Lecture at the ceremony to award an honorary doctorate
Ladies and gentlemen, the honour you are giving me today gives me the opportunity to reflect on what is to me a sensitive topic: the close connections or relatively weak relationships that exist between cultures – in this case, between musical cultures. This explains why I was very pleased to accept the award which brought us here together today.
I am a member of a generation raised mostly during the Second World War, that is, at a time of catastrophes, a time when borders were closed, which made communication between cultures extremely difficult, almost impossible. Under the pressure of their situation, each country turned inside: the result was that this exceptional situation conditioned movement and exchanges.
After the war ended, my generation, twenty year of age at that time, driven by curiosity, sought above all one thing: to break free from this closure, to open wide the door to knowledge and learn about other cultures and what happened to them. And so the famous Darmstadt was born, where many different nationalities met, where traditions and views were confronted. It was the best place to achieve a lasting openness of spirit, a desire to discover, seek and deepen cultural relationships.
The award you offer me today is awarded in a city that is associated specifically with one man and one culture. The city is Brno and the name is Janáček – a composer I discovered quite late, because during my studies at the Paris Conservatory, and despite the fact that my professor was Olivier Messiaen, a man of a broad horizons, there was no mention of Janáček. Only much later and by chance did I discover the score of The Diary of One Who Disappeared a friendly library. After reading it, I immediately realised, if not the breadth of the composer’s genius, its originality for sure. In this way, I gradually discovered other works that I either programmed or played; the last was “From the House of the Dead”, realised with director Patrice Chéreau.
The deeper I delved into this work, the more I adopted to it, I literally understood its uniqueness; a kind of meteorite with fascinating strangeness and oddity. Like all composers of his level, who recreate culture and at the same time are not completely adaptable to it. And if they have the ability to influence the direction of thoughts and musical sensibility, they remain without direct followers, because they are completely exceptional in their craft. Is it necessary to look for this peculiarity in order to reach a place where we start to understand it? It is certain that in research there is an intentional constant subject to the will, but – and so is the case of Janáček – there is also intuition, a certain spontaneity directing the research. I have seen sketches where the composer recorded the noises of nature or the modulation of conversation; it tries in some way to reconcile, at least for a fleeting moment, two different speeches. In my opinion, it is in this stubbornness where the greatest originality of Janáček’s thought and expression lies, the stubbornness with which he takes into account the common sources he “personifies”.
Therefore, Janáček is a purely local phenomenon and at the same time he is an exceptional representative of the universal. From this point of view, he is a model only a few can match, a cultural heritage, because cultures are not afraid of any confrontations and mutual exchanges, on the contrary, they become stronger and more individual precisely the more open this cycle of ideas is.
I have already told you this: I accept with great joy the honour you are bestowing me with today, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this honour, but I also thank you for enriching my own cultural heritage.
Pierre BOULEZ
Vienna, June 2009
Translated by Alexandra Noubelová
Laudatio delivered by doc. MgA. Vít Spilka
Your Magnificence, Spectabiles, Honorabiles, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Guests.
It is my great honour and pleasure to present a proposal at this ceremonial meeting of the JAMU Artistic Board on behalf of the Faculty of Music to award an honorary doctorate to one of the most important personalities of the contemporary world of music, a personality who has dedicated its life to the creation and interpretation of modern art, a personality who, among other things, significantly helped bring Janáček’s compositions to the world’s most prestigious stages – a composer and conductor, Pierre Boulez. It is a great honour for the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts to award a doctorate to a man who, throughout his life, fought for the ideas of modern artistic thought with incredible diligence and tenacity, proving that contemporary art can intensely appeal to the man of today and fulfil his often insufficient spiritual dimension.
Although it is assumed that the life of a world-famous artist such as Boulez would be generally known, allow me a small summary. Before joining the Paris Conservatory, he studied mathematics in Lyon, and later during his studies in Paris he at first studied the twelve-tone technique, where he was inspired mainly by René Leibowitz, but his teacher of musical analysis, Olivier Messiaen, had a great influence on Boulez as well. His classmates in Messiaen’s class included Karlheinz Stockhausen or Iannis Xenakis, both of whom later made a significant contribution to the further development of music in the 20th century.
Stimulated by Messiaen’s research into the independence of individual musical parameters, Boulez applied in his composition in the early 1950s the serial techniques not only to pitches, but also to rhythm, dynamics and articulation. This laid the foundations of multi-serialism, which was becoming a new international style at the time. It was especially Boulez’s work at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where the leading personalities – i.e. Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen – formed the “Darmstadt School”. Boulez acted as the main spokesman for the artistic direction, who did not want to be abused by any propaganda. The 4-chamber cantata Le Marteau sans maître (1954) became a huge success, in which Boulez managed to combine a new, serial musical language with extraordinary sensitivity and poetic impact.
Ever since, Pierre Boulez has been ranked among the leading European composers and his work was constantly growing – although not large in number, his pieces are of fundamental importance and masterfully crafted. In his musical performances, Boulez did not limit himself to classical instruments, but soon began to combine them with electronics and advanced technologies.
However, Pierre Boulez’s musical activity was not limited to composing: already in his student years he displayed extraordinary conducting skills, which became apparent by accident when he played as a substitute with the theatre ensemble of Jean Louis Barrault. Under Barrault’s patronage, Boulez founded the Domaine musical concert series, which staged contemporary music without any state support.
