The Irrepressible Avant-Gardist With a Cause : At 64, Pierre Boulez still delights in his ‘Robespierre’ image

A critic once called Pierre Boulez the “Robespierre” of music, after the radical French revolutionary leader during the bloody days of the Terror.

Indeed, Boulez was an angry young man. He complained that the classical tradition was “a weight on one’s very being.” His early pieces scorned sentiment, employing a complicated serial technique with rhythm and dynamics based on mathematical formulas. Performers were sometimes given options of what to play next. He was a rebel who brought computer terminals onto the performing stage and used them to interact with the musicians.

“I have a temperment that enjoys making rules for the pleasure of breaking them,” he once said. A French critic in 1980 charged that Boulez was busy “preparing the death knell of the music of our Christian civilization.”

Boulez, 64, still delights in the rebel role. He gladly helped embarrass the French government after Daniel Barenboim’s dismissal earlier this year as director of the new Bastille Opera. The Bastille Opera, now in the final stages of construction in the square where the storming of the Bastille prison took place 200 years ago this July 14, was supposed to be the centerpiece of the bicentennial celebration planned by the Socialist government.

Barenboim’s firing, however, shocked the international musical community. Composers and conductors rallied to his side. Boulez, vice president for artistic affairs at the Bastille, quickly quit in protest, firing off a devastating critique of the government’s bungling in a letter to Le Monde.

“Conditions could not be worse to begin an opera house,” Boulez said in a recent interview with The Times. “There is no administration. Everything is improvised. There are 44 vacancies in the orchestra, including several important soloists. No musical director has been named.”

As a result, the huge glass-sheathed opera building will be ready by July 14, but the performers will not. The government has been unable to hire anyone to replace either Barenboim or Boulez. The music program is in limbo. No performances are envisioned until at least 1990.

This suits Boulez just fine. The government needed to be taught a lesson for firing his friend Barenboim. And, despite his Robespierre image, he never really liked the idea of celebrating the revolution of the guillotine.

“As I said in London recently,” he commented with a mischievous smile, “I prefer the people who cut off the heads to the people who celebrate the people who cut off the heads.” Boulez has had a lot of fun with the hoopla over the French Revolution. “People only celebrate revolutions when they are no longer dangerous,” he said recently,

In a way, as a critic at the Independent pointed out after a BBC-sponsored Boulez Festival in January, the same thing can be said about Boulez’s own revolutionary career. Boulez is accepted enough now that he is no longer considered dangerous or a threat to Judeo-Christian civilization.

“There is a genuine affection for Boulez as conductor and guru,” critic Robert Maycock wrote, “like a feared politician who has mellowed into an elder statesman.”

So despite the recent furor at the Bastille, it is a kinder, gentler Boulez who comes to Los Angeles for a three weekend festival with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at UCLA starting Saturday. (He’ll also make his fourth appearance as music director at the Ojai Festival, June 2-4, conducting a program each day.)

For one thing, his pioneering work at the Institut pour la Recherche et Coordination Accoustique-Music (IRCAM) at the Pompidou Center in Paris is going well. IRCAM, generously funded by the French government, is one of the leading centers of computer music in the world, along with Stanford University, UC San Diego, CalArts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to Boulez, IRCAM is on the verge of achieving “real-time” interaction between his performers and the computers. During his visit to California he hopes to talk with Apple creator Steven P. Jobs about using his NEXT computer at the Paris center.

“They have a machine we want to adapt to our needs,” Boulez said. “Before, we were talking to the machine only in terms of figures--very technical language. Now the programs are more sophisticated. More and more the musician, using his intuition, can talk directly to the machine. Instead of a series of figures, he can have a curve or a diagram that speaks to his eyes, even the direct transference of pitch to the screen. The machines are made more for the musician. The musician understands that he no longer has to go into the machine.”

During a break in rehearsals for his Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, Boulez said he gets a special kick out of Southern California, where he has visited regularly since 1957.

“I like Los Angeles very much. The two cities I like the most in America are the two most contrasting cities--the vertical New York and the horizontal Los Angeles.” He even likes the Southern California freeways. “In Los Angeles,” he said, “if you are driving on the freeway, you are like dolphins in front of a boat--always crossing.”

Boulez served as director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971-77. But his musical ties to Southern California are in some ways longer and deeper.

In 1965, he chose L.A. for the premiere of his new composition, “Eclat,” and he visited in 1986, following the death of his close friend and supporter, Lawrence Morton, father of the Monday Evening Concerts at the L.A. County Museum of Art and one of the founders of the Ojai Festival.

Two of Boulez’s most important influences--composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg--were longtime L.A. residents. Boulez worked with Stravinsky there periodically for 10 years, 1957-1967. He is also a close friend of L.A. Philharmonic managing director Ernest Fleischmann.

For this California visit, Boulez said he plans to perform works from both Stravinksy and Schoenberg as well as Gustav Mahler. The concerts are loosely organized to show his musical roots. “If you listen carefully,” he said, “you can hear a relationship between them.”

Fans of Boulez’s own work may be disappointed to know that he will give only one concert containing his material and not his best known work still in progress, “Repons.”

The 45-minute “Repons,” his most ambitious effort to achieve “real-time” computer music, was scheduled for completion this year. “We have a project with Ernest Fleischmann to do “Repons” with his orchestra. But I want to add a part to make it into a full evening.” This effort, he said, might take him until 1991.

Boulez was interviewed in a dormitory auditorium at Cite Universitaire, the main Parisian university student housing complex located on the southern edge of the city. On one side of the modern dormitory are beautiful landscaped grounds with trees and flowering shrubs. On the other side was the noisy, grimy peripherique freeway that circles Paris.

Afterward, he agreed to be photographed outside. Given the choice of the park or the freeway as a backdrop, he chose the freeway. For Boulez, who lives in one of the few high-rise apartment buildings in Paris, the freeway seemed a more appropriate symbol of his persona than the pretty park.

He claims that despite his newly won image as an elder statesman of music, he is still a rebel at heart. Only his rebellion is not as obvious as it once was.

“I would like to make a comparison that seems to me natural,” he said. “It is like a river. If you are a young stream in a mountain and you are going down fast (he makes a quick slashing motion with his hand), then you are really doing a lot of splashing. Then after you accumulate more water you become larger. The current is very strong but you don’t see it anymore.”