What I have for you today is the transcript of a conversation between Robert Ponsonby and Pierre Boulez, published in this month’s Tempo magazine.
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RP: You recently wrote that ‘There is almost nothing to teach or to learn about conducting’, and Klemperer is on record as saying that what one can teach is so minimal that ‘I could explain it to you in a minute’. There must surely be more to it than that?

PB: Well, I spoke of technique. Certainly the way of conducting is not easy to learn and not easy to teach; it’s not at all like an instrument. For instrumental technique you need many years, because it’s a mechanical process. What you learn on an instrument is not only the music to be performed, but you learn how, mechanically, to achieve what you require from your instrument. In conducting you do not have any kind of specialized gestures; the gestures are very unsophisticated. The proof is that if you don’t play the violin for five or six months, then you must train your muscles to play again; but if you have not conducted even for three years, you can be on the podium and immediately have the same contact with the orchestra as if you had conducted the day before. So it is the material proof that, technically, there is nothing very much to be learnt. The gestures are very simple. It’s like when you begin to drive a car: first rule, know how to stop; and second rule, know how to begin! And, if you know these two rules well, in between you can manage – more or less!

RP: You don’t use a baton – a stick – but most conductors do and at least one, Sir Adrian Boult, attached the very greatest importance to the stick and to the point of the stick. Is there any loss in not using the stick? Is there actual gain?

PB: I think that’s an individual matter. (If you ask singers, for instance, each singer thinks he has a better technique than another one.) And, stick or no stick, I think it depends on what you want or how you want to convey the things you have to convey. You can observe various conductors, and sometimes very good conductors have very awkward gestures, but they work; and some people have more elegant gestures, but it does not work; so it doesn’t depend upon the elegance of the gestures, or whether you do it with a stick or without a stick. For me I can only give a personal answer: I always found it very awkward with a stick because for what I want to form – the rhythm, the dynamic – my five fingers are to me so much more expressive than a stick. Of course, it is economical, because you can move the stick and the response is bigger to see, but I ask myself, ‘Does the musician really look at the stick?’ It is not terribly important, because I’ve conducted works which are difficult rhythmically and I have also conducted in the theatre at a great distance, and nobody ever complained about the lack of precision or difficulty to follow my beat. So, I conclude that, for myself, it is a good technique; I cannot say that it’s a good technique for everybody.

RP: Did you ever use a stick?

PB: Never.

RP: Did you ever have any formal lesson of any kind from anybody?

PB: No, I am completely self-taught, because I did not mean at first to become a conductor at all. The first things I did were in the theatre with Jean-Louis Barrault. Just conducting incidental music for the stage, which is not terribly complicated; and you learn your mètier with that, because you learn how to act with musicians and also how to react to a situation which is dramatic – a theatrical situation. But, confronted with a hundred musicians, it is quite different. Then I founded the Concerts of the Domaine Musicale, which were exclusively dedicated to contemporary music, and I was the least expensive conductor in my organization, so therefore I began to conduct the works, which were not the easiest to conduct; but I had the advantage that I had in front of me musicians who were as inexperienced as myself! So, we learnt together and therefore my technique, my way of conducting, came out of this confrontation with contemporary music. Only afterwards did I enlarge my repertoire to everything that’s in the history of music, but always with a preference for contemporary music, because it is more directly related to me. Not that I don’t like the other music, but it is less significant to me, less directly significant, I have to say. Also, I find that for the audience it is better: there are so many people who do the standard repertoire and so few who do 20th century music, that I prefer to be involved in it because I have always thought that was my mission. And also I must say that I observed conductors like Rosbaud, like Désormière – people who were, in my opinion, very great conductors – and who were not specialized, but who were very involved in contemporary music. So I observed them much more than other conductors like Munch, like Karajan. I observed all these conductors, but the ones I related to most were the conductors who were conducting contemporary music.

RP: Whatever the music, most conductors have attached the greatest importance to the upbeat, the preparatory beat. How is it that so much can come out of such a small movement?

