“Simple solutions are not to my taste,” remarked Pierre Boulez in a letter to fellow composer John Cage. For him, a work of art “[is] authentic only if one is never able reach an end. (It must contain this ‘impenetrable essence of night.’) When everything has been said, one still has said absolutely nothing and will moreover never have anything to say.” Just how deeply Boulez has taken this aesthetic idea to heart in his own creative work is demonstrated by his great Mallarmé-inspired cycle, “Pli selon Pli,” which he will conduct on 8 September in a performance featuring the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY Orchestra and Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan.

“Pli selon Pli” certainly represents a work that cannot “reach an end”—a notion already apparent from the textual source on which this five-movement composition for soprano and orchestra is based. All his life Boulez has been fascinated by the ambiguous lyrical poetry of Stephane Mallarmé, which has strongly influenced his own art. In “Pli selon Pli” (“Fold by Fold”), Boulez fashions a musical portrait of the Symbolist poet. But his concern is not so much to “set” these poems to music in the conventional sense as to get at the substance of individual texts. He is far more interested in the linguistic concision and ambiguity of Mallarmé’s poetry, which for Boulez represents an “extreme position, which is not to be surpassed. I wanted nothing more or less than to transpose this formal rigor into music.”

The result, simply put, is overwhelming: “Sometimes the entire score seemed like a blur in front of my eyes—foreign and immense,” recalls Barbara Hannigan, who will be the soloist for the Lucerne performance, about rehearsing “Pli selon Pli” for the first time in 2007. “But at the first rehearsal, when I came together with the orchestra, it was like an explosion of sound I will never forget. I felt we had entered a sound world into which I had never travelled. It was like different textures of liquid which mix, carry, and envelop each other. I think in ‘Pli selon Pli,’ we are all a part of the poetry, all voices and all instruments.”
Music lovers should not miss this opportunity to learn more about “Pli selon Pli” and the “impenetrable essence of night” in a special forum on 5 September, when Barbara Hannigan and the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY Orchestra will be joined by the master himself to introduce this composition.