“Music moves me a lot, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think I understand it”, Francis Bacon confided to Michel Archimbaud shortly before his death. It was against such disjuncture between musical intelligence and emotion that Pierre Boulez fought all his life. To him, making people love creation and exploring its intricacies were part and parcel of the same desire to pass on the musical experience, embodied as much in the conductor’s gestures as in the thinker’s words. Everything seems to separate Boulez, the composer who dedicated a luminous study to Paul Klee, Le Pays fertile, and Bacon, the painter who felt that music and painting were “two modes of expression that have nothing to do with one another”. Was this a definitive verdict on the profound dissimilarity of the languages of art or a sign of fundamental questioning – which led the painter to actually be not only a listener of Boulez’s music, but also a reader of his writings?
Boulez met Bacon in London in 1971, when he was appointed conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Twenty years later, he invited him to Ircam for the partial premiere of …explosante-fixe…. The work was introduced before the concert by the composer, who traced its tortuous genesis through multiple versions since the first sketches in 1971. This was the year Igor Stravinsky died, and the piece is dedicated to him. Can Boulez’s artistic approach be explained? Bacon declares himself incapable of doing so. However, he slips in this striking phrase, which sums up the art of Boulez in a nutshell: “He was looking, thanks to new techniques, for another way of recording his instinct”. The composer was wary of the spontaneity of the creative act. He saw in it a false kind of freedom. Instinct without technique is bound to take familiar paths, to fall back on memory, and thus fail to access real invention. But Boulez was also aware that there can be no art without impulse. His technique was therefore not intended to tame his instinct, but to play with it and lead it down unsuspected paths – to “give him the strength to break the rules in the very action that brings them into play”, as Michel Foucault wrote. For his part, to ward off instinct and its “clichés”, Bacon used what he called “the catastrophe” – strokes of paint or cloth that disrupted a supposedly finished painting and spurred on the painter to seek the “figure”.
A surprising closeness between the two artists emerged. “Always that same problem for the artist:” Bacon remarked that the key problem for an artist was “to express a subject, which is always the same and unchangeable, and each time find new forms”. In 1944, he painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which he considers to be his first true work. Second Version of Triptych 1944 was completed in 1988, for which he produced a lithograph entitled After Second Version of the Triptych 1944, dedicated to Pierre Boulez. Boulez’s music is also a weaving of forms fertilised by earlier compositions or by a fragment. Their progress could take several decades, for instance when a seven-note fragment from the violin part of …explosante-fixe… (1971-1994) also generated Anthèmes (1991).
It was Yehudi Menuhin who, in the winter of 1990, asked his friend of thirty years to write a work for the Concours international de la ville de Paris. Composed of seven sections, each developing an instrumental gesture, Anthèmes unfolds around a D, “like concentric circles on the surface of water, which are lost, reborn, until they are reduced to a single point like gravel thrown one last time”. For Menuhin, the virtuoso, ornamented figuration evokes Indian singers, and his pizzicati sound like the Hungarian cymbalum. But it is Boulez’s childhood memory of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, whose letters introducing the Latin verses are sung in Hebrew (Aleph, Beth…), that inhabits the long glissandi of meditative harmonics signaling the passage from one section to the next in the work.
Like Anthèmes (“hymns”), the title of his friend Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII (1975-1977) refers to Gregorian plainchant, for the long melismas that extend the Alleluias. Having himself played the violin as a child, Berio explains that “composing Sequenza VIII was like paying a personal debt to the violin, which for me is one of the most subtle and complex of instruments. (…) I’ve always had a strong attraction to this instrument, although mixed with rather tormented feelings”. Like the fourteen Sequenze, all composed for a solo instrument and linked to their performer, Sequenza VIII, dedicated to Carlo Chiarappa, pushes the technical capabilities of the musician and the violin to the limit, simulating polyphony from a monodic instrument, and dramatizing the historical dimension that runs through every virtuoso musical gesture. Homage is paid to Paganini as much as to Bach, the harmonic construction of the work around the notes A and B echoing the wonderful “Chaconne” of the Partita in D minor, BWV 1004.
Just as Anthèmes produced Anthèmes 2 (1997) for violin and electronics, Berio subsequently composed Corale (1981), in which the melody of Sequenza VIII is enveloped by an orchestral commentary.
Lambert Dousson