PB: That was my first difficulty and I remember the first advice I got. That was, ‘Just breathe in the same time and you will give something to the musician and your gesture will correspond to the reaction of the musician preparing himself to give sound’. Of course, it is good for the wind instruments, but you cannot say it is the same for percussion or for piano. If you have four pianos, for instance, like in Stravinsky’s Les Noces, or if you have a string orchestra, that’s not at all ‘breathing’. It is a kind of preparation to the action, which has to do with breathing for some instruments, but which is not expressly to do with breathing for other instruments. And also it depends very much on the education, the schooling of the musicians. For instance, in France and the Latin countries generally (although I have not much experience with Latin orchestras, only French) your upbeat gives the action immediately and the sound from the strings is immediately there. But in Germany you give the beat while everybody is preparing themselves, and then you give the downbeat, but the sound does not really come on the downbeat, it comes slightly later – which is in some cases extremely good because, if you play Wagner, you want this type of sound which comes out of the instrument without any brutality. It is rather difficult at first, especially when you are trained to conduct an orchestra which reacts immediately, to have this slight delay, and you must adjust yourself to this kind of delay. Therefore, it’s not only the problem of the upbeat but the problem of how the sound comes out of the instrument, and how long it takes to come out of the instrument.

RP: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that certain orchestras play very late and this seems nothing to do with a particular conductor?

PB: No, certainly not. For instance, when you hear German orchestras, you find this kind of delay and you have to adjust to it because the sound quality is better. French orchestras, when they play romantic music, sometimes are too direct, especially the strings, and therefore you like a response which is less immediate, but with a small delay, and this response can also change from one work to another one. For instance, when you play Wagner, especially with the sforzato, you have first the beginning of the sforzato; then you push, like a spring, and you have the second sforzato, you have sforzatos. But if you play Stravinsky, this way of playing is absolutely obnoxious; you cannot get anything because when you play The Rite of Spring the rhythm should be there immediately, because otherwise you have a mess, it’s not clear at all.

RP: Can we talk about the score now? You once said in my presence that, in order to get to know a particular piece of music, you simply had to read the score. This suggested to me that you read a score as a non-musician would read a book, and as easily. When you do that, can you hear in your head all the sounds that are there on the page, or does some of that come later?

PB: I think that’s a question of training. When I was very young and I first looked at a score I had difficulties with the transposition of the instruments; you have this kind of material difficulty, especially when you look at the beginning of The Rite of Spring, for instance. To take just this example, you have a clarinet in E flat, you have a flute in G, you have other instruments in B flat, in A, some in bass clef and some in treble clef, the horns in F, the cor anglais in F, and so on and so forth. So not only do you have to transpose with the key system, which normally you are trained to do, but you also have to transpose with the accidentals. So it is a hard training physically to read a score really very well, because you have to know a lot of information, which is given in the score, especially when you have a page which is rather complex, and thick, and dense. But that’s not the point, that’s just a kind of mechanical training. The most difficult training is to be able to imagine the sonority when you read a score and that, of course, cannot be dealt with just theoretically. You know, I had an experience which was to me very enlightening: I gave two classes of conducting in my life (although I don’t believe in teaching, as you know, and especially in teaching conducting!), but I had two classes which were very hard. That was in Basle, where Paul Sacher invited me, and I had the orchestra at my disposal for three entire weeks, and I made for the students a repertoire, and there were three concerts at the end. So everyone, the orchestra as well as the students, had to study, because they could not blame themselves in front of an audience. So I chose a repertoire with The Rite of Spring, Erwartung by Schoenberg, the Berg Violin Concerto and so on and so forth, and then I discovered this difficulty of conductors. Some are very gifted from the point of view of gesture: they are physically gifted, but they are unable to analyse the score and really to make the texture clear, so they gave a kind of vitality but within this vitality it’s very much al fresco. And you have the other kind (I take, of course, extreme cases). There is the other type of young people who can analyse very well and they know the score and they really are involved with it, but when they come in front of the orchestra, first, their gestures don’t correspond to what they have seen in the score and, second, they are not able to give to the musicians the most simple and effective instructions to do this or that, do this note forte and that other one less. Through instructions which are very simple, you can explain to a musician what you want. You read a score, you listen to it, you want to hear what you have listened to (I mean, just listening in your head), and then you correct some things you had not expected to hear exactly that way, especially if you do a score for the first time; and then you correct very rapidly. But for the scores you have already conducted and have heard, then you know very precisely what to do. And, in a very funny way, you can be sure that almost all orchestras, even the best, fall into exactly the same traps – difficulties of reading some passages which are very difficult, difficulties of balance, some rhythmical difficulties – and you can be sure that there is a kind of difficulty, which is difficult for everybody.

