ABSTRACT
It was after a visit to Cologne in September 1954, when Boulez spent a period working in the electronic studio, that the score and drafts for the Symphonie Concertante were discovered to be missing, Boulez apparently having left them behind in the student accommodation where he was staying. As discussed in Chapter 4, this work was originally composed in 1947 prior to the composition of the Second Sonata, and was evidently an important link in the stylistic changes which Boulez’s music was undergoing at the time. A première having at last been fixed for Munich in 1955 some eight years after the work was originally composed, it seems likely that Boulez, consistent with his practice in the case of the delayed première of other early works such as the Sonatine, would have been engaged on some revision of the Symphonie Concertante at the time of the loss. All attempts to retrieve the material having failed, his initial response was to compose a replacement work for piano and orchestra in time for the scheduled première in Munich the following year. A letter to Stockhausen, written the following month, contains some significant thoughts about this new piece:
… it is necessary for me to think about another score for the concert in Munich on 22 April. Plainly this can no longer take the form of Symphonie Concertante, but an ‘antiphonal’ form: piano-orchestra. I reckon on featuring in it what I have sketched in the article, a structure ‘non-homogeneous’, which allows for: full orchestra – soloists – and piano – Structures not closed; musical parentheses; musical italics, that is what I seek.1
