Boulez Ensemble XVI

Furious Handicraft

Pierre Boulez and Le Marteau sans maître

Johannes Knapp

On the banks of the river Seine between Pont Marie and the Louvre and along the Quai de la Tournelle and Quai Voltaire, bibliophile bon vivants—known to Parisians as bouquinistes—run an impressive open-air bookstore. Novels, philosophical essays, biographies, volumes of poetry, postcards, historical etchings and art catalogues (and today also refrigerator magnets, Eiffel Tower replicas made in China, and other souvenirs) wait in hundreds of dark green folding boxes for browsing passers-by—nearly regardless of the weather.

According to his own recollection, it was in the spring of 1946 that Pierre Boulez, just turned 21, saw a name wink at him from one of the stalls that he recognized from a literary journal: René Char. It was Seuls demeurent, a volume of poetry published a few months before the end of the war in Gallimard’s famous Collection blanche. To Boulez, who had left the Paris Conservatoire shortly before to become music director of the Renaud-Barrault theater troupe, reading Char’s poetry felt like the revelation of his own identity. Fascinated by the novelty of the concentrated, yet abundantly free poetic language, he quickly set to work composing. This soon bore its first fruits: Le Visage nuptial (1946/47), a cantata for soprano, contralto, two ondes martenot, piano, and percussion. The central focus of this youthful work is the eponymous love poem from Seuls demeurent. Usually rendered in English as The Nuptial Face, the poem oscillates between free verse and alexandrine meter. The music underscores the tale; it was clearly invented to suit the text, leaning upon it and following its course.

After conjunction came parallelism: in Le Soleil des eaux (1947/48, “The Sun of the Waters”), a radio play, several far-flung musical ideas Boulez had already developed are conjoined through Char’s text. Alain Trutat, a close friend of Paul Éluard and later the founding figurehead of the radio station France Culture, had asked Boulez, still unknown at the time, to write the music for Char’s theatrical radio play. The piece is about fishers rising in revolt against the construction of a paper mill on the banks of their river. By the time Le Soleil des eaux was broadcast on the French airwaves in April 1948, Boulez and Char, who was 18 years the composer’s senior, had met in person and become friends. Even more than four decades later, in 1990, Boulez would speak of “substantial allies” in the newspaper Le Monde. In the same article, he asked: why this poet, that poem, at that very moment in the composer’s development? By way of an answer, he quoted Blaise Pascal, who has God say in his Pensées: “You would not seek me if you had not found me.” Which we may take to mean: in the deep innermost of the maturing musician’s personality, Char’s poetic words released something that was already there, yet hidden. It gave wing to Boulez’s creative powers, allowing him to realize his potential and accompanying him on the path into the unknown tomorrow.

In early October 1952, Boulez wrote a long letter to Belgian fellow composer Henri Pousseur from Montreal, where he was on tour with the Renaud-Barrault troupe. In it, he frankly reviewed his participation in the Darmstadt Summer Courses of 1951, reporting on his early encounters with electronic music in Bonn and Cologne and drawing razor-sharp conclusions about his own work, first and foremost Polyphonie X for 18 solo instruments. Neither a Roman numeral nor a letter, the X in the work’s title symbolizes a radically conceptual school of musical thought; it represents the mutual cross-linking of all structural parameters, including sound color. The compositional rationale behind this was to eradicate any trace of tradition, to make a clean slate of all heritage, or—to freely borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes—to begin at the zero point of music. “We wanted to bring a new Gospel,” Boulez said in an interview a few years before his death, looking back upon the post-war period. This striving culminated in 1951, in his Structures Ia for two pianos. Starting with strictly dodecaphonic tonal material that his former teacher Olivier Messiaen had established in his piano etude Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (composed in Darmstadt in June 1949), he developed it in all ways imaginable: retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion, durations between a 32nd note and a dotted quarter, dynamic values ranging from quadruple piano to quadruple forte, ten different variations of pianistic attack, layering of tone rows to the point of achieving two sets of three voices, and so on and so forth—like mechanical objects that can be moved in any direction. Such serial rigorousness, however, soon even got on Boulez’s own nerves.

“I have begun writing a ‘little work’ setting poems by René Char,” Boulez announced in the same letter. One movement of this “little work” he had already set down on paper before the crossing to North America: L’Artisanat furieux (in Paul Griffiths’s translation, Furious Handicraft) for contralto and alto flute. Char’s poem, vision of a journey to imaginary worlds, has been set here in a direct, simple, and supremely elegant manner. Matching the sonorities of the four lines of text, Boulez invented a filigree of melismatic lines. Occasionally, one single vowel is sung to an entire twelve-tone row. It is hard to imagine anything further removed from the ascetic Structures with its daring tonal leaps. As if Boulez had decided to follow his provocative obituary Schoenberg Is Dead (July 1951) with a musical “Long live (the young) Schoenberg!”, the ornamented vocal line and the contrapuntal flute accompaniment form an intentional allusion to the seventh song (Der kranke Mond) of Pierrot lunaire.

