Listening to Start the Week this morning I was reminded what a great Wagner conductor Pierre Boulez was.
One of Andrew Marr's guests on the programme had written a book on Wagner and Verdi, and another was long-time Boulez associate the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, so the subject naturally came up in conversation. Aimard was there to plug his forthcoming festival, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, taking place on the South Bank in the next few days.
What depths of irony lie in that title. Liszt was without doubt a great musician, and a great pianist. But he was not a great composer, and neatly exemplifies my long held view that talent will only get you so far in composition. Liszt is famous not because the public likes his music, but because he was a vastly talented pianist who wrote music which pianists enjoy playing. That is not the same thing.
My favourite Liszt story concerns the visit paid to him by Edvard Grieg. At the time Liszt was one of the most famous musicians in the world, and Grieg very much the young supplicant. As they played through the last movement of the Norwegian's Piano Concerto, reaching the grand tutti where the spacious A major theme is heard for the final time, subtly altered from its first appearance, Liszt cried out approvingly, "Of course! The G sharp this time!", thereby conferring the magisterial weight of his approval on Grieg's effort.
And yet Grieg's Concerto, although far from being his best work, is worth all of Liszt's compositions put together. Grieg was no intellectual, but he was a real composer, as distinct from someone who knew how to compose but not why. His music has artless tenderness and grace, with a melodic gift Liszt could only have dreamed of. It will live as long as there are people to listen. Yet whilst it is impossible to imagine the South Bank having a Grieg festival - the opportunity was passed up in 2007 on the centenary of his death - Liszt is, apparently, a Composer of the Future.
This seems unlikely in both major senses. Firstly Liszt was not a terribly influential composer. Secondly if Liszt had been going to take a grip on the public imagination you might have thought that would have happened by now. But it hasn't, and I wouldn't waste a tenner betting that it will in the next fifty years.
What then about Boulez? Another of Andrew Marr's guests was Simon Jenkins, who bravely voiced the opinion that he didn't much take to the Frenchman's music - it reminded him, he said, of the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Interestingly Jenkins, not a man given to displays of public humility, made this confession in apologetic terms. But why? I don't like Liszt, or Saint-Saens, or for that matter Phil Collins, Kasabian, Dido and a hundred other mediocrities. It's nothing to apologise for.
When Aimard was asked to describe Boulez, I knew, in the pause which followed, what he was going to say. An intellectual, replied Aimard. But if Boulez is an intellectual, I'm a banana. An intellectual is someone brainier than the rest of us who thinks rarified thoughts and reaches the right conclusion. But Boulez reached the wrong conclusion. He thought that the rigorous systems of total serialism would make "better" music (whatever that means); moreover he poured buckets of personal vitriol over those who disagreed with him, and used his own personal power to dominate the institutions of French music - and the aesthetics of modern music generally - for half a century. That a man as forthright as Jenkins should feel obliged to apologise for disliking Boulez's music is a measure of the extraordinary cultural cringe that he and his disciples have succeeded in imposing on intelligent people who like music. Hilariously, Alex Ross (in The Rest is Noise) has Boulez responding to a question about why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces by saying, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener". No shit, Sherlock. I'm not even sure that Ross understands how funny this remark is.
Boulez might be better described as a Composer of the Present, in the sense that he has made a pretty good career out of ruthlessly aggressive obscurantism, exploiting the gullibility and pretentiousness of the French political classes to fund and promulgate his own work, and his view of what other people's work should be like. This view, based on the modern age's desire to incorporate the technical language of science into something - composition - which is palpably unscientific (there is after all no scientific explanation why Grieg has the x factor and Liszt does not), has caused immense damage to the cause of classical music and kept bums off seats in concert halls across the western world.
Boulez will be lucky if his music lasts as long as Liszt's. Certainly only a statistically insignificant proportion of people like it now. If he is a composer of the future, classical music is in big trouble. His tragedy, if such a successful and lucrative career can be thus described, is that he had the talent to do great things.
Perhaps he should have stuck to conducting Wagner.
