This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
No free country is so minutely regulated as France. From Normandy down to Nice, the price of a baguette is fixed at one euro. The width of a boulevard is laid down in the Code Napoléon, as are the duties of priests and rabbis in places of worship.
A fonctionnaire in the Ministry of Education can tell you, any minute of the day, exactly which page students are studying in their history lessons. Everything is micro-managed from the top down.
So I was not surprised to receive a 72-page book from the Ministère de la Culture, listing all the events the state has planned to salute “the talent, contribution and legacy of this major figure in contemporary creation”, namely the composer Pierre Boulez, born in 1925.
Only France could organise a composer celebration on the scale of the Paris Olympics, and only France could do so without a flicker of admission that the legacy of Boulez is contested and that two centennials of far greater significance are being officially ignored.
Credit to Boulez: no previous composer ever brought French presidents begging to his door. They built him a futuristic composing lab, known as IRCAM, and gave his acolytes cultural control. His tunnel vision of serial music, void of pleasure or popularity, became state policy.
When Boulez joined the BBC as conductor of its symphony orchestra and the New York Philharmonic as music director, Mozart and Tchaikovsky were banned and Britten and Shostakovich were denounced as reactionaries. Boulez was the closest music ever came to having a Stalin.
“You cannot forever bark outside like a dog,” he once told me. Power was the love of his life (he never had a partner). His charm was irresistible, and musicians were awed by the acuity of his ear. At London’s Roundhouse he got concertgoers to sit on the floor and deconstruct the music they had heard.
In the absence of sensory satisfaction, we counted the numerical logic in Le Marteau sans maître and Pli selon pli, his titles as elusive as the music itself.
For half a century Boulez was the Sun King of a sinking art, no part of it sinking faster than his own. After Répons of 1981, in which an orchestra interacted with a room-sized computer, his invention failed.
The centennial of 2025 will include premieres of “eight previously unheard works”. Deservedly unheard, is my guess. France, after Boulez, is a state of musical confusion, its former glories dimmed by the Arc de Triomphe of Boulezian mind-rule.
Two painful coincidences underline this imbalance. The year Boulez was born saw the death of an unqualified musical genius. A conservatoire dropout and army reject, Erik Satie went to work in the bars of Montmartre dressed in a cassock, the head of his own église.
He exchanged the habit for a green velvet suit and a bowler hat, carrying an umbrella in all weathers. The poorer he was, the further he moved from the Champs Élysées, walking seven kilometres each way to attend the salons where Guy de Maupassant and Marcel Proust observed epochal decadence.
Whilst Gabriel Fauré played romances at the piano, Satie tinkled out black-key aphorisms that were at once trivial and indelible. Satie’s enigmatic Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes sounded like nothing ever heard before. Ladies stopped their chatter and listened.
“Walk around,” cried a furious Satie, “carry on talking.” His music was intended as background. He envisaged a future where music would be ignored, like wallpaper. And much the better for it.
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel doffed their hats to the transparency of his sound. Young composers, known as Les Six, took him as their mentor. Serge Diaghilev commissioned his ballet, Parade, with costumes by Picasso. Satie, uncomfortable with fame, drank himself to death in July 1925 in a one-room rented apartment without running water or electric light. His music can be identified by ear in less than ten notes.
In California, John Cage acclaimed Satie as a prophet, the harbinger of modernism. Cage, with fellow pianists in 1963, gave the first public performance of Satie’s Vexations — a single page of music that is meant to be repeated 840 times, without variation or intermission.
Vexations was a passport to musical nihilism, a milestone in early minimalism. The mystic Arvo Pärt and the electronic Brian Eno are amongst its legatees.
Erik Satie pushed musical tolerance to its limits and made the world rethink what music is for. His centrality is incontestable. Yet — and I share this with dismay — I can find no events in the French calendar to commemorate the centenary of his early death, and certainly no command performance by order of President Macron.
And that’s not the worst of it. Maurice Ravel, the most captivating French composer of any era, was born 150 years ago, in March 1875, and is getting little recognition. Of Basque origin and accent, Ravel struggled with Paris fashion and convention. Like Satie and Boulez, he never found an intimate relationship. His music, however, crossed all social lines and international borders. The lucidity of his Pavane for a dead infant, the shimmering nuances of Rapsodie espagnole, won the outsider Ravel greater public affection than his rival Debussy, the establishment favourite.
The piano concertos, the morose La Valse, the interminable Boléro, confirm Ravel as a composer for all time and tastes. This ought to be the year of Ravel.
Yet the only commemoration I can find is a week-long summer festival along the Basque coast: nothing in Paris. Pinned between Debussy and Boulez, Ravel has been written out of the official record. That is the ultimate price of French over-regulation. When the state puts all its prestige behind one composer, there is nothing left to signify the life-affirming breadth and diversity of French genius.
