, really, in a nasty way, but I think it was a big complement when he says, “Wagner is a master of the miniature.”? He thought it was very derogatory to say that, but it is true because Wagner was extremely fastidious in his putting together his orchestral texture.

BD:??? The details?

PB:??? Yes, all the details of the orchestration, which are really very well-conceived.? For instance, the balance against three clarinets is two oboes and one English horn, or he has two bassoons and two clarinets.? Even the weight of the instruments he’s calculated with extreme precision, and you cannot forget that!? But at the same time you have these sweeping lines, and that’s very difficult for me, in Wagner, to bring together the extreme precision of this texture and in the same time the long lines of a theme.? That’s this contrast between miniature and fresco, which is so difficult to obtain in Wagner.

BD:??? What do you expect from an audience, and is it different when you’re the composer, as opposed to the conductor?

PB:??? Yes, because when I conduct that which I have not written, I am certainly involved, but I am not reflecting on the work in the same way that I am reflecting when it is a work which I have written myself.? When I have written the work myself, especially when the work is fresh?—?a month or so or even the previous week when it is a chamber work?—?then I am not sure how to perform it.? I have to do a couple of performances to be absolutely sure of how I will manage all the things I have thought and how it translates in practical gestures and its many sonorities.? This is not a difficulty, but you certainly have to concentrate on the way of looking at your score and saying, “Yes, I want that, and how will I realize it properly?”? But if I have an old score, for instance the scores I have written in 1950-1955 like?Le Marteau sans Maitre, then I have no difficulty, because the distance is such that I consider that like a score of the past.? I like them much better than I did 30 years ago, not only because I have learned quite a lot in conducting more and more, but also the distance from the score is benefiting these performances.? It’s the same for the classical works — the works of the past, even of the recent past, such as the Vienna School or Stravinsky.? When I was very involved in discovering the scores, I did not know how to manage them properly.? But now that there is a distance and I have gone through the score quite a lot of times, it’s like a car race.? The driver has to discover a curve here and a right line in a part of it, and then another curve.? Then he knows how to manage these curves, and all these differences in the run.

BD:??? A race car driver would say that he doesn’t know how fast he can take a curve until he’s taken it too fast.? Is there an equivalent in music?

PB:??? I think that’s exactly the same because sometimes you know that you have to give so much more energy in one part than the other part.? Then you give too much energy and that’s wasted because you know that maybe later on you have to give more energy than the previous point.? When I conducted the?Ring?for the first time, I was thinking all the time, “Here I must give more, but not too much because there is still to come the end of the scene,” and so on and so forth.? You have to think about that each time, and that of course you can manage, but that’s very tiring.? It might not be a natural gesture, but when you have done it a couple of times, after five years, for instance, I do not have to think anymore.? I was giving the energy, and compensating sometimes when, for instance, a place was a little bit too slow because the singer wanted to take a slightly slower tempo.? Perhaps his voice was not in as good shape as it was previous series of performances.? I can understand that.? You cannot be rigid in these performances.? You have to take in consideration everything.? Also the production is very important.? If a singer has gone a little too far, you have to give way and observe what he does on the stage.? You have to listen to that, but you react by feeling more than by thinking.? That’s the progress you make, always, when you are dealing with a score over a number of performances.? At first you are concentrating on the fact that you are doing that, and that, and that, and that.? Then afterwards you don’t think anymore, but you react naturally because the score is not in your head but in your hands.? There is no transmission time, let’s say.? You have direct contact to the score with your hands.? That’s the great advantage when you do a series of performances, that at the end you don’t have to think anymore, but you just feel the score.

BD:??? Is opera then more a collaborative art between the conductor and the performers than a symphony?

PB:??? Oh yes, much more.? In each performance I have done, I was always there from the very, very beginning.? I don’t want to be at each rehearsal of the director, because it can be annoying for the director to have always somebody with him.? Sometimes he likes to work completely alone with a singer and just a piano for rehearsing.? But when there are important rehearsals, then I prefer to be there.? First, I can follow what the director is doing, and second, I can tell him, “We love this movement but it does not move with the music.”? Physically, if you ask the singer to just run at this point, he cannot sing easily a phrase after that.? Or if he does this movement at this point, it will disturb the flow of the music.? I prefer to say that before, rather than be confronted with these problems at the last minute, when people have already studied the production and it is difficult to change something.? The change will be always like a scar, then, but if you do the change at the beginning, then it’s an organic process of development.

