Introduction

At first sight, Pierre Boulez is not the most obvious subject for a study of piano music in the post-war era. Remarkable as they undoubtedly are, the first two sonatas were completed before the age of twenty-five, since when Boulez failed to complete a single work for solo piano until the appearance of the final version of Incises, after an interval of some forty years. Such seemingly sporadic output is in contrast not only to that of many other nineteenth and twentieth century composers, but to Boulez’s teacher, Messiaen, whose oeuvre is dominated by the great keyboard masterpieces of the 1940s and 1950s as well as subsequent major compositions for solo piano. However, this seeming hiatus in production obscures the reality that the instrument occupied a central role in Boulez’s creative thinking from his earliest unpublished student works through to his last published compositions some sixty years later. Thus the radical nature of the first published works, in which the young composer’s style seems to emerge fully formed, was in reality a slow and painful evolution, a process of selection, the extent of which is revealed by a study of preceding works for piano and their relation to the first drafts of published works. The era of the 1950s is bounded by the two volumes of Structures, the work for two pianos which functioned almost as a laboratory in which to test the far reaching stylistic and technical changes of the decade, whilst even the comparatively less fruitful period of the following decades includes works which relate to material which first appeared in published form in the Third Piano Sonata. With the opening of IRCAM in 1977 and the beginning of a new phase in Boulez’s career, it was again the piano to which he turned in realising the ground breaking integration of computer generated programmes with traditional instrumental forces. The instrument lies at the heart of the concept of both Répons and sur Incises, with their deployment of two and three pianos respectively, and both these large-scale works have an intimate relationship to the solo piano work, Incises. To trace the development of his writing for piano is to undertake a study of Boulez’s stylistic development as a whole, and the creative dilemmas which characterise his output.