Piano sonatas (Boulez)

Pierre Boulez composed three piano sonatas. The First Piano Sonata in 1946, a Second Piano Sonata in 1948, and a Third Piano Sonata was composed in 1955–57 with further elaborations up to at least 1963, though only two of its movements (and a fragment of another) have been published.

First Piano Sonata

In early 1945, Boulez, who had been studying with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire (Jameux 1991, 10-14), attended a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Wind Quintet, conducted by René Leibowitz (Jameux 1991, 15). Boulez later reflected: "It was a revelation to me. It obeyed no tonal laws and I found in it a harmonic and contrapuntal richness and a consequent ability to develop, extend, and vary ideas that I had not found anywhere else. I wanted, above all, to know how it was written" (Peyser 2008, 130). Boulez and a group of fellow students sought out Leibowitz and began studying privately with him. Thanks to Leibowitz, Boulez became familiar with the music of Anton Webern, who would prove to be a major influence (Jameux 1991, 15).

Boulez's First Piano Sonata was written in 1946, and was completed on the eve of his twenty-first birthday (Gable 1990, 436). Boulez had originally dedicated the piece to Leibowitz, but their relationship ended when Leibowitz tried to make "corrections" to the score (Peyser 2008, 132). According to biographer Dominique Jameux, by this point, Boulez had become disenchanted with Leibowitz's approach to twelve-tone composition (Jameux 1991, 16) (he later stated that Leibowitz "could see no further than the numbers in a tone row" (Peyser 2008, 134)), and had already absorbed what he needed in terms of musical influences (Jameux 1991, 16). Thanks to his work with Messiaen (under whose guidance he had analyzed a wide range of music, from plainchant to that of Stravinsky, as well as music of non-western cultures (Jameux 1991, 11)), Boulez inherited a rhythmic grammar involving the manipulation of rhythmic cells via augmentation, diminution, and interpolation (Boulez 1976, 14). (In a 1948 essay, Boulez wrote of his desire for "a rhythmic element... of perfect 'atonality'" (Boulez 1968, 71).) From Webern (via Leibowitz), he inherited not only the mechanics of twelve-tone methodology, but a taste for "a certain texture of intervals" (Boulez 1976, 14) as well as a kind of writing in which he attempted to unify the vertical and horizontal aspects of music (Boulez 1968, 383). (Along with the Sonatine for flute and piano and Le Visage nuptial, the Sonata was one of Boulez's first serial works (Griffiths 1978, 8).) From Schoenberg, he inherited an affinity for piano writing that exhibits "considerable density of texture and a violence of expression" (Boulez 1976, 30), in which the instrument is treated as "a percussive piano which is at the same time remarkably prone to frenzy" (Boulez 1976, 30). (In this context, Boulez had expressed admiration for the third piece of Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, as well as for the piano part in the "Die Kreuze" movement of Pierrot Lunaire (Boulez 1976, 30-31).) All of these influences are evident in the First Piano Sonata.

With the Sonata, Boulez took a step away, not only from a reliance on traditional forms, but also from the kind of thematic writing found in the Sonatine (Bennett 1986, 61), and toward a music in which clearly identifiable gestures and collections of intervals are mutated in such a way that there is no clear hierarchy between original and derived appearances (Bennett 1986, 63-65), forming what Gerald Bennett called "a three-dimensional space where all the related forms are equidistant from an imaginary centre" (Bennett 1986, 65). The work consists of two movements:

  1. Lent – Beaucoup plus allant (slow – moving along a lot more)
  2. Assez large – Rapide (quite broad – quick)

The first movement is characterized by the juxtaposition of slow, pulseless passages interrupted by wild flurries of notes (Paul Griffiths suggested that this type of writing showed the influence of music from India and Indonesia (Griffiths 2010, 7)) with faster material that moves in a jumpy, stilted way. The second movement alternates fast, toccata-like music of even note values (Griffiths noted that this music, with its percussive, evenly-emphasized rhythms, has a static feel that can also be associated with music of Asia (Griffiths 1978, 13)) with sections featuring widely-spaced single notes and lyrical, polyrhythmic two-part counterpoint in which the pulse is obscured. (Charles Rosen described the contrapuntal music as turning the piano "into an immense vibraphone" (Rosen 1986, 89).)

