Whitsun Festival

What does Maurice Ravel have in common with Pierre Boulez? A commitment to "absolute music." This idea of a pure musical composition, postulated by Ludwig Tieck as early as 1799, inspired Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms as well as Maurice Ravel and Pierre Boulez. Each composer devised new rules with the goal of liberating tones. Ravel’s chorus in Daphnis et Chloé sings only vocalises without words. Pierre Boulez took the liberty of fine-tuning his works over time. In two premieres, composers Mark Andre and Enno Poppe pay tribute to the power of absolute music.

The theme of interactions always interested the musical thinker Pierre Boulez. In his work Répons, premiered in 1981, he harks back to the old musical tradition of a solo singer followed by a group response. Musical instruments are played and electronically-altered sounds respond – and vice versa. After forty-five minutes, the audience changes their seats and hears the same work from a different perspective, giving rise to a different interaction.

“What was extraordinary about Boulez was his kind of musical ethic. Here was a passion, a man who was on fire for music, unstoppable, and this was palpable in every second of his music-making.” These are the words of French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who at the age of fifteen had already obtained scores of Boulez's piano works and immersed himself in them completely. On the occasion of the composer’s 100^th birthday, the pianist invites us on a promenade through twentieth-century musical history, beginning his program with Boulez’s virtuoso Third Piano Sonata, which not only explores incredible sound worlds but also underscores Aimard's statement that the piano was "his" instrument.

They were masters of the scandal: Hector Berlioz in the nineteenth century and Pierre Boulez in the twentieth. Both big "B's" freed music from long-established rituals. Berlioz remembered Lord Byron's pirate novel The Corsair, paying tribute to the freethinking poet, whose daughter Ada Lovelace wrote computer programs in the early nineteenth century. Boulez was considered a math genius. In his work Mémoriale, he assigns to different wind instruments fixed sound areas, within which they go on to develop a "life of their own." They become the "explosante-fixe" of the work, leading us directly back to Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which is devoted to the musical idée fixe. And Idéfix from the Asterix comics? Also brings Berlioz to mind.

Pierre Boulez set three cycles of poems by the surrealist René Char in Baden-Baden in 1955, not successively, but interlocking them with each other like a geometrical arrangement. René Char joined the Résistance. His friends included the painter Joan Miró and philosopher Albert Camus. Artists such as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque illustrated his poems. After Le Marteau sans maître, it's time for the next generation: students from regional music universities will present their compositions commissioned by the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden on the occasion of Pierre Boulez’s 100th birthday.

It was a friendship that went down in music history: the American rock star and Pierre Boulez shared a love of experimentation and inventing new, virtuoso musical forms. Boulez even recorded an entire Zappa LP in 1984 entitled The Perfect Stranger, a testament to how close the two were. At the age of seventeen, Zappa had bought a record of Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître (see event at 6 pm). When he gave a concert in Paris in 1980, the band broke off the tour program after half an hour and intoned the Lohengrin Prelude. In the audience – in the midst of shrieking Zappa groupies – sat Pierre Boulez.

Back to the roots. Pierre Boulez grew up with the music of the French Impressionists and the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. He also frequently conducted works by the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti, who said about himself and his compositional method: "I am like a blind man in a labyrinth, feeling his way around and constantly finding new entrances and ending up in rooms that he did not even know existed."

The poet Stéphane Mallarmé regularly opened the doors of his Paris apartment on Tuesdays, welcoming the likes of Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George. Cut. Pierre Boulez first performed his work Pli selon pli, based on Mallarmé poems, in 1957 and revised it again and again until 1990. What did Mallarmé and Boulez have in common? Both aspired to create the "complete, absolute" work of art, knowing full well that this does not exist. Boulez, in the meantime, also turned his attention to the oeuvre of Claude Debussy, a composer whom he revered. The celebrated work La Mer is considered a masterpiece of musical Impressionism, and is less about a portrayal of nature than about virtuoso instrumentation of abstract musical ideas.

Pierre Boulez was famous for his precise "karate chop" when conducting. But what may have seemed a bit stiff to the audience was of considerable help to the instrumentalists: "He taught us the structure of every work very precisely," noted Emmanuel Pahud, principal flutist of the Berliner Philharmoniker. When Boulez was able to select the repertoire of the Wiener Philharmoniker, he chose Bruckner's austere monuments of Romanticism. Boulez's work Cummings ist der Dichter refers to a poem by the American E. E. Cummings, who breaks up sentences and words and arranges them on the book pages in such a way that surprising interrelations emerge.