Goodbye to All That

France, mired in a state of musical bankruptcy ever since World War II, could always boast one major asset: Pierre Boulez, 41, the leading voice of the modernist school of composers and a gifted conductor as well. But in 1959, Boulez suddenly deserted Paris to live in Baden-Baden and work with the progressive Southwest German Radio Orchestra. He left, he said, because "the organization of musical life in Paris is more stupid than anywhere else. France has completely lost her importance. Nothing advances."

This would never do. Paris was the vaunted citadel of artistic adventure, haven for the misunderstood, and all that. So Boulez (rhymes not with hooray but with who says) was lured back on several occasions to direct the French National Orchestra, and was even offered the important post of director of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra. (He turned it down.) In 1963, the Paris Opera gave him a free hand in producing Alban Berg's Wozzeck: he demanded and got an unprecedented 30 rehearsals, and the opera scored a major triumph. In a six-week tour de force in Paris earlier this year, Boulez again conducted Wozzeck, helped to produce three Stravinsky ballets, gave eight concerts, performed on TV, and recorded an opera and two orchestral pieces. The French critics treated his visitations with a mixture of adulation and almost blind acceptance and the Paris musicians' union named him honorary president. Things were going swimmingly. There was even some hope that Boulez might relent and return to Paris for good.

Plush Exile. Then, last month, Cultural Affairs Minister Andre Malraux appointed Marcel Landowski, a composer of conservative persuasion and little renown, as the ministry's director of music. Boulez hit the ceiling, canceled all future government-connected engagements in France and fired off a scathing letter, which was published in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. He accused Malraux of jeopardizing France's musical future, called the Landowski appointment "badly thought out, irresponsible and illogical." Malraux, he charged, should understand "that music is a matter sufficiently important not to have it put into the hands of feebleminded and incompetent men." He dismissed Landowski as "a droll and inconsistent man equipped with little imagination," adding acidly: "The poor chap has finally found something to do."

Now the Paris critics are slapping back. "Childish stamping," sniffed the weekly magazine Arts. "When Boulez did this kind of thing at 20, he was called a young brat that age would mature. At 30, we said he's a bit retarded but appealing. At 40, one can only shrug one's shoulders." In Le Combat, Critic Jean Hamon accused Boulez of trying to control France's musical development with "a dictatorship Boulezienne conceived on the immutable principle that 'no one has any talent except us and our friends.'" Concluded Hamon: "Goodbye, then, Herr Boulez. Return to your plush exile. Stay there, and while you are at it, why don't you change your nationality?" Boulez's reaction: "Hamon is an imbecile, always was. It is this chauvinism which makes it impossible for me to ever live in France, and particularly in Paris, again."

Inventive Explosion. Boulez does not stand to suffer from the estrangement. As one of the world's foremost conductors of contemporary music, he has more engagements than he can handle. This summer he will put in a six-week stint at the Bayreuth Festival conducting Wagner's Parsifal. U.S. audiences will also be hearing more of him: Columbia Records recently signed him to record his entire output of compositions, and in the summer of 1967 he will become co-director of the small but excellent Ojai Music Festival in California.

Though conducting commands more and more of his time, Boulez periodically retreats to his Victorian mansion on the edge of the Black Forest outside Baden-Baden to compose. Pointillistic, tautly wrought, totally dissonant, his music ignores traditional melody and rhythm in favor of a new language of sound in subtle juxtaposition with silence. It is extremely complex music, reflecting in its intricate design his early training as a mathematician; a section of his Third Piano Sonata, for example, was originally written on a single sheet of music 8 ft. long, crosshatched with unconventional symbols as well as notes. Perhaps more than any other composer in the avant-garde wing, he has remodeled and extended the serial music of Anton Webern, making it more flexible by transcending the purely theoretical approach. "We are not in a blind alley, as some untutored people think," he says. "We are in the midst of an inventive explosion similar to the Renaissance."

A slightly puffy, balding man, Boulez looks more like a librarian than a revolutionary. Indeed, he confessed last week that he has lost his taste for jousting with the French musical establishment. Hereafter, he says, "what energies I have will be spent on composing and conducting rather than on squabbles with officials in Paris."

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