[W]e don’t mind posing, but we are uncomfortable remaining nude before the students when they have stopped working. When we are on the table, we are models, little more than “objects,” but as soon as we climb down we become women again, and our first gesture is an instinctive gesture of shame. – Marie Laparcie, La Femme à Paris: Les Modèles, 1902
1.
Pierre Boulez, L'Artisanat furieux" (Le Marteau sans maître), 1954
“Adolf stood in front of me,” writes August Kubizek, about a performance he and Hitler attended of Wagner's Rienzi at the Linz Memorial Theatre in 1905, “and now he gripped both my hands and held them tight. He had never made such a gesture before. I felt from the grasp of his hand how deeply moved he was. His eyes were feverish with excitement. Never before and never again have I heard Adolf Hitler speak as he did in that hour, as we stood there alone under the stars, as though we were the only creatures in the world. He now spoke of a mission that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to guide them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom.” – Savitri Devi Mukherji, The Lightning and the Sun, 1958,
Back in the hazy lazy Boulez days, this was how it was supposed to start, not with music but with light, colours lowered slowly to black, dropping into darkness with a tympanum thud, a ground-swell of black noise like the base note of a hydrogen bomb, followed by an immense silence, followed by a hiss, breath blowing through a metal valve, hoarse and amplified, growing in intensity as it transformed from a wet whisper to a growl to a bright electric shriek.
A texture arises then, a cloverleaf cluster of four trumpet tones, each articulating a single letter. Yod, hay, vay, hay. The lights turn on. The screens turn on. The ground is made to tremble. The trumpets climb higher. The wind whips up through the trees. The limbs and the boughs creak and crack. The sea is seen to rise.
That's as far as we got. I don't think Pierre’s heart was in it. The whole Nixon thing was falling apart; Safire was in a sulk and Pierre was avoiding the piano, spending whole afternoons in his silk robe sipping cocktails, flipping between the soaps and the hearings, the sound off, both hands conducting, his pursed, grim mouth moaning a melancholic melody.
The main problem with Pierre was one of the oldest and most obvious – sex, or rather, the lack thereof. Simply put, he didn't have sex and he didn't want sex. His only cravings were for what Kissinger called the “ultimate aphrodisiac” – power. This had monstrous consequences. Many of you will say this is an oversimplification of a valid orientation, grossly ignorant and insensitive. You will argue for language, love, the mechanisms of musical syntax, the physical presence of poetic genius.
“He was a free spirit, a poet who freed himself from words. He was the only truly free man we had.”
Perhaps. All I know is that even then we knew that the Latin lover myth was bollocks. We knew that the French were anal to the core, that they were nuts about suppositories (aspirin, vitamin B, antacids, antibiotics, mentholated chest rubs, all a tergo, from behind, up the bum), and that sodomy, while almost a national sport, was not associated in the Gallic mind with the giving and receiving of pleasure. But we didn't understand to what extent this was reflected in their musical culture. We miscalculated and it set us back years.
2..
César Franck, String Quartet in D major, 1889
It didn't matter that the little phrase told him that love was fragile, his was so strong! He played with the sadness that it spread, he felt it stealing over him, but like a caress that deepened and sweetened the feeling of his own happiness. He made Odette play it for him again and again, ten times, twenty times, demanding that, as she did so, she never stopped kissing him…. “Make up your mind what you want: am I to play the phrase or play with you [faire des petites caresses]?” – Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913
Four years later, at Larue’s, Paul Morand introduced him to Princess Soutzo, née Hélène Chrissoveloni, with whom Morand confessed to being “horrifically smitten” [horriblement épris]; and Marcel instantly understood why, as she was indeed a bright and alluring creature; and soon she was to become his last, great, obsessive infatuation who – apologies for the Proustian proportions – thankfully waited till after his death to reveal what she truly was, a virulent antisemitic homophobe, just like a her by-then husband Morand; – but on that night, the night of their first encounter at Larue’s, March 4, 1917, upon hearing her enthusiastically praise first Wagner’s ability to create motifs out of “unorganised and fugitive fragments of recollected noise – the song of a bird, the tune a shepherd plays on his pipe, the note of a huntsman’s horn” – and, second, the “complètement irrépressible” musicality of the Quator Poulet, Marcel was so suddenly overcome with a need [“tourmenté par le désir”] to hear César Franck’s string quartet in D major that he pushed himself up brusquely from the table, waved away the waiter, hastily bid the princess adieu, and, without a nod to the other guests (and without paying for his supper or retrieving his hat, coat and stick from the cloakroom) had a taxi summoned, which took him across the length of Paris to Gaston Poulet’s apartment building in the 16th, where, ringing the bell repeatedly like a madman [“comme un fou”], he woke the poor man – it was almost midnight – and insisted that he in turn telephone and wake the other three members of the Quator Poulet and together, accompany him in the taxi to his completely cork-carpeted bedroom [“chambre toute tapissée de liège”] on the nearby rue Hamelin where, less than an hour later, standing at music stands lit only by candles in front of a feverish Marcel laid out on the divan in a silk nightshirt and wrapped in bankets, they played Franck’s first movement –
– whereupon, ten minutes in, Marcel fell fast asleep.
His housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, who had been hiding in the shadows [“se cachait dans les ombres”] stepped forward when the movement ended, gave Poulet an envelope “stuffed with francs” and showed the four musicians the door.
It was raining. The metro was closed for the night. Unable to find a taxi, the quartet took refuge in a café around the corner, where they “regaled” the clientele with the remaining movements of the Franck, for which they were rewarded with wine, beer and brandies. Three hours later, they tottered the six blocks to Poulet’s apartment, where the cellist, Louis Ruyssen, climbed into bed with Poulet “in his still-wet clothes on top of the blankets” while Victor Gentil, the second violin and the tallest member of the group, stretched out on the settee. Sigismund Jarecki, the viola, slept face down on the floor.
All four snored.
3.
Pierre Boulez, Pli selon pli, portrait de Mallarmé, 1957-1962
History is much like the guillotine. If a composer is not moving in the right direction he will be killed, metaphorically speaking. – Pierre Boulez, 1960
He had difficulties with naming and names. At five, his big sister led him to the village cemetery where their brother was buried. No one had told him about the dead boy’s existence – he had died a few months before Pierre was born. The day of their graveside visit was the anniversary of his brother’s death. Standing in front of the tiny tomb, he read the name on the headstone. Pierre Boulez. The same name. His.
How did this make him feel?
Elvis was haunted by his twin brother, who died in the womb.
Years later, when asked about his brother, Boulez shrugged. “I am a Darwinian,” he said. “I believe I survived because I was the stronger. He was the sketch, I, the drawing.”
Was he right? A surgeon who separates conjoined twins – killing the weaker twin to save the other – is not guilty of murder. It is considered justifiable homicide. This is the doctrine of necessity.
He hated the theatrical, what he called the “visible.” He hated Picasso, for example. “Everything is there for the eye,” he said. He liked masks, secret keys and handshakes over kisses. He thought there was still something to be gained by endlessly expanding and contracting rhythmic cells.
Whenever he was forced to hear a pop song, in a restaurant or at a party, by the Beatles, James Taylor or Radiohead, Boulez would always ask who it was. As if actually interested in the music. And even though he usually already knew who it was. And whatever the answer, he would nod his head and say, “Ah. Another smash hit of mass shit.” He thought this clever.
He owned two dozen identical dark suits. In 1961, he lived on the first floor of Heinrich Strobel's dentist's house in Baden-Baden. This is where Pli selon pli took its most fructive form, and where his conducting career got its start, and where his new tonal grammar, his pitch multiplication and association techniques, his clean break with the “music of filth and shit of five centuries” [“musique d'ordure et de merde de cinq siècles”], his ars poetica, his empire of sound and light, wheezed, sputtered, and stopped. Strobel's wife saw him for what he was: "small, fat, a real peasant, a paysan d'Auvergne.”
I’ll say one thing for him, however. He could drink. Three or four cocktails before dinner, most of a bottle of wine during, cognac after, followed by at least a dozen fingers of scotch – but I never saw him stumble or heard him slur.
3.