RP: I’m sure that the conversion of what the conductor imagines in his mind into a practical performance is one of the great problems. On the question of using the score, I think I am right in saying that you always do have the score there? This is, presumably, not because you can’t remember it, but as an aide memoire.

PB: At the beginning I was conducting from memory. But later, when I was involved more and more in tactical things, I had not time to concentrate on memory, because you can learn a score very well, but memory is a second step and of course scores you have conducted a lot of times, you memorize automatically, you don’t make an effort, it inscribes itself in the memory. So I have done that as a challenge. I remember the most challenging thing I have done was to conduct from memory the Variations by Webern which is very difficult to remember properly because you cannot rely on the response of the musicians, because they have very little to do – with a lot of rests in between – and they must be absolutely sure, if you give a cue, that it is for them and not for anybody else. So if you have a lack of confidence on the part of the musicians and if you are yourself fighting with your memory, it gives an uncertainty of performance which leads certainly to disaster. I find for me that memory is a kind of gift which is totally independent from musicality. Like absolute pitch: you have conductors who have not absolute pitch but who listen carefully and it makes them work harder on this problem, because somebody with absolute pitch – I have it – will find that if you don’t play a C sharp but a C you will immediately notice that the C and not the C sharp has been played, like you would say, ‘That is blue, not red’, for instance. You have a notion of pitch which is instantly there and which can help very much: you don’t need to check the internal reference. I think that memory is exactly the same. For instance, you have conductors like Mitropoulos who have a photographic memory – I’ve never had that myself. What I remember is the whole structure of the piece and, in a funny way, when I come back to the printed score, I am very disturbed to find it on the page because I do not memorize photographically; on the contrary, I memorize by a kind of memory which does not take into consideration the printed page. I have the structure in myself, I have my own pages, not any more the printed pages. But other people have a photographic memory.

RP: Presumably the memorization of atonal music is in itself more difficult than traditional, tonal music?

PB: You have to absorb much more ‘information’, as one says today. For instance, I have conducted by memory very often the Berg pieces, Opus 6, and now if I conduct them, after so many years, I don’t look at the score every second. I know them. If you have absolute pitch it is not that difficult, because then you are aware of the pitch of each line and you know how it sounds. And if you have conducted a piece a lot of times, then you react like Pavlov’s dog. If you have a wrong chord, at first you don’t know why exactly, but you know this chord is wrong because you have heard it many times right, and suddenly it is wrong, and if you apply your listening capacity, then you find very quickly why it is wrong.

RP: On a different subject altogether – the question of the beating of a particularly difficult passage: I believe I am right in saying that a famous conductor, Sir Georg Solti, once phoned you to ask you how to beat a particular passage? Do even the most eminent of experienced conductors actually sit down in the privacy of their studies and practise the beating of very difficult music?

PB: I suppose yes. I would like to clarify this example with Solti: he asked me – not about Wagner for sure! – but he asked me about a piece by Ives, because in Ives there are two rhythms and he asked me how I beat it myself – which is very normal, because that was the first time he did this score. I can understand, if someone had conducted a piece many times, I would ask him in exactly the same way. I find it very difficult in Wagner, for instance, to decide if I should beat in 4 or in 2, because you have a tempo which is possible to be beaten in 2 or in 4, and you can see that some conductors beat it this way, some the other way. The music is capable of being sub-divided, or not. I remember very well an instance – it disturbed the musicians very much, especially the first year, but I was stubborn and I was right, finally! In the second scene of the second act of Siegfried you have a dialogue between Mime and Wotan, and Wotan is very calm and very sure of himself, rather slow, and Mime is, of course, very agitated; but the tempo is unified. How do you do it? You can do it, of course the simple way, as it is done very often; you can beat all in 4, a little calmer in 4 for Wotan and a little more agitated for Mime, but you don’t give this relationship, which is in Wagner very, very obvious, that Wotan is in 2 and Mime is in 4, and I decided to do it in 2 for the one and in 4 for the other. Of course, for the musicians to change the metre all the time was irritating and disturbing, but I stuck to my guns, and finally everybody, when accustomed to it, found the relationship was much more obvious. The calming 2 is a calming 2 – you don’t need to make much movement – and the agitated 4 is of course agitated because of the doubling of the movement. In some of my own music, there is no metre any more and you must really memorize where the people are on the platform, because you cannot at the last moment think, ‘Oh my God, the harp is on the left, the extreme left, I must give this cue on the extreme left!’ You must have an automatic reaction. For instance, you would not look at the keyboard and say, ‘Where is the G sharp? Oh it is here’, then hit the G sharp. You must have this automatic reaction to where the musicians are, and also when you have a series of difficult rhythms you have to practise that, and even more in Gruppen by Stockhausen, when you have three orchestras, and three conductors, who have to be synchronized in very specific ways. For instance, one conductor has 5 against 4 of the other one, the other one has 7 to 6 of the third, so you know there are points when you have to meet absolutely! Then of course the three conductors have to rehearse for themselves; after that they can go to each of the orchestras and finally to the three orchestras together. That’s an example of where the conductor has to rehearse for himself.

