Pierre Boulez, emblem of the musical avant-garde – Herald Tribune

  EFE. Paris.

 

 From the rubble of World War II, a handful of European composers had the audacity to want to reinvent the music and break everything set: perhaps the most feared and respected of them was Pierre Boulez

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 French genius, who died in Germany at age 90, both innovative works such as his peculiar way of conducting the orchestra will be remembered.

 

 When the name of Boulez rule, this will always also accompanied by his bluster and high-sounding declarations, in which the same presumed dead the father of twelve-tone Arnold Schoenberg called “blow up the opera houses.”

 

 So commonplace these days run out to define as “rebel”, “enfant terrible” or any adjective to make it clear that his was building something new.

 

 At age eight, Pierre Boulez and could play pieces by Frédéric Chopin on the piano, but its capabilities go much further and extended to physics or mathematics.

 

 However, I always wanted to hide these qualities, as I remembered the newspaper Le Monde, to prevent his father forced him to quit music in order to focus on scientific studies.

 

 Born on March 25, 1925 in Montbrison Boulez at 19 entered the Paris Conservatoire, where Olivier Messiaen and Andrée Vaurabourg him into dodecaphonism.

 

 However, it was distancing Boulez Messiaen, who burst into several of his legendary temper tantrums and in 1946 composed his first piano sonata, a radical work while he earned his living playing light pieces at the Folies Bergeres.

 

 Soon, in 1955, he premiered “Marteau sans maitre” (“Hammer without owner”), the centerpiece of twentieth century music, which crystallizes the challenge of the new generation of European composers to royalties.

 

 If anything distinguishes Boulez of his other contemporary artists is his work as a conductor and as a teacher, always led by the desire to disseminate a music difficult to appreciate without preparation.

 

 As a director, he remains faithful to a repertoire in shining Debussy, Ravel and, above all, Mahler, along with other big names like Bartok, Stravinsky or Schoenberg himself.

 

 In 1971 he landed in front of the New York Philharmonic, with high hopes of renewing his repertoire after the passage of Leonard Bernstein.

 

 His six years as head of the New York institution fail to give the revolutionary shift that intended and in 1977, called by the then French President Georges Pompidou, returns to France to head the new Institute for Research and Coordination Acoustic-Music, better known as Ircam.

 

 Its labyrinthine pieces (aspired to follow his music as a road had no end) become commonplace in concert halls in France and dedicates his efforts to the creation of his last major work: the Music City in the district XX of the French capital.