BD:??? You’re helping to mold it?

PB:??? Yes, exactly.? I attended not all the rehearsals of Chéreau, but I attended the main rehearsals, and I asked him, “Can I go do it this way?” and he was very happy.? We also discussed it afterwards, right after rehearsal.? I would tell him, “I think that and that and that, but you could do more at this place because the singer can really move there without any problem.”? The production was absolutely his invention, but at some points I was mixing in myself, just to give some direction according to the music and the possibilities of the singers.

BD:??? Are producers today getting too much power, and taking too many liberties with scores and texts and stage directions?

PB:??? With scores, certainly not.? Nothing was done with the score as long as I was there.

BD:??? But I mean, in general?

PB:??? In general I don’t think the score is touched.? The score is never touched, but certainly some productions have a super-structure of the staging compared to the score.? I don’t find it very interesting when you have so-called?‘ideas’.? This type of production is disturbing when you want to change the time and change the psychological relationship, and you want to say, “Now I have understood what he meant.”? All these kinds of directions are sometimes even very childish.? But I find a production should go into the text, and not only as a decoration.? A production should really look at what is in the music and in the text, because both are important.? When a musician has composed the music, he has the text in front of him, and he thought of the text.? With the productions of Chéreau, of?Lulu?or the?Ring, certainly he emphasizes some details.? I remember something which shocked the people, especially in the first year, was the scene with the bird in?Siegfried.? The bird was in a cage, and that shocked people out of proportion.? They wondered why he did that because it is very strange.? If you look at the text of Wagner, Wotan is maneuvering Siegfried all the time, until the break when they fight and both are defeated.? But until then, he maneuvers, always.? Siegfried is the least free of all people because he is constantly maneuvered.? Then this bird, which should bring him to Brünnhilde, is also the will of Wotan, because he has to deliver Brünnhilde.? So how to show on a stage that the bird was also the will of Wotan is very difficult.

BD:??? So he put it in a cage!

PB:??? Wotan put it in a cage.

BD:??? Even though Wotan himself says that he is the least free of anyone?

PB:??? Absolutely!? And it’s very difficult to show that.? You have that in the text, but if you have to show something like that, the cage was an idea which was not in the text of Wagner, but which was not at all against the meaning of the text.? It was just a symbolic transcription of what the text meant, and people took it as a real thing in spite of the fact you don’t find any birds in a cage in the forest, especially in the wild forest!? But as a symbol of the absence of freedom of Siegfried, it was really the best symbol.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?*???? *???? *???? *???? *

BD:??? You have said that all music should disturb.? Should the stage directions also disturb?

PB:??? I suppose they should disturb.? They should bring the light of our period on a piece.? You cannot even do revivals, and that’s really very strange.? I have seen revivals of old stagings, even those of just ten or fifteen years, and because the art of the stage is something which is so tied with the actuality, so tied with the period itself, immediately when you have ten or fifteen years in between, you see a production is aging progressively.?

BD:??? Would this be different if it were done each year for those ten or fifteen years?

PB:??? Yes, if the director himself modifies it.? I would like to tell you how Wieland Wagner reacted.? Wieland Wagner’s production of?Parsifal?was begun in ’51.? I came to Bayreuth in ’66 to work with him, and during all these years it changed constantly.? It was the same production, but at the same time it was not the same production.? There were some major changes.? So in ’66 he told me, “While you are here now I want to change it completely, because I cannot change something here and something there when the musical direction has completely changed.”? He told me, “You bring another point of view, and my point of view was fitting with Knappertsbusch.? Now I feel absolutely I must change that.”? Unfortunately he died that year, so we did not work on that.? But afterwards his production was maintained for a certain number of years with somebody very competent to maintain it, but only to maintain it.? Then the production aged instantly.? It was like the scene in?Rheingold?when there is no apple anymore, and then the gods are aging instantly!? This production, without his kind of rejuvenation of each year, just was growing older and older and older, and after a certain number of years it could not be maintained anymore, because it was the style of Wieland Wagner, the style of the fifties.? Then you see how much the stage production is tied with the period, even when there was a genius.? But this genius does not survive.? That was due to some circumstances, due to some very precise meeting of some talents, and then, when those talents are no more there, there is another generation, another time, and you have to change completely.