Claude Debussy, “Où vas-tu? Il faut que je te parle ce soir” (Pelléas et Mélisande), 1902
Suddenly I saw M. de Charlus coming towards us. My delay had obviously made him impatient. “I would like to hear some music this evening,” he said to Morel without any introductory remarks, “I am giving 500 francs for the evening, it might be of some interest to one of your friends, if you have any in the music business.” – Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1921
Because of wartime disruptions and his own physical failings, which were at their most debilitating in this period – he rarely left his bed – Proust was forced to satisfy his desire to hear live music by subscribing to the théâtrophone, a telephonic narrowcasting system that, for sixty francs a month, allowed him to listen remotely to daily opera and theatre performances over the telephone.
The sound quality of the transmitted music was terrible. “At one moment I was finding the murmur [“le rumeur”] pleasant although a little amorphous when I realized that it was the intermission!” He rarely used the subscription “as one hears very badly. However, for Wagner's operas, which I know almost by heart, I make up for the inadequacies of the acoustics. And the other day, a charming revelation, which is even tyrannising me a little: Pelléas. I had no idea!”
Despite its shortcomings, Proust recommended the subscription service to many of his correspondents, including Geneviève Halévy, the Paris salonnière, to whom he wrote: “Have you subscribed to the théâtrophone? They now have the Touche concerts and in my bed I can be visited by the brook and the birds of the Pastoral Symphony, which poor Beethoven enjoyed no more directly than I did, as he was completely deaf. He consoled himself by trying to reproduce the birdsong he could no longer hear. In the distance between genius and absence of talent, I also create pastoral symphonies in my own way, painting what I can no longer see!”
This distance, this absence, this genius. Listening to the babbling murmur – le rumeur – of the audience picked up by the crude, pre-electronic microphones mixed with the hissing, sizzling friture of the telephone line, he felt something quiver in him, shift, try to rise, something that seemed to have been unanchored at a great depth: “I do not know what it is,” he wrote, lying in the “silence immense” of his sound-proofed chamber, “but it comes up slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed.”
4.
Adel Abdessemed, Cri, 2012
As if by stealth and visible I sense
That fold by fold the widowed stone unrobes itself.
– Stephen Mallarmé, "Remémoration d'amis belges", 1893
You have seen her before. Not like this – frozen in space and machine-carved from an ancient mammoth tusk purchased on the Internet – but identically posed; balanced gracefully on her right foot with her slender arms stretched out wide, as if holding an invisible skipping rope. Eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide open; whether screaming, laughing or singing, it is impossible to tell. Then the pattern receptors kick in. The napalm girl. The Pulitzer Prize-winning icon of Vietnam War atrocity – one of photojournalism’s decisive moments, a snapped shot seen around the world – now an aesthetic object in prehistoric dentine.
It is an unusual operation. Not the brain’s; it does this constantly, and effortlessly, the entire synaptic process taking less than a second. What the artist is processing, however – the conversion of a moment into a monument, in the anachronistic form of figurative statuary, using an instantly recognisable detail of a pre-existing photograph – is less common and more problematic. There are plenty of three-dimensional appropriations of famous photographs in the public sphere, but most are heroic, flag-waving affairs – Iwo Jima, the firemen at Ground Zero, that sort of thing – not naked prepubescent girls.
Cri conjures its own complexes of collective recollection but otherwise seems to operate in a different register. Unlike its many antecedents – Picasso’s Guernica, Géricault’s raft, Goya’s commemorations of resistance to Napoleon, David’s visit to Marat’s bathroom and so on – its depicted moment is not contemporaneous with its creation. Half a century ago, the image of a Vietnamese girl, running naked, badly burned, crystallised opposition to the war; since, it has served as a metonymic signifier for the abomination and cruelty of all war. But, like this, isolated and ivoried, what does she mean? Is she a war memorial? An anti-war memorial?
At best, she is an echo chamber, borrowed for her resonant capacities but otherwise empty, gutted of all performative meaning except, perhaps, an ability to convert provocation into commodity. Beyond that, she is inarticulate. Drowned out. Like so many signals bouncing around in the general hubbub of the everyday, the “reality” of her cry is lost in the noise.
5.
