Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez CBE (French: [pjeR bu.le:z]; 26 March 1925 - 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor, writer and founder of institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of the post-war classical music world. Born in Montbrison in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andree Vaurabourg and Rene Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as Music Director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris.
1925-1943: Childhood and school days
Pierre Boulez was born on 26 March 1925, in Montbrison, a small town in the Loire department of east-central France, to Leon and Marcelle (nee Calabre) Boulez. He was the third of four children: an older sister, Jeanne (b. 1922) and younger brother, Roger (b. 1936) were preceded by a first child, also called Pierre (b. 1920), who died in infancy. Leon (1891-1969), an engineer and technical director of a steel factory, is described by biographers as an authoritarian figure, but with a strong sense of fairness; Marcelle (1897-1985) as an outgoing, good-humoured woman, who deferred to her husband's strict Catholic beliefs whilst not necessarily sharing them. The family prospered, moving in 1929 from the apartment above a pharmacy at 29 rue Tupinerie, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house at 46 avenue d'Alsace-Lorraine, where he spent most of his childhood.  From the age of seven he went to school at the Institut Victor de Laprade, a Catholic seminary where the thirteen-hour school day was filled with study and prayer. By the age of fifteen he was sceptical about religion ("what struck me most was that it was so mechanical: there was a total absence of genuine conviction behind it") and by eighteen he had repudiated Catholicism, although later in life he described himself as an agnostic.  As a child he took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. After completing the first part of his baccalaureate a year early he spent the academic year of 1940-41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby St. Etienne. The following year he took classes in advanced mathematics at the University of Lyon with a view to gaining admission to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His father hoped this would lead to a career in engineering. He was in Lyon when the Vichy government fell and the Germans took over. The city became a centre of the resistance and Boulez later recalled the terrible reprisals: "when there was a bomb in a cafe where the military had been drinking next day there was a poster saying hostages had been shot. It was not a gentle time, and nothing to eat, and terribly cold."  It was in Lyon that he first heard an orchestra, saw his first operas (Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg) and met the well-known soprano Ninon Vallin, who asked him to accompany her in arias from Aida and La Damnation de Faust. Impressed by his ability, she persuaded Leon to allow his son to apply to the Conservatoire in Lyon, but the selection board rejected him. Boulez was determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied the piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir). "Our parents were strong, but finally we were stronger than they," Boulez would later say. In fact, when he moved to Paris in the autumn of 1943, hoping to enrol at the Paris Conservatoire, Leon accompanied him, helped him to find a room (at 14 rue Oudinot, near the Invalides) and subsidised him until he could earn a living.
What kind of music did Boulez perform?
orchestra,
orchestra,