BD:??? Is it your basic complaint about opera houses in general that they are dying, that they have withered on the vine?

PB:??? I think my complaint is that they don’t give the best conditions for performance.

BD:??? So it really has nothing to do, then, with repertoire?

PB:??? It has nothing to do with repertoire, no.? I would like that the repertoire could be expanded, and people? would be more curious and more curious to put in the repertoire of accepted masterpieces but which are performed once in a blue moon.??Wozzeck?should be permanently included because as a story it is as exciting as?Tosca.? That’s exactly the same type of opera drama, and I am sure that with good production, and with the music really put together very well,?Wozzeck?would be a normal repertoire piece.? It is not.

BD:??? [Gently protesting]? Some people think that it is becoming a normal repertoire piece.

PB:??? If you perform it once every four or five years, I don’t think that’s repertoire.? That’s the point.? As a matter of fact, Wagner is not terribly repertoire, either.? How many times do you see?Parsifal???Parsifal?is not performed very often in all theaters.? What is performed by Wagner are the early pieces, mainly?Tannh?user?and?Lohengrin?and?Meistersinger?and?Tristan.? But full cycles of the?Ring?are very rarely performed because, first of all, economical conditions are enormous!? But the theater is there for that.? If you cannot manage that, then your ability is put into question.? I don’t know if it is still the case now, but when Solti was in Covent Garden, there was a?Ring?cycle at the beginning of every season.? I find that’s normal because that’s one of the most important works of the nineteenth century; also the operas by Mozart.? You see sometimes some performances that are terribly routine, and I don’t find them always very exciting.? For instance, if you hear?Così fan Tutte, which is a very difficult opera to perform, what you hear is not really terribly satisfying all the time.

BD:??? As you say, the repertoire should be expanded.? Are the obstacles to contemporary opera the same or different than they were twenty or thirty years ago?

PB:??? They are more or less the same.? Most of the people in the opera houses do lip service to them due to lack of interest and conviction in presenting the works.? They don’t take the best singers.? They always take singers who are less used in the house and can do that assignment.? World-class singers will never touch that assignment.

BD:??? Would a contemporary opera work better with a Domingo, rather than a young singer who is more into contemporary?

PB:??? No.? If he is a very good young singer, certainly it works better.? But I don’t see why a star could not devote part of his time to a new work, if he’s interested.? And it doesn’t apply only to new works; it applies to production.? I don’t consider that either a conductor or a singer does justice to a production if he comes only four or five days before the premiere, and that is very often the case.? You will never expect that from even a star actor!? He will be always there for the rehearsals, and really be involved from the beginning to the end.? The singers take that very lightly, much too lightly for my taste.

BD:??? Is it possible for something to get over-rehearsed, perhaps like a Felsenstein-type production?

PB:??? Yes.? You cannot exaggerate in the other direction.? If you are six months in a production, of course everybody will be bored to death, although with Felsenstein, it gave some stunning results, I must say.? But the?Lulu?production was one full month of rehearsals, and one full month of rehearsals can be accepted by any singer for a new production if he is conscientious.? A revival takes less than that, but a first production should be no less than one month.? But the life of an opera house is organized in such a way that people have to sit there for rehearsals for one month, and nothing else is proposed to them.? In an opera house you could organize in the same time concerts, recitals, also periods of teaching which will be very profitable for everybody.? The great singers begin to teach only when they are all out of dollars, and I find that a pity because they can rely only on their past for the style.? But a great singer could give some master classes when the production is in rehearsal, or could give some recitals or some concerts with orchestra.? You could find either a similar work, or works by the same composer who has composed this opera, for instance.? When one rehearses?Lulu, you could give the?Altenberg Lieder, for instance, in a concert, and that will be of interest for the singer because he will not sit there and have the impression of doing nothing but rehearse, which is a kind of dead period for him.? If you could excite his interest in other activities, this would be a good thing.? But the whole conception of an opera should change to be able to propose that to the singers.? Then it will be another involvement; it will be interesting, and they would have a tendency to stay where they are, and not just to go from one place to another one.

BD:??? Is it a mistake on the part of the public to expect all new operas, world premieres, to be masterpieces?