As a conductor, he suddenly rose to among the world’s best conductors, which was evidenced by his engagements with the world’s best orchestras, such as the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. He has been associated with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for years, and recent, he has been frequently collaborating especially with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic. His also appeared at other venues, such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and, from 2005, he was a regular at the Staatskapelle Berlin. At the forefront of his conducting focus were mainly those authors who formed the very basis of the twentieth century’s music: Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Béla Bartók and Olivier Messiaen. He also gained respect for his excellent interpretations of the works of classicist and romanticist composers, especially for the staging of Richard Wagner’s operas. Pierre Boulez was always conducting hundreds of recordings and concerts and he did so with enviable vitality – for example, he was the first conductor in history to memorise Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by heart – and he did it in his eighties! Boulez’s conducting is characteristic by its precision and great respect for the score, but at the same time it is a manifestation of a composer who seeks interesting and revealing moments in the work of others from his own point of view.
Boulez’s conducting activities are also closely linked to organisational activities: in 1976 he founded the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which served as a model for other ensembles of this kind; he established the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, which has been opened in 1977 and represents one of the world’s most important music centres.
As a conductor and organiser, Pierre Boulez has always advocated for the works of others. He then clarified his own works and attitudes in his writings. His juvenile passion sometimes went hand in hand with explosive polemical texts, but most of them dealt with issues of compositional technique and contemporary musical aesthetics. Today, these texts are one of the basic documents of contemporary composing thought.
Pierre Boulez is a universal musical personality, unparalleled in history – not only a leading composer, but also a first-class performer, an excellent theorist and music writer, a prominent organiser and promoter of contemporary music, as well as an admired educator. He is the only who remains of his generation, a strong generation which developed the concept of “New Music” to an unprecedented extent after World War II. His name is a symbol of a cultured, sophisticated and widely educated musician who was able to push and implement new ideas.
From our point of view, we appreciate the attention he paid to the work of Leoš Janáček, the composer who gave our university its name: it was especially the triumphant Viennese staging of the opera From the House of the Dead, which was also the last opera performance under Boulez’s baton. The very fact that Boulez moved on from his career as an opera conductor by staging this supreme dramatic work of the 20th century is perhaps a bit of symbolic and it is an honour for Janáček himself. However, he continues to devote himself to Janáček’s work, blessing us with other unforgettable performances such as the Sinfonietta in New York (2007) and the Glagolitic Mass in London (2008). Therefore, on the occasion of the ceremonial opening of the international colloquium “Leoš Janáček – culture européenne et création”, which took place in Paris in April 2008, Pierre Boulez received a commemorative medal of Leoš Janáček for spreading Janáček’s work around the world. One could say that only the permanent inclusion of Janáček’s compositions in the repertoire of Pierre Boulez led to the de facto recognition of Janáček in the world musical context.
The extent to which Janáček was often misguidedly defined in the field of music history until recently is evidenced for the example by Milan Kundera in his book “My Janáček”, where the writer introduces us to an almost shocking text presented under the subject-word Janáček in the most widespread and serious French encyclopaedia Larousse. The encyclopaedia characterises Janáček in a more or less inferior, and from our point of view incomprehensible way – allow me to quote the Larousse concisely: “The composer devoted himself to the systematic collection of folk songs, the sap of which continued to feed all his work and his political thinking, his work is inherently national and ethnic, his operas are imbued with socialist ideology (?!), he uses traditional forms, opens new horizons with unusual melodies, characteristic rhythms and colourful instrumentation.” This rather primitive and in many ways misleading description of Janáček’s personality certainly cannot contribute to his world renown, and without the reader’s knowledge of the matter, it could ingrain a number of nonsensical prejudices in him. The opposite of this distorted thinking is precisely the approach of Pierre Boulez, who came to know Janáček’s work purely in his own way and was able to place his compositions into the context of the works of the 20th century’s most important composers, especially in France. Later, he even promoted dramaturgy composed exclusively of Janáček’s compositions, which was used, for example, at the already cited concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where Boulez thematically interconnected the composer’s three top works: Sinfonietta, Capriccio and Glagolitic Mass.
Dear guests, our gathering today takes place on the sacred ground of the Besední dům in Brno, which witnessed a number of premieres of Janáček’s compositions, as well as the conductor’s works in organisation and conducting alike, his lifelong struggle to have his work recognised. For that reason, it is rather symbolic that the awarding of the title of Doctor honoris causa to Pierre Boulez takes place precisely inside the walls imbued with a rich musical history, where the genius loci breathes on us from every corner of this magnificent house. In this context, many personality parallels between Janáček and Boulez come to mind – both had innovative and unconventional attitudes all their lives, both have significantly and originally enriched the treasury of 20th century music with their work.
In conclusion, let me wish Pierre Boulez, on behalf of all of us here in this great hall and on behalf of the general cultural public, good health, strength and creative energy, as well as joy and fulfilment from active life of music for years to come. Also, let me end my speech today with a sentence that we can all agree on: We are happy that Janáček found his conductor genius in Boulez, and we are happy that Boulez discovered our Janáček for himself.