As a second piece, Boulez chose an extremely short poem, Bourreaux de solitude. Here he searched for a completely different relation between words and tone. This time, the voice is embedded within the ensemble sound, only rising above it for short sequences in order to articulate the text. In contrast to L’Artisanat furieux, the vocal line is not melismatic, but mainly syllabic (in principle, each syllable of text has a note assigned to it). Boulez’s intense reading of Char also yielded Bel édifice et les pressentiments. Again, the poem assumes another meaning: it appears at turning points in the musical action, thereby delineating its sections. Occasionally this leads to the impression of rivalry between voice and ensemble.

In the remaining pieces, Boulez might have continued on this path: music for each of the poems, as in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire with its three times seven pieces and its 21 poems. That, however, may have reeked too much of a romantic song cycle to him—Boulez had a lot more in mind. He sketched his ambitious endeavor on the margin of a piece of music paper with an abandoned clean copy of the beginning of Structures Ib: a nine-piece cyclical work, composed of three smaller, interlocked cycles.. And so he framed the textual setting L’Artisanat furieux (III) with an instrumental prelude (I) and a postlude (VII). For Bourreaux de solitude (VI) he composed three instrumental commentaries (II, IV, VIII)—resonances of the text in music, which, in turn, reflects the poem. Like a sculptural frieze, the percussion parts run through the four related pieces bearing all the even numerals. Once again, in the summer of 1954, Boulez was on tour with the Renaud-Barrault troupe, this time in South America. By the time of their return, he had assembled “rich pickings of ‘exotic’ instruments” (Boulez in a letter to Stockhausen). He decided to fundamentally revise the percussion parts. The xylophone, big brother of the West African balafon, seem exotic as well. The guitar, on the other hand, occasionally evokes Japanese courtly music. How profoundly the European language of sound was enriched by non-European soundscapes! The third cycle, finally, only consist of two parts, the core piece (V) and its “double” (IX). Boulez ingeniously deconstructs and re-amalgamates the three cycles. (Their structure may be understood by observing the order of works as printed on page 3.) A vocal core piece is never followed by an instrumental postlude, and comments never appear in direct proximity to the poem in question.

In the final movement—the “double” of Bel édifice et les pressentiments and, at the same time, a microcosm of the entire work—Boulez again makes reference to the music of the other two cycles. The stage now belongs to all involved. Their relationships are clarified: the voice and flute, both in the alto range, are connected by human breath, while flute and viola have monodic playing in common. When the viola’s strings are plucked, it resembles a guitar, which again builds a bridge to the vibraphone, etc. Char’s poem now falls somewhere between singing and speaking (another allusion to Pierrot lunaire). No sooner have the last words been spoken than the voice retreats, with mouth closed, into the ensemble sound. The flute, on the other hand, which accompanied the voice in L’Artisanat furieux, now comes to the fore, slipping into the role of the vocal protagonist. Here, Boulez’s treatment of Char’s text is reminiscent of the fate of the Roman city of Pompeii, where all life was extinguished by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, but the deadly rain of ashes and especially the streams of lava also impressively conserved the former life. Consider the hoof-prints of a horse that archaeologists only discovered this summer, or the human traces enabling us to reconstruct the fateful last day of a patrician family. Boulez, in his own words: “If I choose a poem as anything other than a frame for the weaving of ornamental arabesques, if I choose it as an irrigation source for my music and thereby an amalgam in which the poem becomes ‘centre and absence’ of the whole body of sound, I cannot restrict myself simply to the affective relationship between these two entities; a whole web of relationships will make itself felt, including, among others, the affective relationships, but also the entire mechanism of the poem, from its pure sound to its intelligible organization.”

Anyone eager to “understand” the mysterious work— which had its enthralling world premiere in June 1955, after 49 rehearsals (the heyday of public radio…), in Baden-Baden —must also confront the question of the meaning of the poems. It is a question not easily answered. The title of Char’s volume of poetry alone, which Boulez adopted for “his” Marteau, along with the three poems contained in it, is open to several interpretations: it may be translated literally as “The Hammer without a Master”. Paul Griffiths, one of the world’s leading writers on Boulez’s work, decided upon “The Hammer Unmastered.” Is the title, then, a surrealist metaphor for the rejection of rational control? Is it an allusion to the ancient mythical figure of the smith? Or a reference to the anarchistic motto “Ni Dieu ni maître!” (“Neither God nor master!”)? Is the poet paying homage to late Nietzsche (“Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert” —“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”)? Possibly, all these explanations are correct, and then some. The writer Peter Handke, a passionate translator of Char into German, once remarked that one does not necessarily understand Char’s texts, but upon reading them, one sees differently. In this regard, he says, Char resembles the pre-Socratic philosophers. In an interview a few weeks ago, François-Xavier Roth, whose remarks are reflected in this program note, said about the question of content: “Like the music, the poetry points beyond the merely illustrative. Words become sound, also meaning, but it is hermetically locked into the word, like an insect in luminous amber.” Boulez’s musical creation does not limit the richness of poetic meaning; it is not an interpretation of the text in sounds. His music and Char’s poems meet in “fruitful camaraderie” (Char), which may serve to reveal structural affinities. Char’s poetry bears a similar relation to a dry-point etching Picasso created for the title page of the revised edition of Char’s Marteau in 1945: two works that claim autonomy, yet enrich each other. The ballet choreography for Boulez’s Marteau that Maurice Béjart created in 1973 at Milan’s La Scala with six dancers, a ballerina, and Boulez on the conductor’s podium, is another example of the free interconnection of the arts, at eye level.