RP: Rehearsal is obviously critically important in the preparation of any performance. Do you plan your own rehearsals down to the last minute?

PB: At the beginning I was more careful than I am now. Now you know more or less what you want to do, it’s more instinctive, because I know the difficulties of the score, especially when I have conducted it a couple of times. I know where the difficulties are and I read the score with the orchestra. Even with all the disasters of the first reading, sight reading, they have an idea of the continuity. I have done, for instance, L’Heure Espagnole, which is not very difficult music, but it constantly changes tempo, so you must here sub-divide, here not sub-divide, here you stop, here you conduct this way, here you conduct another way, and it’s like that every two or three bars. With this piece no sight-reading is possible because everybody would be lost. So there are cases where you can really not do this sight-reading. But generally you can do the sight-reading and, afterwards, you take immediately the places which are difficult. I’m not the first one to do that: Stokowski was famous for choosing the places which were difficult and which would not improve without rehearsing. He also said there were places which do improve without rehearsing, partly because they are not that difficult and even if a musician has made a mistake, he will not do it the next time.

RP: When the musicians are trying very hard, I have noticed that you are very patient with them. Do you expect them to come to rehearsal knowing their parts, even in the most complicated contemporary scores?

PB: Utopically, I would like that they are completely prepared! But you cannot expect them to be prepared, especially for a score they don’t know at all, because it’s true (while it is sometimes laziness or lack of interest) that sometimes they don’t know how to learn a part, how to work on a part, if they don’t have any idea of the ensemble. I can understand that because, for instance, they don’t know how I shall beat; they don’t know the sonority; they don’t know the exact tempo. There are lots of things they don’t know if it is a score they are playing for the first time, especially if it is not a difficulty of an instrumental nature. Then they will not bother very much, but, if they have a challenge in the instrument itself, it’s a personal challenge and they work for themselves and say, ‘Well, that was difficult, but I did it’. But if there’s a difficulty of style … I remember very well a concert some 30 years ago when we had the Symphony Opus 21 or the Concerto Opus 24 by Webern. There is nothing difficult really for the instruments, but awkward, delicate. They have three notes and then eight bars rest, and then two notes and six bars rest. They cannot understand the music at first, so what to work on exactly? When they understand the music they can of course forge the sound in a better way; they can make a phrasing in a more smooth way. But only when they have a notion of what the work is about and how the ensemble will sound. Of course, if they have a solo part or a part which is very important, I find it very disconcerting when someone has not had the smallest look at the score, because you have to say, ‘That’s not a B natural, it’s a B flat; no, that’s not a crotchet, it’s a quaver’. Then you give the impression of being a teacher in an elementary school, and that’s not exactly the most pleasant task, you can imagine! There’s immediately tension and everybody is irritated and waits, and you know the time is wasted, simply that.

RP: Rozhdestvensky used to say that rehearsal is not for practice.

PB: Yes, that’s true, but at the same time you have to rehearse!

RP: On the question of tuning and intonation: it does seem that the public, including the critics, don’t really notice bad intonation. Obviously it is of great importance, but what is the actual effect of bad tuning, apart from the pain which it causes to sensitive listeners?

