Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma

by Joan Peyser

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: 0028718100
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Schirmer Books
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

the only biography you will ever find

This remains the only book on Boulez's life. He was not one to give-up personal details on his life, he said so to a reviewer arrongantly when he was newly appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic. Peyser had access to rehearsals,dinners,lunches and insider trades and gossip, and all that is here, but also we find Boulez at work, the conductor and composer, a rehearsal schedule in included here ;when he looked for an apartment or an eye doctor appointment. Peyser is not a creative person so the sorry side of the book is that it remains as an outsider looking in, for Boulez's creative secrets are not revealed simply from hanging around him as she did. No you need to have studied the Boulez aesthetic, where it comes from, from the roots of modernity, Mallarme, Paul Klee, Schoenberg and recently Francis Bacon.Those books do exist and excellent one by Dominic Jameux, and there are a few on specific aspects of the Boulez aesthetic, (harmony Lev Koblyakov, one on Mallarme,another on conducting,Jean Vermeil) I still enjoy re-reading this work, Peyser knows how to tell a good story, how to pick at details of the everyday, the excitement of creating and conversing.