Pierre Boulez

At 90 years old, Pierre Boulez physical status not available right now. We will update Pierre Boulez's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Pierre Louis Boulez CBE (1926 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor, editor, and developer of musical organizations.

He was one of the key figures of the postwar classical music industry. Boulez, the son of an engineer, worked at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, as well as privately with Andrée Valiant and René Leibowitz.

He began his career in the late 1940s as the music director of Paris's Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company.

He emerged as a young composer in the 1950s as a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing a vital role in the rise of integral serialism and controlled chance music.

He pioneered the electronic revolution of instrumental music in real time from the 1970s to the present day.

His tendency to revise older compositions meant that his body of completed works was rather small, but it did include works that were regarded as twentieth-century music's finest works, such as Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, and Répons.

Some people criticized him as a dogmatist because of his uncompromising dedication to modernism and his trenchant, polemical tone in which he articulated his thoughts on music. Boulez, a composer, became one of the most influential conductors of his generation.

He served as chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra over a lifetime of more than 60 years.

He appeared regularly with many of the world's top orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the London Symphony Orchestra.

He was best known for his performances of the twentieth century's music, including Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartók, and the Second Viennese School, as well as those of his contemporaries, including Lio Berio and Carter.

The Jahrhundertring—the production of Wagner's Ring cycle for the centennial of the Bayreuth Festival—and the world premiere of Alban Berg's Lulu's three-act version of Lulu's Lulu were among his performances in the opera house.

His recorded history is extensive. He founded a number of musical institutions in Paris, including the Domaine Musical, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Cité de la Musique, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy in Switzerland.

Character and personal life

Boulez, a young man, was a fiery, often adversarial figure. "His vivaciousness, a particular blend of intransigence and humour, his manner of love and insolence, all of which had drawn us near," Jean-Louis Barrault, who knew him in his twenties. Later, Messiaen said, "He was in revolt against everything." Moreover, Boulez grew hostile toward Messiaen at one point, describing his Trois petites liturgies de la presence divine as "brother music" and saying that the Turangalîla-Symphony made him vomit. It was five years before the two nations were reestablished.

Alex Ross, a New Yorker, referred to him as a bully in a 2000 article. "I was definitely a bully," Boulez said. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The establishment's hostility to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very good. "You have to fight against your culture at certain times." Boulez's statement in 1952 that "any musician who hasn't experienced — I don't say understood, but really felt — is the greatest example of this. "All of his work is irrelevant to the needs of his time."

On the other hand, those who knew him well expressed their admiration both to individuals and organizations. When his mentor, conductor Roger Désormière, was paralysed by a stroke in 1952, Boulez sent scripts to French Radio in Désormière's name, so that the older man could collect the fee. Jean Vermeil, a writer who worked with Boulez in the 1990s, discovered "a Boulez who was worried about the wellbeing of a musician in the Strasbourg orchestra, learned by name, and who responded with admiration or joy" in each individual's news. In later life, he was known for his charisma and personal warmth. Gerard McBurney said that it "depended on his twinkling eyes, his infectious schoolboy giggle, and his inability to say what the other person would not expect" in terms of humor.

Boulez read extensively and cited Proust, Joyce, and Kafka as three of his influences, with Proust, Joyce, and Kafka being among the most influential influences. He had a lifelong passion for the visual arts. He wrote extensively about Paul Klee and collected contemporary art, including works by Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Nicolas de Stal, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, all of whom he knew personally. He had close links with three of the world's most influential scholars, including Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes.

When he was at home in Baden-Baden, he spent the late afternoons and much of the weekends walking in the Black Forest. He owned an old farmhouse in France's Alpes-de-Hautes-Provence department and constructed another, modern home on the same property in the late 1970s.

"In its obituary," the New York Times announced that "in his private life he was closely guarded." Boulez told Joan Peyser that a passionate affair in 1946 was "intense and terrorized," which Peyser said was the catalyst for the period's "wild, courageous works." Jeanne, Boulez's sister, told Christian Merlin that the affair took place with the actress Maria Casarès, but that there is no evidence to back this up. Norman Lebrecht, a bookworm who knew Boulez, guessed that he was gay, blaming the fact that he shared his Baden-Baden home with Hans Messner, who he occasionally referred to as his valet. Alex Ross' portrait for The New Yorker, which appeared shortly after Boulez's death under the name The Magus, described him as "affable, implacable, unknowable."

Source