Creating the spirit - Pierre Boulez
[P.B.] “I did Lazarus by Schubert, for instance, and The Pilgrimage of the Rose by Schumann. Of course these were not their greatest masterpieces, but I mean generally if you had a museum like our concert life, you would have ten pictures in the museum and nothing else — ten beautiful pictures, but that’s not enough. You have to have a kind of historical survey. If you have Van Gogh, you have to have also other people of this period, to see the difference and to see how the genius was fed by other people in this period. In music it is exactly the same: if we do masterpieces, we should do also at the same time pieces which are companion pieces. For me that was always the idea behind programs — to bring not only isolated pieces, but to bring a general view of history.” p. 20
[P.B.] “I think, the future is to be more like an art gallery. You know you don’t have Rembrandts and Van Gogh side by side. You have 17th century Flemish, and then French Impressionists, then Van Gogh and so on. But you can also have an exhibition where you put Rembrandt and Van Gogh side by side, you know. It’s not forbidden.” p. 20
[A.F.] “You’ve often spoken of the musical work as a labyrinth, and what you’re saying about Notations seems to tally quite well with that concept. What do you really mean by the labyrinthine nature of art?” p. 23
[P.B.] “A labyrinth has a very strong structure, but at the same time it is a structure that fools you. You think you know where you are going, but you don’t know how you’re getting there. There are two images: the labyrinth and the spiral. Répons is a kind of spiral, and each time I compare that with the museum . . . of Frank Lloyd Wright in New York . . . “ p. 23
[P.B.] “The Guggenheim. Which is a spiral. Everybody was telling me that it was beautiful architecture, but not good for exhibitions, and I said I don’t agree. You look at a painting and, at the same time, you can see what you have already seen and also what you will look at later. So in this museum you have a strong sense of the past and the future, and yet you are in the present. When you listen to a piece of music I want you to feel there is a strong hand behind you, showing you the direction, and yet you are completely in the dark about where you are going: that’s always what I try to do.” p. 23
[A.F.] “So is there a future for modernism?” p. 24
[P.B.] “I don’t see a future for modernism; I don’t see a future for post-modernism. You are not modern — you are merely expressing yourself according to the coordinates of your time, and that’s not being modern, that’s being what you are.” All kinds of references, for me, are absolutely useless. If I want to be myself, I don’t need references. I want to be myself. Period. I really can’t see any interest in going back to a lost paradise. For me there is no paradise and there is no loss — of any kind.” p. 24
[A.F.] “The Ensemble InterContemporain is one of the foremost contemporary music groups in the world, but it came into being at a time when there was a plethora of early music ensembles, playing on original instruments. How do you feel about the craze for authenticity in classical and baroque music? I know, on the one hand, that you don’t like nostalgia and you don’t like looking back, but, on the other hand, when you conduct, you are keen to realise the composer’s intentions as exactly as possible.” p. 26
[P.B.] “I think authenticity is necessary so long as you know about it, if it is not arbitrary reconstructed. I have seen so many truths coming out of studying baroque music. What I agree with is balancing the weight of instruments. If you do a choral work of the baroque period, you know very well that there were not big choruses, but that the individuality and agility of the voices was preserved because there was a small number of singers. But if you go on from there to say that Bach had only twelve boys and therefore we must have twelve boys, I say that’s stupid, because the conditions a composer has in his time are maybe not the best conditions. And therefore what is authenticity? I am sure Wagner of 1882 would no have accepted the conditions of Riga in 1841, so to create those conditions today in order to be authentic, that I find stupid, really. And that’s the limitation of authenticity: the more you try to be authentic, the more you put the music far from real authenticity. There was a big symposium and festival of baroque music for the anniversaries of Bach and Handel in 1985, and I was asked to write an article on what I thought about authenticity. And I said that you will always muss the authenticity of the audience, you cannot recreate the audience of 1710. People who are listening to this music today have the memory of many other things which have come in between. You would have to wash their brains completely if you wanted perfect authenticity, because in 1710 they did not know what we know. From this point of view authenticity is necessarily a failure But I do agree, for instance, that if you have a continuo of course you cannot play it on a grand piano. And if you play a Mozart concerto on a big Steinway and you have a small orchestra with only two bassoons, you don’t hear them in the right proportion. But if you are playing in a big hall, with a lot of strings — for instance, Beethoven’s third symphony — well you have to have six horns instead of three, because three horns will have to blow their lungs out of the instruments to match the dynamic level. You have to be careful with this.” p. 26-27
[P.B.] “I like people who are not trying to catch the spirit of the time, but who create the spirit of the time.” p. 28