PB: I think the sound of the orchestra is bad when the tuning is bad. In my opinion the two most absolute qualities of an orchestra, independent from any music, are, first, the tuning, and, second, the range of dynamic. You recognize immediately the orchestra that has bad intonation and dynamic, which has reduced everything to between mezzoforte and mezzofortissimo, and nothing else – and you have no range of dynamic possibilities. As to intonation, if you have a chord, they say, ‘Of course this is in D major or in F major and you must have it perfectly tuned because it will be heard’. And they also say, ‘If you have a more complicated chromatic chord as in twelve-tone music, it doesn’t matter, because it will not be heard’. But it is heard! If you have an orchestra very well tuned, then the sound of the chord is quite different, because the sonority is much nicer to listen to. And then also it gives the impression of truth, you have something which is as striking as truth. I remember with the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra (with which I worked a lot, as you know) I did sometimes find in some Webern pieces, when I wanted to draw attention to this intonation problem, I took some chords, very clear and very exposed, and I constructed the chords. For instance, I took out of the chords the fifth, or the fourth, or the third, and then I built the chord progressively and the musicians, without me saying anything, were aware how the chord could be properly adjusted to the tuning. Once you have done that with a couple of chords then everybody is alert and everybody is aware that the sonority will change completely. It’s the same for the strings. The intertwining of rhythmical accuracy and pitch is really the thing which is satisfying. Very often you hear the violin section: the notes are there, but the rhythm is not quite there. The G does not exactly come together, you have one G which comes too late and then, when you have a C–G sharp, for instance, the G sharp comes a little bit too late in some desks. That I taught the musicians very often and they believed me after a while! You can have perfect intonation, all of you, but if you are not absolutely together, it will give the impression of bad intonation, because this rhythmical inaccuracy spills over into the intonation and gives the impression that the tone is not really pure and not well tuned. So you have a mixture of rhythmical accuracy, tuning and also, especially for the wind instruments and for the brass, the quality of the sound, especially in contemporary music where we have the problem of mutes. If four trombones, for instance, don’t care very much about the quality of the mutes, then you have four individuals who are playing a chord and you have not a chord! For me real quality is to achieve this unity, not only in intonation, but in the time and in the rhythms.

RP: When you have got the intonation right and the notes right, you then have to get behind the notes to the meaning of the music. We all know that some apparently faultless performances are actually very dull, and we also know that some very inspiring performances have faults in them. What is the difference between a felt and moving performance, which may not be immaculate, and one which is just a play-through, though completely accurate?

PB: I think that’s very difficult to define. Cocteau once said the musician can have talent but the public can also have talent, or not have it, according to different evenings. I think it’s a conjunction of facts. First, there are different circumstances. For instance, when you have rehearsed, but only just as much as was necessary, not more, everybody is tense. This tension can bring disaster, or it can bring a marvellous performance. You never know exactly why. If everybody gives his best, the tension can add something which is absolutely unbelievable. But then sometimes, if there’s too much tension, or if there’s a small disaster in one area, everybody becomes nervous and the performance can fall apart, very rapidly. Of course, there are also performances in which you feel too secure and then you have no more interest, because the performance is just one more performance. That’s very dangerous, particularly on tours. When you tour, you repeat the same piece four or five times and you begin to feel like a factory: you give another performance, not a new performance. It can bring on disaster. It happened to me that, suddenly, at the end of a piece everybody was apart because attention evaporated and there were pieces of the score which were practically chaotic. Everybody was surprised, because it was a routine performance and suddenly disaster happened – and that really makes the blood go into your toes! It is unpredictable, and happily so, because if you knew in advance that the performance would be very good, or awful, you would not have the courage to begin!

RP: In every other art, I think, technique is essential, but in music it does appear that you can give great performances without a faultless technique. Furtwängler would be a very good example of this. Toscanini had a naïf, rather primitive technique, and Stokowski also. How can this be?

