This chapter surveys Pierre Boulez’s recording career. It began in the 1950s, as a pianist in Mussorgsky and Stravinsky songs and directing incidental music by Milhaud. In the early 1960s, he conducted Mozart (with Yvonne Loriod) and C. P. E. Bach (with Jean-Pierre Rampal). His earliest recording of Le Marteau sans maître was made in 1956 and he first recorded The Rite of Spring in 1963. From the mid 1960s onwards, he recorded for Columbia (now Sony), including much of what is considered his key repertoire: Stravinsky, Varèse and Bartók; Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen; Berg, Schoenberg and Webern; and Boulez himself. In the 1980s, he made the first recording of the three-act Lulu and several new recordings of his own works. In the 1990s, for Deutsche Grammophon he made new versions of many pieces previously recorded for Columbia, as well as a Mahler cycle and, more surprisingly, works by Szymanowski, Richard Strauss and Bruckner.

Although Boulez never met or corresponded with the Second Viennese composers (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), their influence on him was palpable. He first encountered their music through René Leibowitz in 1945 and began writing about their compositions from 1948. This chapter examines Boulez’s extensive writings on the music of the Second Viennese composers as well as his programming and conducting of their works, demonstrating that he was a central figure in their post-war reception. He frequently criticises the Second Viennese composers for reliance on conventional formal structures and explains that he is most interested in compositions that display ‘ambiguities’. He extols Webern’s compositions for using ‘elements of classical language’, which through their distorted use become ‘the elements of a new language’. Treating the Second Viennese composers’ innovations as building blocks, Boulez’s compositions expand upon what he identifies as their most important attributes: serialism and the crafting of novel timbres and sonorities.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

This chapter considers the reception of Mahler by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, with particular attention to parallel threads of interpretation. On one hand, the triumvirate championed their idol with determination and perseverance, to make a place for him in the centuries-long progression of Western compositional history and to establish as the culmination of this history (at least provisionally) their own works, with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method as its most advanced expression. But another, backward-looking Second Viennese interpretation of Mahler’s music existed from the beginning: as the last manifestation of a musical paradise eternally closed to subsequent composers, who, unlike Mahler, rejected the commandment to leave tonality intact. As self-styled heirs, then, the Second Viennese School faced an irresolvable dilemma: their succession through an initially “atonal” and then dodecaphonic language required the destruction of this paradise, which existed on a tonal foundation.