PB:??? I have looked at the programs of the opera between 1875 and 1900.? There were thousands of operas which were premiered and which never survived because they are really works of the time.? If you had an opera which had no success, it did not survive after five performances at the most, and sometimes it had only three performances.? Look at the example of the big works of Berlioz, which is very typical, in a way?—?Benvenuto,?Beatrice and Benedict, and?Trojans.

BD:????Trojans?was never done completely.

PB:??? Never done completely at first, and only for a very limited number of performances.? It was not successful, period!? It was buried immediately, like all other operas.??Trojans?has musical qualities which allow it to survive, but anything which was not immediately successful was just dumped.? What was successful in the opera in Paris was mainly Rossini and Meyerbeer, period.? Wagner was not successful until 1890s.? Otherwise, there were very few performances.? And if you look at the life of the big time of the opera houses, there were a lot of very poor works.

BD:??? Should the opera houses of today be doing more new works a few times and then letting them be dropped?

PB:??? I don’t say you cannot do that, because repertoire establishes itself in a more powerful way, but in a year, if you choose well, you could very well do two or three first performances, and it would not really be a burden to the house which does that.? As a matter of fact, that’s what Liebermann did when he was in Hamburg.

BD:??? But that’s an isolated case!

PB:??? Yes, because he was Liebermann!? It needed personality to do that, and as long as you have the personality, you have the results.? It needs conviction.? You have to be convinced, and Liebermann was convinced of that, and they needed it.

BD:??? Can we ever hope for an opera from Pierre Boulez?

PB:??? Yes.? Maybe not an?‘opera’?in the conventional sense, but a work for theater, certainly.

BD:??? Thank you so very much for speaking with me today.

PB:??? You are very welcome.

BD:??? You’ve been very gracious.??Merci beaucoup, Monsieur!

PB:??? [Laughs]??Très bien!

We now move ahead just over twenty months for the second encounter in late October of 1987.

BD: ?? [As we both get comfortable on the sofas in his suite]? So, where is music going today?

PB:??? Who can tell?? [Laughs] I suppose that’s exactly the type of question you can never answer.

BD:??? Is that even a question we want to try and answer?

PB:??? No, certainly not.? I’m not really interested in prophecy and saying,?“Oh, music goes that, and in ten years you will see, or fifteen years or the near future even.”? That is something which is interesting.? That’s a surprise, and if you had told me that I am now where I am, I could have believed it or not believed it.? But it would not have been of any kind of importance because I could not materialize myself into the future.? I am certainly detached and I’m living in the moment, but of course I’m thinking about what I will do.? What I would think so for the future is a strong direction, but that’s a guess always.? Nobody can tell anything.

BD:??? If you can’t tell where music will be later, what direction is it heading at this moment?

PB:??? At this moment there are a couple of developments which interest me.? I don’t see that’s development of music generally speaking, but there are a couple of developments which for me are interesting.? First is the expansion of material of music.? I have made very often this comparison but it’s like architecture at one point was really changing because of the change of material.? If you can build sky-scrapers because the materials changed, the style has changed as a consequence of the discovery of the new material.? That is where music is, at the beginning of a period where a lot of new material will appear at the disposal of the composers.? The new material is like electronics, for instance.? You can tell me that’s not that new because it began something like forty years ago.

BD:??? Are you a creator then of new material, or are you a user of whatever material is around?

PB:??? The question is not that simple.? You don’t just have new material at your convenience without looking for it.? The thing is just to look for new material and to investigate in this direction, and to provoke the birth of new material.? That’s a kind of action which is reciprocal.? You might have new thoughts of a musical expression or musical intentions which cannot be fulfilled by instruments because you cannot have the right intervals or you cannot have the right colors or the right material.? You look at how you can do that.? Generally there is a meeting point between the research and the creative power.? The creative power could not go without this research, but research without creative material, power would be nothing.? When I began with colors some fifteen years ago, I was thinking of that.? A musician alone cannot think and cannot find all kinds of new material if he’s not helped either by a group of people or an institution which will care for that.? Then he’s facing then a situation which is lighter for him because he can benefit from a group activity, although composing and creativity will remain highly individual.? The way of using this material will remain individual, but this discovery of the material can be a group activity.

BD:??? Are you pleased with all of the new developments, or are there some blind allies that we have uncovered?

