Abstract
Long before 1977 marked the inauguration of Ircam and the start of his lectures at the Collège de France, Pierre Boulez had laid the foundations for his public activities. He had even done so by stirring up resounding polemics that left little doubt as to the full nature of his commitment. Such was the case with the famous, murderously-titled plea , Il faut brûler les maisons d'opéra , published in Der Spiegel in 1967.
In more ways than one, however, the "Collège years" represented a change of scale: as a leader, he abandoned his militant, "artisanal" modes of action of the early years, in order to carry through his plan to modernize the entire musical landscape; he didn't hesitate to partially withdraw from his global responsibilities, the better to assume, after two decades of disaffection, his return to the French institutional scene (correlated with the genesis of the Ircam, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Opéra-Bastille, right up to the Cité de la musique) ; or it formalizes, right from the launch of the Centre Pompidou, the need to establish strong synergies between multiform generalist poles and specialized satellites, so that research can come face to face with the outside world.
My talk will attempt to identify the main lines of force that ran through his institutional approach, drawing on my personal memories, as I have already evoked them in a small book, Pierre Boulez aujourd'hui, published by Editions Odile Jacob in January 2025. I had the good fortune to accompany him from 1986 onwards, first as artistic director of Ircam, then as his successor at the head of the Institute in 1992, before taking over as director of the Cité de la Musique in 2001 and continuing his fight for the construction of a large auditorium, which would not see the light of day until 2015. From my position as a privileged observer and player, I was able to gauge an adversariat that, quick to denounce Pierre Boulez's supposed hegemony, maintained the thesis of a reversal of conduct and values resulting from his international success as a conductor: he would quickly have moved from a collective commitment, often associated with the clan of "moderns committed to the left", to an individualistic posture marked by compromise and instrumentalization.
The ambivalence of his relationship with the Paris Opera is an interesting case in point. This project certainly occupied him as much as the later creation of the Cité de la Musique. Already in the mid-1960s, he and Maurice Béjart had joined forces with Jean Vilar to transform the Opéra Garnier. André Malraux's resignation accelerated his "exile" and international activism. Later, in the midst of the "Collège years", from 1982 to 1989, despite his growing skepticism, he once again attempted to reform the lyric arts, becoming heavily involved in the construction of the Opéra-Bastille. His recommendations went beyond the issue of "correspondence between the arts", reflecting his attraction to the emergence of a cross-disciplinary organization, already tried and tested at Ircam, capable of opening up to creation while giving meaning to the exhibition of an expanded repertoire. Successive governments kept their distance, but this failure, far from sounding the death knell for Boulézian visions, was, on the contrary, to motivate the work in progress at La Villette.
The numerous articles on cultural policy that have appeared over the years in the general press under Pierre Boulez's byline, including that of Spiegel, speak for themselves: once past the deliberate equivocation of the catchphrase, he has always placed himself in a perspective aimed at improving existing structures through gradual adjustments to usage, rather than by exalting some schism. The time of conquest motivates forms of guerrilla warfare and energizing polemics, failing which nothing advances [Pourquoi je dis non à Malraux (1966), La Cité unijambiste (1999), etc.]. The exercise of power, on the other hand, lays down rules that are more restrictive: from the Domaine musical adventure launched in 1953, for Pierre Boulez, governing means embarking on the path of long-term reforms, at the accepted risk of concessions or even temporary renunciations.
A kind of unity emerges from his practice as a manager, marked by chance and determination. Alluding to the Jaurésian formula of "revolutionary reformism", it is possible to affirm that Pierre Boulez, a fine dialectician of "order and chaos", thought of the institution above all in terms of evolution rather than radical rupture.
