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“... the last century and into the next. One’s first thought, though, is bound to be: do Fauré and Boulez have anything in common at all? Could two composers linked by nationality ever have seemed at first sight so antipodean? Fauré the Proustian saloniste (an important model for Vinteuil) and Boulez the blazing ...”

“... Boulez has been the omnipresent conscience of post-war music. He has applied to his own music rigid criteria of method and historical validity, and revised many works again and again, often withdrawing them altogether. He has become a martyr figure somewhat after the fashion of Schoenberg, also self-appointed to a role of revolutionary innovator; the special prize Boulez has paid is not increasing isolation but creative sterility – compositions have flowed ever more slowly from his pen ...”

“... Pierre Boulez took his final bow in the opera pit last summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the production was the music chosen: Leoš Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead, written in 1928, the final year of his life. Boulez seemed a little ambivalent about the choice ...”

“... much of 1949 in Paris, where he met Alice B. Toklas, Olivier Messiaen, Alberto Giacometti and Pierre Boulez, whose recently completed Piano Sonata No. 2 and ensemble work Polyphonie X were considered de rigueur Modernism. When he returned to New York the pair began a correspondence – anthologised in unabridged form as The ...”

“... Altogether more problematic for him are the medals for valour in the face of the Modernist Enemy (Boulez, Birtwistle, William Glock, and so forth) that are now readily available and all-too-lightly awarded. False recognition and media success on those crypto-political terms could be far more ignominious and damaging to a real artist than the neglect which our ...”

“... convincing, living interpretation.One of the most persistent critics of the authenticity drive was Pierre Boulez. ‘What is authenticity anyway?’ he wrote in 1988.The more we tire ourselves out searching for it, the more it escapes us. Minds that have not experienced the era of the works that are being reconstituted cannot possibly know their reality ...”

“... living painter in the world’.A conversation of January 1950, reported by Staël’s friend Pierre Lecuire, does something to attenuate, or at least to account for, the seemingly paradoxical character of Staël’s commitment to abstraction. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a glue-pot and an ashtray, ‘here are objects, and this is just what I don’t ...”

“... the Seventies, the report that had led to the loss of several orchestras and the start of Radio 3, Pierre Boulez was appointed as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and embarked on a series of revelatory discussion concerts at the Round House – although they failed to impress Newby’s successor, Stephen Hearst. Hearst wished, on the ...”

“... reputation as a forum for advanced musical debate, and it was here that Messiaen first got to know Pierre Boulez and Yvonne Loriod. Boulez has remained a committed partisan to this day, despite his disapproval of certain aspects of Messiaen’s music. Loriod’s technical ability was such that Messiaen found it quite ...”

“... Accordingly, Glock brought in more orchestras and foreign conductors (he particularly admired Pierre Boulez), and extended the repertoire backwards to the Renaissance and forwards into the second half of the 20th century. This meant serious confrontation with Sargent, as Glock reduced the number of concerts that he was allowed to conduct, and also ...”

“... and meaning itself – was no longer new. Like the total serialism championed by his contemporary Pierre Boulez, it seemed all the more dated for heralding a future that had failed to arrive. In the US, where he’d once enjoyed a cultish notoriety alongside Beckett and Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately ...”

“... had its disastrous French premiere – a scandal of choral under-rehearsal for which blame fell on Pierre Boulez. Craft is convinced that Walsh has cribbed his own Stravinsky writings: more than 25,000 words by his calculation, though that must include the deleted quotations from the conversation books. He berates Walsh for putting too much matter into ...”

“... and awards were distributed, only occasionally earning the well-deserved anger of mavericks like Pierre Boulez, who denounced Nabokov and his fellow conspirators with healthy insults about their dishonesty and mediocrity. Saunders estimates that $200 million were spent in the effort, wherever possible, to buy intellectual support for the US, to get ...”

“... with which, when conducting, he could hear each member of the orchestra anticipated the prodigious Pierre Boulez, a composer-conductor who has similarly failed (so far) to find a suitable opera libretto, and of whom it could probably be said, as the composer-conductor Julius Benedict said of Mendelssohn, that he communicates his conception of a work ‘as ...”

“... the Score, famous for publishing the most controversial of the postwar avant-garde manifestos – Boulez’s essay ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’. Glock recalled how Keller’s first letters to him were ‘invariably aggressive’ (‘Your Schoenberg issue. Could have been worse, could have been better’), but – as was so often the case with Keller – they had ...”