PB: I observed Furtwängler, I saw many of his concerts. Toscanini I never saw because he refused to conduct in France after a kind of political feud between France and Italy, and therefore I never heard him, apart from his recordings. I would not say that the technique of Furtwängler was primitive, not at all, he was a very refined conductor. He had not the technique of nowadays, but that’s quite a different matter. It’s like listening to Casals’s recording of the Bach Suites. You cannot say that Casals was a bad performer. He was a veteran of his time and the view we have is different. For instance, on string instruments (not to speak of conducting now) they did sliding, which to our ears is horrible, but their ears were not shocked by it. There is a style which has disappeared progressively – and the same in conducting. I suppose that Furtwängler was a man who wanted flexibility and therefore, if a chord was not exactly together, for him it was less important than phrasing. He had some priorities, we now have other priorities, and I suppose that is due to the recording industry. I remember there is a recording of a performance by Furtwängler of Die Zauberflöte in Salzburg and, really, if you hear the first three chords of that opening, you cannot believe your ears. I suppose, maybe, that for once in his life he did not really convey very well and, as I say, accidents can happen very often, more often than you wish! But I have also heard Walküre with Furtwängler and the feeling of time in Walküre was absolutely wonderful; of course, I would not see Walküre with the same eyes as he, but I find that his way of saying it was really remarkable. I remember I had a lot of conversations with Strobel, who watched the conductors in Berlin in the Twenties, and Furtwängler was, for this new generation which Strobel was associated with, the conductor they could not stand, because of his romantic approach. For them Toscanini was the big man, because he was exact, he was just doing what the score said had to be done. But if you hear the recordings of Toscanini they are not that accurate either. And that notion of accuracy also relates to the standards of our
period: if now you hear a recording, even only twenty times, you cannot stand a chord which is not together twenty times – hence all the editing. We must not forget that editing came rather late in the recording industry – I mean tape – and now of course our listening habits have changed completely, and also the dynamics. I remember very well once I was on tour with the Cleveland Orchestra and we played The Rite of Spring rather loud, at least not especially timidly, but it was in a big hall, and after it a student came to me and said, ‘Oh! Your performance this evening was not very loud. I have the recording, and when I listen to it, it is much louder than you did it tonight’. I said, ‘Yes, of course, but there you have just to push a button for that sound’.

RP: There is one very mysterious fact about conductors and orchestras, which I don’t think anybody has been able to explain fully, and that is that a particular conductor can come to one orchestra and produce from it a particular characteristic sound of his own, and the next day a different conductor can come and produce his own, quite different characteristic sound. How can this be explained?

PB: I think that’s because he chooses the sonority. For instance, he wants the strings louder compared to the woodwinds; he wants the woodwinds sharper for some accents; he wants the brass, on the contrary, to be very soft in the background; and so on and so forth. Mainly it’s a combination of what he requires from a group of instruments, and the balance he establishes between the groups. There are so many ways of changing the music. I find, for instance, that if you hear Haydn or Mozart by one conductor or another, you can hear what they do only with the strings. There are many ways of doing a staccato: you can make a staccato very short; or you can make a staccato more flexible; you can make a staccato with an accent; or you can make a staccato very fluid. And the whole character of the music is changed with that.

RP: But, I suspect, you see, that it isn’t necessary for the conductor to say any of these things, that there is something to be conveyed in the hands alone. Klemperer said it was very mysterious, but he thought it depended on the hands, the way in which the hands and the arms are actually moved, whether they move quickly and violently, or gently and elegantly – this is enough to make the sound of that orchestra particular.

PB: I would say ‘no’. Of course the way of conducting is critical; the way that Karajan is conducting, and the way Solti is conducting – visually it isn’t the same so obviously the response can’t be the same. But I think more important is the conscious relationship between what the conductor wants and the response of the musician – the type of bowing, the type of accent. You notice it when an orchestra has worked for along time with one conductor. In America, for instance, the Philadelphia sound is very famous, because it was Stokowski and Ormandy who were in the same line, and the Philadelphia sound is a sound by itself, it cannot change easily because these musicians have played most of the time like that and they will not forget it very easily. But you have orchestras which are less under the influence of a personality, and then they are more flexible and they can change from one conductor to another. In Cleveland when they had a very strong disciplinarian in Szell: this orchestra played really the way Szell wanted them to play, and it was a sound which was recognizable. I don’t think therefore that a kind of hypnotism affects an orchestra, but a very conscious relationship, and you see it especially when this relationship is on a long term.

