Pierre Boulez
1954–1959: Le Domaine musical

In 1954, with the financial backing of Barrault and Renaud, Boulez started a series of concerts at the Petit Marigny theatre, which became known as the Domaine musical. The concerts focused initially on three areas: pre-war classics still unfamiliar in Paris (such as Bartók and Webern), works by the new generation (Stockhausen, Nono) and neglected masters from the past (Machaut, Gesualdo)—although the last category fell away in subsequent seasons, in part because of the difficulty of finding musicians with experience of playing early music. Boulez proved an energetic and accomplished administrator and the concerts were an immediate success. They attracted musicians, painters and writers, as well as fashionable society, but they were so expensive that Boulez had to turn to wealthy patrons for support.

Key events in the Domaine's history included a Webern festival (1955), the European premiere of Stravinsky's Agon (1957) and first performances of Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques (1955) and Sept haïkaï (1963). Boulez remained director until 1967, when Gilbert Amy succeeded him.

On 18 June 1955, Hans Rosbaud conducted the first performance of Boulez's best-known work, Le Marteau sans maître, at the ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden. A nine-movement cycle for alto voice and instrumental ensemble based on poems by René Char, it was an immediate, international success. William Glock wrote: "even at a first hearing, though difficult to take in, it was so utterly new in sound, texture and feeling that it seemed to possess a mythical quality like that of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire ". When Boulez conducted the work in Los Angeles in early 1957, Stravinsky attended the performance; he later described the piece as "one of the few significant works of the post-war period of exploration". Boulez dined several times with the Stravinskys and (according to Robert Craft) "soon captivated the older composer with new musical ideas, and an extraordinary intelligence, quickness and humour". Relations between the two composers soured the following year over the first Paris performance of Stravinsky's Threni for the Domaine musical. Poorly planned by Boulez and nervously conducted by Stravinsky, the performance broke down more than once.

In January 1958, the Improvisations sur Mallarmé (I et II) were premiered, forming the kernel of a piece which grew over the next four years into a large-scale, five-movement "portrait of Mallarmé ", Pli selon pli. It received its premiere in Donaueschingen in October 1962.

Around this time, Boulez's relations with Stockhausen deteriorated as (according to the biographer Joan Peyser) he saw the younger man supplanting him as the leader of the avant-garde.
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