PB:??? You can’t say they’re blind allies.? It depends on how the people use them.? Sometimes there is a possibility and composers don’t use it properly, or they did not have enough time, or they didn’t have enough persistence, or they will be fooling themselves with idealistic possibilities which are not really possible right now.? So you have all kinds of difficulties and all kinds of problems, but that’s a normal situation.? I’m never really astonished if you have problems in your way because you know very well things are not simple.? Maybe retrospectively you?think it was absolutely logical to do that,?but before this logic was discovered, this logic was very hidden and not absolutely obvious.

BD:??? You say?‘use it properly’.? Who makes the decision of what is proper?— is it the musical community, is it the audience, the critics, the historians?

PB:??? That’s what I mean, it’s a mixture of everybody.? I don’t think any kind of group makes the law or decides what is good and what is not good.? You have a vast variety of choices with many personalities.? Of course you have personalities which are stronger than other ones, but it’s not always the strongest personalities who develop the background.? Certainly there are some composers who are not really at the forefront, but who have developed ideas which are very interesting.? Let’s take, for instance from the past, the example of Varèse and Stravinsky.? The complete works of Stravinsky are much more striking as a force in the twentieth century, but Varèse was maybe, in some parts, more inventive, and the fact that it was not fully achieved allows people to be begin with that and to take these ideas which were not completely put to the most achievement as a point of departure.? From this point then they can read and develop many things.? On the contrary in some of the pieces of Stravinsky that’s a universe which is closed because all the possibilities are explored.? You must be very inventive to see what he used and how he used the methods, and then to develop from this point something which is more important, or differently important from what he did.? But that’s much more difficult with a composer with? a very strong personality than with a composer with a less strong personality, or with an output which is smaller or less striking at first.

BD:??? In your own music, do you strive to use all of the possibilities, everything that is in the kernels of invention?

PB:??? I try to use them one by one.? [Laughs]? You cannot eat all the food of the world at once!? When you are having a walk in the woods, you don’t take every path and you don’t look at every tree.? You are trying to make your way, and to go from one point to another one and even to discover things, but you don’t explore everything.? I suppose that’s the way of a musician.? It depends also from the circumstances of his life, the points in his life, and how his mind is working at certain moments.? Sometimes you can discover vast territory with a lot of things which are just seen like that and which are just taken on the surface, and sometimes he goes much deeper in a corner which is more interesting, and he explores this corner really very deeply and to the point where it is exhausted.? Then when this is exhausted, he can go further, and maybe find that it is not completely exhausted, so he goes into another corner and back to the earlier corner.? We are like animals which have the winter in front of them, so they accumulate small things.? They know they have a fortress of their own on which they can survive during the whole winter.? When you are very young you accumulate knowledge, and progressively you have the opportunity of using this knowledge and of accumulating other things.? This knowledge will be part of your life, and part of your sources of energy constantly.? You see someone at eighteen or twenty.? Then when you see them after twenty or thirty or forty years, you don’t see them at all in the same light.? The characteristics of really important works are mainly already made, so you can see quite a lot of things according to your own development because they are reflecting you very well.? Works that are not very important are not reflecting very much because they’re not good mirrors, but very important works are terribly good mirrors, and they reflect and they enlarge what you are able to see of yourself.? You are drawn to something the writer says about literature, and it is exactly the same meaning in music.? Important works speak to you not about themselves but they speak about yourself, and that’s exactly what I think about when confronted with the past.? They are speaking of yourself, and not the contrary.

BD:??? Are they speaking about the people who are alive at the time they were written, or are they speaking about the people today and tomorrow?

PB:??? Today and tomorrow.? I was never really a great fan of authenticity and tradition because if you think this performance is authentic or that’s not the right tradition, there’s no absolute values in music or in literature or in art.? That’s impossible because the relationship between a work and its time does not change.? In art you have a? painting which theoretically does not change.? There is no change of the oil pigment, and in music the structure does not change.? You can’t tell me that music is painted and nothing changes at all, but music to be heard has to be performed, and then the relationship the performer with the work is also something which is changing constantly, even unconsciously.? For instance, listen to recordings of work which were made fifty or sixty years ago.? You see the enormous difference between a work by Beethoven recorded by Furtw?ngler in the 30s the same work recorded by a young man right now.? It has not the same vision, and that’s very sane because you don’t go back to a fixed image.? This image follows you.

BD:??? So both these interpretations then are valid?