Gabriel Faurè, Romance sans Paroles, 1893
Mme Verdurin would then give them two adjoining rooms and, to put them at their ease, would say: "If you feel like making “music”, don't be shy, the walls are like those of a fortress, you have no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like a log. – Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1921
The adjoining rooms were for the Baron de Charlus and the brilliant young violinist Charles Morel, who was mentioned in the Sodome et Gomorrhe passage cited in 3. This is the relationship that would eventually kill the Baron. And the coupling “music” they will make, unheard because of the thick walls, will serve as a fugal variation of that which played out in the famous opening scene, when Charlus seduces the tailor Jupien:
Every two minutes, the same question seemed to be intensely put to Jupien in M. de Charlus's lecherous glare, like those questioning phrases of Beethoven, repeated indefinitely, at equal intervals, and intended - with an exaggerated lavishness of preparation - to introduce a new motif, a change of key, a “re-entry”.
And then, in the next movement, the music heard – which the Narrator hears through the wall of the tailor’s nearby shop, where the Baron “takes” the tailor:
These sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another’s throat within a few feet of me.
Proust conjures similar violence in a letter to Baron de Charlus’s real-life model, Robert de Montesquiou, written just after hearing Gabriel Faurè’s Romance sans Paroles, which the composer wrote when he was 18:
As for the mixture of litanies and semen [mélange de litanies et de foutre] that you speak of, the most delicious expression I know of is found in a slightly antiquated but intoxicating piano piece by Fauré, which is called perhaps Romance without words. I like to think that it is what a pederast might sing while raping a choir boy [“ce que chanterait un pédéraste qui violerait un enfant de choeur”].
6.
Leonard Bernstein, “Glitter and be gay”, (Candide), 1956
We came up here ten days ago to attend the Ring – and I hereby state that I will never go again, and you must help us both to keep to that. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp – O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still. – Virginia Woolf, 1913
I was against the Cavett show from the start. Boulez and his handlers, however, had their usual whoopsy-daisy attitude. Fall on your face, get up, fall on your bum. As long as you fall ever forward, a long stumbling dishevelled somersaulting lurch towards the new, new, new, everything was groovy. “Formidable! Genial!” They were mathematical about every aspect of Pierre's work and life except where the two dovetail – his public persona. In this respect Pierre was worse than John Cage: when it came to making decisions about how and where to appear, he might as well have thrown bones or analysed tea leaves.
“What's to worry about?” they said. I told them it would not be the right vehicle, that it would not be dignified, and they scoffed.
“This is not a circus act, Pierre. You are not a show-business personality. You are a composer, not a performing dog.”
But, as we later realized, Pierre was just that, a musical mongrel. A lieder lapdog. A Webernian wiener. A serial Saint Bernard. He was also pig-headed and overconfident, and his handlers were arrogant French shits of the worst kind. They wore Pierre Cardin leisure suits. They draped Cacherel sweaters over their shoulders. They didn't listen to Americans. They said – they knew! – that Pierre was a genius and could handle whatever crass pap middle-brow America might throw at him. But this wasn't the point. It was frustrating trying to get them to see clearly what the stakes were.
But their minds were made up. The idea was Phil Johnson's and had arisen a few weeks before at his apartment when, after dinner, we were led out of the dining room and settled into the front salon with our coffees and digestifs. Johnson opened a cupboard door and flicked the switch. “Cavett's not a Merv-like shmooz,” he said, flipping through the channels. “He's smart as a whip and utterly charming.” The program was at the height of its popularity at that time – June 1972, deep Watergate – but I was surprised that this gang – serious people! – were going to huddle around the set on a Friday night and watch it. (The very fact that Johnson had anything as vulgar as a TV in his ridiculous taste temple, even if hidden inside a Bauhaus commode, was already surprising.) Norman Mailer and Bobby Fisher were the program guests. Fisher, who at the time was deep into the Worldwide Church of God, was notoriously difficult – Bob Hope said Fisher was the worst guest he ever had to deal with – but Dick handled him perfectly. Then it was Mailer's turn. Mailer was an asshole, as everyone in the room knew, without ever having met the man. “Why don't you look at your card and ask the next question?” he snarled at Dick, to which Dick replied, “Why don't you fold it five ways and stick it where the moon don't shine?”
