Following his early appearances during the late 1940s and early 1950s as musical director of the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company and the Domaine Musical, Boulez enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in the 1960s, becoming a conductor of international renown and securing prestigious posts with orchestras in London and New York. He also made waves in the opera house and pioneered seminal interpretations of works by Wagner, Debussy and Berg. Throughout his long career, he championed the music of the early modernist generation, much of which had been grievously neglected by other conductors, and also promoted key compositional figures of his own generation and a number of younger figures. This chapter explores Boulez’s development as a conductor in the context of his compositional activities and explains how his selfless commitment to the music he believed in changed the very nature of the conducting profession away from authoritarianism to a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.

This chapter reconsiders ways to interpret the musical gesture of the turn figure in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by comparing it with Richard Wagner’s use of the same gesture in Parsifal – a work that proved crucial for Mahler’s development as a composer and as a conductor. In Parsifal, the descending second is associated with suffering and pain (‘Strafe’, ‘Klage’, ‘Qual’), but also with the possibility of redemption (‘Erlöse, Rette mich!’). As in the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, the melodic turn is omnipresent in Parsifal. This chapter concentrates on three specific moments where this orchestral gesture seems to express the unspeakable: Kundry’s narrative of Herzeleide’s death, her description of the gaze of Christ on the cross (both in Act 2) and her baptism by Parsifal in Act 3. Comparing these moments in Parsifal with similar instants in Mahler’s Ninth highlights their essentially theatrical and transformative nature: where verbal language reaches its limits, physical and musical gestures take over, transforming the silence of the words into material movement.

Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.