RP: Another aspect of musical performance: Furtwängler used to talk a lot about spirituality in performance. Is it possible for a conductor who is spiritually a charlatan to be a success?

PB: Yes, of course! Well, you know, some charlatans are successful in life, so why not in music? Music is not an exception and certainly there is this kind of success. I would not say that it lasts forever, because the musicians are very much aware of it and very quickly, and, if the musicians are aware of it, you can be sure that the audience is also very quickly aware of it. I think there is a chain in performance; first the composer, the work, and then the conductor and the orchestra, and the audience. Everything is a kind of chain, which is circular and which reflects the behaviour of everybody and this behaviour is the mirror of the behaviour of each part of the chain. There is a continuity between the various elements of this chain and if the chain is broken, well, everybody is aware of it very quickly.

RP: You are a composer as well as a conductor, like Weber and Mendelssohn, and Wagner, and Mahler and Strauss, all of whom were important if not great conductors. What has conducting done to your own idea of composition or, indeed, to your own work as a composer?

PB: A lot, I must say. I have learnt a great deal through conducting orchestras. First, it’s corrected my tendency to be sometimes very theatrical and stubborn. It has taught me how to deal with difficulties of performance and how to be more effective, more efficient in my writing. You know, if you are rehearsing a piece and you have really worked, say, 30 times on the same spot and even then you have a chance in a thousand that it goes right during performance, somehow that is wrong, because the relationship between, as we say in French, the quality and the price, is not really right! It’s like writing for an instrument in such a way that, individually, all the chords are possible, but the relationship is not possible in the right tempo. So, if you want to be stubborn and say it is possible, okay, you can stick to your point of view but you will never be performed successfully, in the sense that the performance will never achieve what you have in mind. If you write a score to be performed at only 50 percent or 40 percent, that’s not really a great achievement, and you cannot say, ‘That’s 40 percent, but in the future, in 20 to 30 years from now, it will be 60 or 70 percent’. Of course you can rely on a certain progression in mastering the difficulties. I will give an example. Le Marteau sans maître, my own work, was first performed 30 years ago with Rosbaud as conductor and I think he had something like 50 rehearsals because, especially with the percussion instruments, there was a lot of difficulty, and also for the viola, and for every instrument there was some technical difficulties. Now when I do it with my group in Paris, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, I need half a rehearsal. So that is proof that things which are possible can be mastered much quicker now than they were 30 years ago. I needn’t have taken this example; I could have as well taken Pierrot Lunaire, when now you need two rehearsals and that’s absolutely all right, if you have musicians who are well trained. But in the time of Schoenberg they needed 30 or 40 rehearsals. So I believe in, not an improvement, but a better relationship between the musicians and the score, better knowledge. I was amazed recently: I was asked, ‘Why do you revise your scores all the time?’ I have done a new version of my cummings ist der dichter. In the earlier version I did 15 or 16 years ago, I had to explain to the musicians, ‘You do that if I do this gesture; you do that, if I do this’, and so on. It was very tedious to rehearse and to repeat always the same instructions, which could be given in a much easier way. So I re-orchestrated this work for many reasons and also I made it richer in texture, I had a new look at the composition itself. Now when I do it, I have almost nothing to say – it comes by itself. And I have not simplified; on the contrary, this score is more complex than the previous one but, from the performer’s point of view, the material is there, completely prepared for the musician. I am aware now, when I write a score, especially when I do the final score, of the problems of conducting, and I remember that I will need so much time to rehearse if I rehearse this score. You find that very much in Mahler, for instance. He knows very well the dynamic balance of everything, the relationship of the instruments between one another; and also Stravinsky – with Stravinsky you have absolutely no problems rehearsing a piece, because he’s very practical. But with Berg – and it’s nothing to do with the quality of the music – with Opus 6, for instance, you have to change the dynamic because, if you want to have the main voices and the secondary voices in the right proportion, then he was not as experienced as Mahler, and therefore you have to re-adjust it – and it is this re-adjustment of my own writing which I have learnt during all these years of conducting. And also it gave me a lot of ideas for using the orchestra in a way I would never have considered before.

RP: When you conduct your own music, as an interpreter, do your own ideas of it sometimes change?

