From a New York Philharmonic concert in January 1971 in which Janet Baker sang Les nuits d’été to this 2010 Wiener Philharmoniker concert, Pierre Boulez continuously challenged me and totally changed the way I listen to music.  

I actually skipped a Mahler Third with Mariss Jansons a few months ago because after hearing Boulez do it with the Philharmoniker, that was it: no one will ever come close to what Boulez achieved that afternoon.

I met the maestro on a few occasions (the last time was after the premiere of Z mrtvého domu in 2007, where he was just standing alone outside the stage door).  Contrary to most accounts, I found him affable, charming, and humorous, with an incredible memory.  I mentioned the concert—36 years before—where Baker sang the Berlioz, and he said, “Ah, yes.  I remember it well.  She was so very special.  We did the Bruckner Te Deum that night, too.”

When I was a kid saving my lunch money to buy classical records at a little specialty shop (the budget-priced reissues from the major labels cost 99 cents—do you remember Victrola, Seraphim, and London Treasury?), I would spend hours reading every album cover, deciding how to spend my weekly allowance.

The very first LP I ever bought was Boulez’s first recording (of three) of Le sacre du printemps made in about 1961 for a French company and issued in the USA on the Nonesuch label (it can be found on a French CD but is very rare and expensive, and of course I bought it!).

In that time when everyone else was turning on and feelin’ groovy, I was rocking out to Stravinsky (my older teenage sister once yelled at me to stop playing it over and over again).

I can’t think of another conductor who gave me so much: from that LP to literally life-changing performances of Mahler, cool Ravel and Debussy, grand Bruckner, and the operas: Parsifal at Bayreuth (twice), and Z mrtvého domu at Theater an der Wien. In my personal pantheon, he is one of the highest deities.

In memoriam Pierre Boulez (26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016)

Evelyn Herlitzius, soprano
Jolana Fogasová, mezzo-soprano
Ladislav Elgr, tenor
Dmitry Ivashchenko, bass
Wiener Philharnoniker
Wiener Singverein
Pierre Boulez, conductor
Musikverein Wien
27 March 2010

Igor Stravinsky – Symphonies of wind instruments
Igor Stravinsky – Symphony of Psalms
Léos Janácek – Glagolitic Mass

Photo: Autograph, signed after the premiere of Janácek’s Z mrtvého domu at Theater an der Wien, 12 May 2007. It would be the last opera he would conduct.