stylistic:style_transfer
Work in the opera house

Boulez also conducted in the opera house. His chosen repertoire was small and included no Italian opera. Apart from Wagner, he conducted only twentieth-century works. Of his work with Wieland Wagner on Wozzeck and Parsifal, Boulez said: "I would willingly have hitched, if not my entire fate, then at least a part of it, to someone like him, for discussions about music and productions were thrilling." They planned other productions together, including Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Mozart's Don Giovanni. However, by the time rehearsals for their Bayreuth Parsifal began Wieland was already gravely ill and he died in October 1966.

When the Frankfurt Wozzeck was revived after Wieland's death, Boulez was deeply disillusioned by the working conditions: "there was no rehearsal, no care taken over anything. The cynicism of the way an opera house like that was run disgusted me. It still disgusts me." He later said that it was this experience which prompted his notorious remarks in an interview the following year in Der Spiegel, in which he claimed that "no opera worth mentioning had been composed since 1935", that "a Beatles record is certainly cleverer (and shorter) than a Henze opera" and that "the most elegant" solution to opera's moribund condition would be "to blow the opera houses up".

In 1967, Boulez, theatre director Jean Vilar and choreographer Maurice Béjart were asked to devise a scheme for the reform of the Paris Opéra, with a view to Boulez becoming its music director. Their plan was derailed by the political fallout from the 1968 student protests. In the mid-1980s, Boulez became vice president of the planned Opéra Bastille in Paris, working with Daniel Barenboim, who was to be its music director. In 1988 Pierre Bergé was appointed president of the Bastille opera. He dismissed Barenboim and Boulez withdrew in solidarity.

Boulez conducted only specific projects—in productions by leading stage directors—when he could be satisfied that conditions were right. Thanks to his years with the Renaud-Barrault company, the theatrical dimension was as important to him as the musical and he always attended staging rehearsals.

For the centenary Ring in Bayreuth, Boulez originally asked Ingmar Bergman then Peter Brook to direct, both of whom refused. Peter Stein initially agreed but withdrew in 1974. Patrice Chéreau, who was primarily a theatre director, accepted and went on to create one of the defining opera productions of modern times. According to Allan Kozinn the production "helped open the floodgates of directorial reinterpretation of opera" (sometimes known as Regietheater). Chéreau treated the story in part as an allegory of capitalism, drawing on ideas that George Bernard Shaw explored in The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898, and using imagery from the Industrial Age; he achieved an exceptional degree of naturalism in the singers' performances. Boulez's conducting was no less controversial, emphasising continuity, flexibility and transparency over mythic grandeur and weight. In its first year the production met with hostility from the largely conservative audience, and around thirty orchestral musicians refused to work with Boulez in subsequent seasons. Both production and musical realisation grew in stature over the following four years and after the final performance in 1980 there was a 90-minute ovation.