Overall, the work is illustrative of Boulez's employment of what he referred to as a principle of "constant renewal" (Boulez 1968, 70) in its rejection of thematic writing, its rhythmic and textural variety, and in the number of different modes of attack. In terms of serial technique, the Sonata is early evidence that his approach was personal and idiosyncratic in that large sections are built around a conflict between passages built on strictly ordered pitch material and those in which a series is treated as a reservoir of malleable cells (Jameux 1991, 235-237). (Rosen wrote that Boulez treated the series as "a nucleus to be exploded, its elements projected outwards" (Rosen 1986, 85).)

The Sonata was first performed, with Boulez at the piano, in late 1946, at a private event organized by Maurice Martenot, inventor of the ondes Martenot (Jameux 1991, 21). In the audience were composers Virgil Thomson and Nicholas Nabokov, as well as conductor Roger Désormière (Jameux 1991, 21). (Thomson later praised Boulez in a review that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (Peyser 2008, 140). Désormière would go on to become the first conductor to perform Boulez's music (Peyser 2008, 179).) Yvette Grimaud gave the first public performance of the Sonata in Paris later that year (Jameux 1991, 234). In 1949, John Cage recommended Boulez to Amphion music publishers (Gärtner 2016, 30). Boulez subsequently revised the piece prior to its publication in 1951 (Gärtner 2016, 31).

Second Piano Sonata
Pierre Boulez's Second Piano Sonata series Play  consists of three cells: A) a perfect fifth followed by a tritone and perfect fourth; B) a descending perfect fifth followed by an ascending major second, descending augmented fifth, and ascending major second; and B1) B inverted (Leeuw 2006, 166).

The Second Piano Sonata of 1947–48 is an original work which gained Boulez an international reputation. The pianist Yvette Grimaud gave the world premiere on 29 April 1950 (Nattiez 1993, 37). Through his friendship with the American composer John Cage, the work was performed in the U.S. by David Tudor in 1950 (Nattiez 1993, 77–79). The work is in four movements, lasting a total of about 30 minutes. It is notoriously difficult to play, and the pianist Yvonne Loriod "is said to have burst into tears when faced with the prospect" of performing it (Fanning n.d.). Tom Service listed it as one of ten key Boulez compositions (Service 2016).

  1. Extrêmement rapide (extremely fast)
  2. Lent (slow)
  3. Modéré, presque vif (moderate, almost lively)
  4. Vif (lively)

Third Piano Sonata

The Third Piano Sonata was first performed by the composer in Cologne and at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1958, in a "preliminary version" of its five-movement form. A subsequent Darmstadt performance by the composer, on 30 August 1959 in the Kongresssaal Mathildenhöhe, was recorded and has been released commercially on CD2 of the seven-disc boxed set, Neos 11360, Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4: Pianists ([Germany]: Neos, 2016).

One motivating force for its composition was Boulez's desire to explore aleatoric music. He published several writings, both criticizing the practice and suggesting its reformation, leading up to the composition of this sonata in 1955–57/63. Boulez has published only two complete movements of this work (in 1963), and a fragment of another (in Universal Edition 1967), the other movements having been written up to various stages of elaboration but not completed to the composer's satisfaction. Of the unpublished movements (or "formants", as Boulez calls them), described in Edwards 1989, the one titled "Antiphonie" is the most fully developed. It has been analysed by Pascal Decroupet (2004, 152–59). The formant titled "Strophe" is the one least developed since the preliminary form but:

a 1958 radio tape of the composer's Cologne performance of the Third Piano Sonata shows that the wealth of cross-reference introduced by the inclusion of the other three movements, even in their preliminary versions, contributes exponentially to the complex, multiform effect of the whole. (Edwards 1989, 5–6)

A facsimile of the manuscript of the preliminary version of the remaining formant, "Séquence", was published in Schatz and Strobel 1977, but was subsequently continued to nearly twice its original length (Edwards 1989, 4).