PB:??? Absolutely, absolutely!

BD:??? Are all interpretations valid?

PB:??? No.? When you have distortions, that’s different.

BD:??? At what point does interpretation become distortion.

PB:??? That’s very difficult to say.? Some things which seem right in a period can seem distortion in another one, so therefore I would not blame distortions unless you know they are blatant oppositions to the text itself.? Yesterday I heard a tape of Mengleburg doing Mahler in 1939.? You think,?“Oh my God.? Did he really mean to make these big?rallentandos?all the time?”? Although the playing is of a very high quality, now it seems to us a distortion.? But at his time maybe that’s how people were accustomed to have the structure of the music shown in this type of very obvious way.? In his time it was certainly not a distortion because a musician of his caliber would not have done it, but now it seems to us a distortion.? Look at baroque music, with Bach especially.? In the romantic time they were doing it so differently.? You have all the recordings of Cortot, especially, which seem wrong to us today.? It was like the sewing machine with no distortion at all.? Everything must be ‘ta, ta, ta, ta’.?? Now there’s flourishes, there are changes of tempo and so forth.? So what could have been really rejected as a distortion in the 30s, now is accepted as the real style!

BD:??? And our style will be seen as distortion perhaps twenty-five years from now?

PB:??? Exactly!? Because on what are you basing interpretation?? You are looking at some books, but you have no documents on eighteenth century music, not to speak of seventeenth and sixteenth century music.? You have books only to rely on.? You have no proper documents from the theoretical point of view, let’s say for the flourishments and for embellishments of the time.? You just have books, but you do not really know how they were doing it.? You have no documents on the tuning.? It’s difficult.

BD:??? When you think about your own music, we have documents.? There are even recordings that you have made of yourself of your music.

PB:??? Yes.

BD:??? There are also broadcasts so that we can listen a hundred or even two hundred years from now to exactly how Boulez conducted and performed his own music.

PB:??? Yes, but it does not mean that it was the only way of performing my own music.? I see the difference between my own performance thirty years ago and now of my own works.? When I listen to the old recording of?Le Marteau sans Ma?tre, which I made in ’56 [shown at right], I am appalled by the kind of uneasiness, and rather stiff tempi and so on and so forth.? Now I am much more at ease with the music because I have a distance.? I’ve played it quite a number of times, so now I can take that in my hand and make something out of it.? [Boulez would make four subesquent recordings of this work.]? But thirty years ago I was still uneasy, and I’m sure that’s with the first performance.? I am very aware of that.? The first time I perform a work of mine is like new shoes or a new jacket.? You are feeling you have to move into it before it feels comfortable, before you feel that you can manage a performance.? I remember very well the first time I played?Notations.? I was not too used to how to do that, how to rehearse it properly.? Even if you have quite a lot of experience, when you are writing a score it’s like making the swimming movements out of water.? There’s no resistance in the air.? When you have water, your movements go in a different way because you have the resistance of water.

BD:??? And then you make adjustments?

PB:??? I make adjustments, yes, certainly.? I am a very pragmatic person, but even more pragmatic people than I, like Mahler for instance, did correct the scores because they knew that sometimes an instrument was not strong enough or this register was not proper and on so on and so forth.? You can see with the material, not with something very simple but in something rather complex, you have to certainly have to be very careful with the results, with the material you are handling.

BD:??? When you have to perform a score of your own, can you divorce yourself from it as the composer, or do you still look at it as the composer rather than as a conductor?

PB:??? Only if the work is far from me in time, a work like?Marteau, like?Pli selon Pli, or something like that.? I don’t look at it as if I could revise it.? That’s finished.? Then I go to it much more as a performer, although I remember the way I composed it.? It is very funny sometimes when a detail does not come out I say,?“Oh, I remember I thought this way!”? If you remember you were thirty years ago in Spain, you might say,?“Oh yes, this day I was in Seville, and I remember this very precise day, and everything else has disappeared.”? But you remember just a moment of your life at this very point, and sometimes I have flashbacks of what I did, but it has nothing to do with performances.? That’s much more a personal remembrance than anything else.

BD:??? Like a diary?

PB:??? Yes, like a diary, or if I hear the?Wind Symphonies?of Stravinsky, I remember very well the sound that Stravinsky wanted, that very dry sound that was typical his markers.? But that’s just a personal view, that’s all.