After a long pause, Mailer mumbled “Did you have that prepared ahead of time?” And Dick said, “No, no, it's a well-known quote from Tolstoy.” The French were impressed. They thought Dick was interesting and entertaining. He is hip, they said. He put his guests at their ease – or in their place – and they opened up.
“Ee eez eep, oui, yes, I am not denying this,” I said. I was exasperated and more than a bit drunk. There was never enough food at Johnson's events. They all ate like birds. “But Pierre doesn't open up. He has no openings. He thinks he's a Sphinx, he thinks he's hidden but the fact is there is nothing to hide. He's a closed book with no pages.”
“You will see,” said Roux, one of the ex-Columbia reps who had attached themselves to Pierre's coattails. “We’ve been given complete control.”
“He's not even a book,” I said. “He's a blank piece of paper.”
“He can handle this chatter monkey. He will impress everyone.”
“Foolscap. That's what he is. A fucking sheet of foolscap.”
“I do not know this word but I do know he will get the word out and you will see. He will bring this to a new level.”
I said pshaw and I worked it for another half hour or so, but I couldn't wipe the smug, bunched-up pouts off their sour little faces. Sourcilleux. Impatient and uppity. They were a smart bunch but they had their heads up their asses. I went home with a headache and they went over my head and booked him.
(Note: Mailer wasn't on the same night as Bobby Fisher, he was on with Gore Vidal, who he head-butted in the green room and with whom he later refused to shake hands unless Vidal “used a finger-bowl first.”)
“I agree,” Pierre had told me at our Le Cirque lunch the day before. “It is beneath me. But so is the New York Philharmonic. So is this city. So is this restaurant. But sometimes you have to do more than reach out. Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes you have to reach down.” He made a gesture with his hand, reaching down under the table as if grabbing a carrot by its green top and yanking it out of the dirt.
“And what happens if you can't get back up?”
“Relax. I'm going to – how do you say? Wow them.”
“We have obligations, Pierre.”
“To whom?”
“To the world.”
“You can't actually believe that.”
“This is not Europe,” I said. “We have a different destiny in America. A different set of responsibilities.”
“You think you're the only people that understand how this world works,” he said.
“This world?”
“You know what I mean. We have made our contributions too.”
I kicked it upstairs. The response: “Stuff a horse tranquilizer up his ass and lock him in his hotel room. We should have stuck with Picasso. Fuck all this visible invisible bullshit.”
I asked Joe Papp to tag along to the broadcast and Joe said he would be glad to, and Pierre said if Joe wanted to come along he was more than welcome but it wasn't necessary. Pierre respected Joe.
But Joe never showed and Pierre sat two hours by himself in the green room, glowering like a South Sea godhead. That face! He waved away the makeup girl. Max Brustein was the first guest. He did sleight-of-hand and the studio audience clapped loudly. There were two other guests – Chuck McCann did his vacuum salesman routine – then Pierre came on, just after midnight – the intellectual slot. Cavett asked him about New York Philharmonic subscriptions. “I am told that people are getting up in the middle of concerts and leaving in droves.”
“I would not say droves,” said Pierre. Later, he confessed that he didn't know what the word meant. “That is too melodramatic.”
“Is it true that you said that all opera houses should be destroyed?” asked Cavett.
“I meant that our connections to the past can be debilitating. That we must sever the roots and cut the umbilical if we want to progress further in our music. We must not be afraid to go forward.”
Cavett looked a little piqued. He had been promised a revolutionary and here sat this yes-man. So he switched tracks and asked Pierre if it was true that he could simultaneously conduct two different tempos with his hands. Pierre demonstrated, his fingers flipping about like merguez sausages. The studio audience clapped loudly. Pierre blushed. He looked happy. I had never seen him look so happy. Then Cavett tested Pierre's absolute pitch by asking the trumpet player in the house band to blow a note.
“G-sharp,” said Pierre and the trumpet player nodded and the audience applauded. Then they cut to a commercial.
I was aghast. I had been Pierre's champion; it was my idea to bring him over. And here he was, a TV clown.
“Why does this happen to me?” I said, to no one in particular. We had been seduced by Cage's description of Pierre: “A look around the eyes, nose and mouth that is the look of a bad animal, an animal waiting for the kill.” Now here he was, grinning under the lights, mugging for the camera, un chien flasque, a spineless dog.