UE Mahler Interview with Pierre Boulez

Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez talks to Universal Edition about his relationship to the music of Gustav Mahler.
Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
This interview is included in our new book Gustav Mahler: The Conductors' Interviews
Edited by Wolfgang Schaufler
www.universaledition.com/mahle...

[@sirmattbelios]

This was so interesting! Thanks you. Boulez speaks like he conducts - such precision.

[@allesvergaengliche]

You can really tell his love for the music. Fascinating interview.

[@TheRealGnolti]

All of the Second Viennese deified Mahler, particularly Schoenberg, and this was a matter of record well before Boulez became a conductor. It's a nice (if insidery) touch that Boulez learned about this connection not by reading about it, but by chatting with Adorno.

[@fredericolourenco1972]

What an amazing interview!

[@user-jb5sk7pc2m]

Your best interview in my opinion

[@kuglagerfeld]

On a shelf, next to Boulez, books about Boulez.

[@uemahlerinterviews]

+Vladimir Gligoric Yes, that's because he visited us in our office for the interview.

[@annakimborahpa]

So very honest and forthcoming in his speech.

[@davidmayhew4818]

I remember first hearing this music when I was a teenager in the sixties. I had on a lark baught Bernstein's recording of the 2nd with NYP. I listened to about five minutes near the end and did not like it. About a year later on a rainy day I was painting a picture and put this record on from the beginning. By the end of the day I was a changed person. I played it for months. The next few years were all about Mahler's music. It was so great to be in on this first real acceptance of his music and to have Bernstein as a guide. Plus his music was interestingly a very zietgiest like experience. On the one hand there was this whole new kind of pop music and Mahler for so many of us was the new classical music. It fit the times with all the turmoil and war and civil disobedience etc. I can't imagine a world without his music.

[@MrKNNT]

WOW!!! Interesting questions!

[@profdodo1]

Agreed - great interview. Pityy it wasn't longer. What would he say about the 2nd, and 3rd?

[@LeonardAbbado3]

It's a shame that he couldn't talk with the great Bernstein. They're two great conductors.

[@Breakbeat90s]

wait why is that?

[@KinkyLettuce]

how so? Didnt they even host concerts together at the NY phil introducing mordern serialism?

[@uranrising]

Interesting interview, Boulez an engaging personality. A shame he wasn't asked for his evaluation of Mahler's body of work Greetings from East Anglia in England.

[@JPFalcononor]

There are two questions I wish all of these conductors were asked... 1. What order do you place the two middle movements of the Sixth Symphony and why? (my preference is scherzo-adagio)2. What is your opinion of the performance version of the Tenth Symphony and do or will you ever program it? (Rattle, thank goodness is an advocate of it, but I do wonder what some of these other conductors think).

[@photo161]

It is not, as you must know a problem with Mahler's composition of the 10th Sym. but with the orchestrations, or as they are best referred to as the reconstructions, various of them, as it is impossible to know how closely they reflect what would have been Mahler's own finished work.

[@olivierbeltrami]

No need to harken back to the 1950s, I recall the Place des Arts in Montreal emptying progressively more after each movement of Mahler 7, in 1986.

[@arnaudhanon5174]

hihi