PARIS (AFP).- Hailed as one of the greatest living composers, Pierre Boulez is earning worldwide praise as he approaches 90, even as he sometimes suffers in his native France from the idea that he is stern and dogmatic.

Ahead of his birthday on March 26, the Philharmonie de Paris -- the brand-new, ultra-modern concert hall that was conceived in no small part by Boulez -- is seeking to dispel that notion with a new exhibition. 

But the composer-and-conductor himself will be absent, restricted by age and fatigue to his home in Germany where he lived on-and-off since 1959.

"The cliche is that his music is severe and that he became a dictator, an ayatollah or even the fuhrer from the moment he moved to Germany," said Laurent Bayle, the director of the Philharmonie de Paris and disciple of Boulez.

Boulez emerged as a forceful presence after World War II by championing serialism, a rigid version of Arnold Schoenberg's atonality that defied traditional classical conceptions of setting music in keys.

Boulez's pieces were noted for their difficulty, with one of his defining works, "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" ("The Hammer Without a Master"), drawing inspiration from surrealist poetry and lacking any bass line.

Boulez's brusque statements added to his public image. 

In 1952, Boulez wrote an essay entitled "Schoenberg is Dead," vowing to take music forward a year after the modern icon's physical death.

"You say to yourself that this young man is an ayatollah, that he wants to go even further in a direction of scorched earth and extreme barrenness. And it's true that for three or four years, his generation looked to wipe away all romantic underpinnings, the pathos, from music. But that was in 1951-52, and by 1954, he had already gone elsewhere," Bayle said.

"When he said 'Schoenberg is Dead,' that means, 'Stop linking my generation to his discoveries and experiments, we're beyond that,'" he said.

Builder in France, but bigger abroad 
But for the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who was chosen at 19 as a soloist for Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, Boulez is "the greatest musician of his time."

"He's not dogmatic at all. He has a very strong vision but he's very open to others and deeply human," said Aimard, 57.

Aimard described his mentor as "an immense creator, who revived the position of an orchestra conductor, thinks like a great intellectual of his time, and who writes, teaches and builds tireless institutions."

Tapped by French president Georges Pompidou, Boulez built Ircam, a research centre that explores the connections between music and technology that was groundbreaking when it opened in 1977. 

Boulez also founded the Ensemble InterContemporain -- affiliated with Ircam -- that is dedicated to promoting modern music and has freely embraced computers and other technological innovations shunned by some classical purists. 

Paradoxically, Boulez is now better known and more frequently played overseas. He led the BBC Symphony Orchestra and from 1971-77 was music director of the New York Philharmonic, where he startled many concert goers by embracing contemporary works rather than sticking to the classics loved by his acclaimed predecessor Leonard Bernstein.

"He's been named conductor of foreign orchestras but never French ones," said Sarah Barbedette, the curator of  the Philharmonie de Paris exhibition, which features uncharacteristic pictures of a younger, laughing Boulez.

The Philharmonie de Paris in the coming months will also showcase several concerts of Boulez's work, including performances by the London Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim's Staatskapelle Berlin.

Aimard will embark on a tour overseas to showcase Boulez, including a concert Monday at New York's Carnegie Hall.

If the nearly 90-year-old Boulez is not yet a household name, Aimard believes he one day will be.

"That will come; these things always take time," Aimard said. "If you were to ask the great composers of our time, all of them would call 'Le Marteau Sans Maitre' a pioneering work."

Blow up' opera houses 
Boulez was the force behind one of opera history's most famous moments when he conducted Wagner's Ring Cycle in 1976 for the centennial of Germany's Bayreuth Festival. 

He and stage director Patrice Chereau, a fellow Frenchman, set the four epic operas rooted in Norse mythology in the industrial era, triggering pandemonium in the audience but later an hour-long ovation.

Boulez has nonetheless never written an opera, despite repeated rumours that he is working on one, and infamously told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine in 1967 that it was time to "blow up the opera houses."

For Bayle, Boulez meant simply that opera at the time had "developed a level of amateurism that had become unacceptable and it was time to completely refresh the system."

Boulez, while shunning ideological labels, has always been outspoken. In 1960, he signed the manifesto of 121 French intellectuals in support of Algeria's fight for independence, leading temporarily to a boycott in France of his music and a refusal to let him return from Germany.

Francois Cusset, a historian who wrote a coffee-table book on Boulez, called the composer "a major intellectual of our time" on par with contemporaries such as the musician's friend Michel Foucault.

Boulez is a "modernist in the most powerful meaning of the term -- a man who draws a line with the new," Cusset said.


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