  1. "Antiphonie" (unpublished except for a fragment, called "Sigle" [Siglum])
  2. "Trope"
  3. "Constellation" (published only in its retrograde version, as "Constellation-Miroir")
  4. "Strophe" (unpublished)
  5. "Séquence" (unpublished, except for a facsimile of the preliminary-version manuscript)

References
  • Bennett, Gerald. 1986. "The Early Works". In Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, edited by William Glock, 41-84. London: Eulenburg Books.
  • Boulez, Pierre. 1968. Notes of an Apprenticeship, translated by Herbert Weinstock. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
  • Boulez, Pierre. 1976. Conversations with Célestin Deliège. Ernst Eulenburg Ltd. London.
  • Boulez, Pierre. 1986. Orientations. Faber and Faber. London. ISBN 0-571-14347-4.
  • Cope, David. 2001. New Directions in Music, "An Interview with Pierre Boulez; February 1969". Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.. pp. 30–32. ISBN 1-57755-108-7.
  • Decroupet, Pascal. 2004. "Floating Hierarchies: Organisation and Composition in Works by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen during the 1950s". In A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, edited by Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis, 146–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Edwards, Allen. 1989. "Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation". Tempo (New Series) no. 169 (June), pp. 4–15.
  • Fanning, David. n.d. Stravinsky: Pétrouchka – Prokofiev: Sonate No. 7 – Webern: Variationen op. 27 – Boulez: Sonate No. 2, Maurizio Pollini, included booklet. Deutsche Grammophon 447 431–2, 1995.
  • Gable, David. 1990. "Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition". Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 3 (Autumn), pp. 426–456.
  • Gärtner, Susanne. 2016. "Traces of an Apprenticeship: Pierre Boulez's Sonatine (1946/1949)". In Pierre Boulez Studies, edited by Edward Campbell and Peter O'Hagan, 25-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Griffiths, Paul. 1978. Boulez. Oxford University Press. New York.
  • Griffiths, Paul. 2010. Modern Music and After. Oxford University Press. New York.
  • Harbinson, William G. 1989. "Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez's Third Sonata". Tempo (New Series) no. 169 (June), pp. 16–20.
  • Jameux, Dominique. 1991. Pierre Boulez, translated by Susan Bradshaw. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Leeuw, Ton de. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure, translated from the Dutch by Stephen Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.ISBN 9053567658.
  • Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1993. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48558-4.
  • Peyser, Joan. 2008. To Boulez and Beyond: Revised Edition. Scarecrow Press. Lanham, MD.
  • Rosen, Charles. 1986. "The Piano Music". In Pierre Boulez: A Symposium, edited by William Glock, 85-97. London: Eulenburg Books.
  • Ruch, Allen B. 2004. "Pierre Boulez: Third Piano Sonata; Répons". themodernword.com .Archived 4 February 2013, from http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/music/boulez.html (accessed 25 January 2017)
  • Schatz, Ingeborg, and Hilde Strobel (eds.). 1977. Heinrich Strobel „Verehrter Meister, lieber Freund“: Begegnungen mit Komponisten unserer Zeit. With photographs by Heinrich Strobel. Stuttgart and Zurich: Belser Verlag.
  • Service, Tom. 2016. "Pierre Boulez: 10 Key Works, Selected by Tom Service". The Guardian (6 January; accessed 4 April 2020) ISSN 0261-3077.
  • Universal Edition. 1967. UE Buch der Klaviermusik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Universal Edition.

Further reading
  • Decroupet, Pascal. 2012. "Le rôle des clés et algorithmes dans le décryptage analytique: L'exemple des musiques sérielles de Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen et Bernd Alois Zimmermann". Revue de Musicologie 98, no. 1:221–46.
  • Losada, Catherine C. 2014. "Complex Multiplication, Structure, and Process: Harmony and Form in Boulez’s Structures II". Music Theory Spectrum 36, no. 1 (Spring): 86–120.
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