Abstract
It's hardly surprising that a man who built his career on disobedience and refusal of authority should have seen his own authority challenged early on. The virulence of opposition to Boulez was commensurate with the man's intransigence and the power, real or imagined, that was attributed to him. We'll come back to the reasons behind this polarization of French musical life.
As early as the Domaine musical concerts, founded in 1954, an aesthetic opposition began to take shape, led most actively and brilliantly by Figarojournalist Bernard Gavoty. Aesthetic opposition was accompanied by institutional opposition: refusal of public subsidies to Domaine musical, hostility from the Conseil national de la musique. The interweaving of aesthetic differences, institutional conflict and personal enmity culminated in the confrontation with André Jolivet.
From a struggle between the institution (radio, government bodies) and the underground (the private niche of the Domaine musical), in the 1960s the opposition took on the appearance of a struggle within the institution itself, when, following André Malraux's support, Boulez's voice was heard at the Ministry, thanks to influential intermediaries such as Gaëtan Picon and Emile Biasini. Within the Ministry, a "counter-revolutionary" current formed around Marcel Landowski. The latter's victory led to Boulez's departure in 1966, and his resignation from any position in France.
When he returned in the 1970s, on the initiative of Georges Pompidou, the opposition took on a new dimension. Until then, Boulez versus the institution had been David versus Goliath. Henceforth, IRCAM, financed by the public authorities but on the fringes of the state apparatus (Boulez having set the condition of not being directly dependent on the Ministry), would no longer be denounced as the plaything of a cultural agitator with limited influence, but that of an autocrat holding all the levers of creation. Hostility came not only from conservative circles attached to tonality, but also from avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis and Jean-Claude Eloy, who felt they had been wronged.
The two opposing forces came together: that of the institution, which wanted to keep control of its administration and criticized what it saw as its hijacking for personal ends, and that of the anti-modernists, who advocated a return to a more consonant aesthetic and now denounced Boulez as a man of power and an official composer.