PB: Certainly, with distance it changes completely. I’m conducting Le Marteau sans maître right now, but I’m no more involved with this work, because it’s a work which is 30 years old, and I don’t want to relate with it directly, as I did when I was composing it. My relationship with this work is in the memory and therefore one has more ability to conduct the piece because you take it as an object, not by yourself, but by somebody who was yourself. And, therefore, not only because I am a better conductor than I was 30 years ago, but because also of this distance, I can interpret this piece in a way that I could not dream of 30 years ago; for I was more stiff then, less at ease, I mean stiff in performing the piece, in the relationship I had with it. But now I can take pleasure in the piece because I have read it from the same distance as I have, for instance, a piece of Debussy. Yes, exactly the same way. When I do Jeux I take a lot of freedom with the score, and with Marteau I have my own indications, which I respect of course in toto, but I am also more flexible. So I take pleasure with it practically and, when you conduct, you play with the score and you are just not respectful of it; you play with it and make it your own thing; and with my own scores it’s exactly the same. And I notice, even for the most recent ones, for instance, Répons, I think of some revolution of tempo, some density, some texture, but it needs a couple of performances to become natural: the musical material asks you to do something else than what you conceived when writing it. So I mean, you thought of the material, of a musical object, and then this musical object, when you begin to manipulate it, asks for some freedom or for some changes: not very big ones, but some changes of what I call manipulation, taking it from this point to this other one. And that’s the relationship between an object which is your life, but your life inside, and you bring it outside and it needs fresh air, a fresh approach, and breathing.

RP: How great a part does emotion, or how great a part should emotion, play in a conductor’s work?

PB: Emotion should not be everything. You know, very often I think that emotion is an excuse for laziness; very often it is that, unfortunately! I will not go also to the paradox of Diderot, who wrote on The Comedian, who says that only the actors who have no emotion at all can convey the maximum of emotion because they can master the emotion of the audience; but the actors who are too emotional convey only their own emotion, not the emotion of the work. There’s something true in that, because if you just convey your personal emotions that’s not enough to convince everybody, but if you convey the emotions that are in the work, and you convey them through a tool which is really perfect, then the emotions in the work will be there. Of course, if you bring only the tool, then that’s not enough: the tool, as you said before, can be just dull and uninteresting. But when I hear some passion in the orchestra, but with wrong intonation, then I find the passion very difficult to enjoy!

RP: I think it was Strauss who said that the conductor should not perspire, only the audience should get warm.

PB: Exactly that.

RP: We’ve all of us been at performances which in some mysterious way have declared themselves as great performances, and everybody has recognized that, the orchestra, the conductor, the audience. I don’t suppose such occasions can be analysed, but can you remember attending such performances and would you tell me about one, or more than one?

PB: I have a very bad memory for that. I cannot really remember such a performance. I remember very good performances, but I cannot say, ‘That’s a perfect performance which I will remember all my life’, because I never live in the past and for me performance is always in the future. A new performance destroys always for me the previous performance. So, for instance, in the years I had with the orchestra here in the B.B.C. or with the New York Philharmonic, I remember very many occasions where everybody was absolutely together and the level of performance much higher than one expected. But that’s a very individual judgement, because I remember some musicians telling me there was a beautiful performance of a Mahler symphony in Japan and I don’t remember that performance as very exceptional myself. But I do remember very well a performance of the Concerto for Orchestra by Bartók in Vienna, for the opening of the Vienna Festival, which was to me quite exceptional, but we did other performances of this work which were as good. Maybe the circumstances were more exceptional in Vienna, but I cannot say that I remember really very exceptional performances. I can remember very exceptional circumstances of my life when a performance was important; that’s another matter.

RP: Other people’s performances, you mean?

PB: Other people’s or my own performances. But I don’t trust people who remember one performance especially; that’s like people who tell me, ‘Oh! I was in a restaurant twenty years ago and I had a meal I can never forget’! Maybe I have a bad memory, or a memory which is very selective, but, no, I cannot remember either a meal or a performance which I could consider really as exceptional. I can remember performances which were very important in my development, that’s for sure, but were they exceptional performances? I don’t know.

RP: Thank you very much, Pierre.

PB: Is the bar open?

Posted by R.A.D. Stainforth at 10:16 AM