Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez said the opera houses should be blown up, then spent thirty years conducting in them. He was a provincial engineer's son who abandoned mathematics for the Paris Conservatoire and Messiaen's class, and made his name at twenty-five as the most aggressive polemicist of the post-war avant-garde - the essay Schoenberg is Dead, published the year after Schoenberg died, argued that the twelve-tone method had been wasted on old forms and that Webern was the real inheritance. Structures and Le Marteau sans maitre extended serial control to rhythm and dynamics. He was also a conductor of the first rank, precise rather than expressive, and ran the BBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, where subscribers hated the programming. In 1970 Pompidou invited him to found IRCAM, an underground institute in Paris for research into music and computers, which he directed for twenty years and which produced Repons. He kept revising his own works and left many formally unfinished. His Ring at Bayreuth in 1976 was booed for years and is now on record as a landmark. He conducted the premiere of the complete three-act Lulu in 1979, finishing what Berg had left. Sur Incises, Repons and Dialogue de l ombre double are the mature IRCAM works. He founded the Ensemble intercontemporain in 1976, which is still the model for a permanent new-music orchestra. He was refused entry to the United States for a period over a decades-old misunderstanding about a remark, and was briefly detained in Switzerland in 2001 over the opera-house line, which he had made in an interview in 1967. He won twenty-six Grammy awards. He kept composing and revising until the last years and died in Baden-Baden at ninety.

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