Partisan Pied Piper

The New York Philharmonic would have liked Leonard Bernstein to stay on forever as its music director. But since he announced 21 years ago that he would quit to devote more time to composing, the orchestra has been pondering a successor, well aware that Lennie would be a tough act to follow. Who could match the famous Bernstein skill, glamour, showmanship and popularity? Last week the orchestra directors courageously and imaginatively picked a man who might just do it. In Pierre Boulez, 44, the French avant-garde composer-conductor, the Philharmonic is betting its future on a musical pied piper who is capable of shaking up symphonic life not just in New York but throughout the U.S. as well.

Boulez, who spent four weeks guest-conducting the orchestra this spring, will take over the Philharmonic in the fall of 1971 for three years. It should be a lively reign. An enfant terrible of French music during his younger days, Boulez is capable of fighting desperately for what he believes in--primarily, Boulez's own precise brand of serialism, Webern, and the two most important "traditionalists" in his life, Stravinsky and Debussy. His own music (notably Eclat, Le Marteau sans Maitre, fresh, glittering, mobile works filled with a constant sense of surprise that belies their tight structure) reflects his individuality. An acknowledged egotist ("And you can be sure, as I grow older I will become even more so"), Boulez possesses a blazing aphoristic gift for denouncing all those who do not agree with him. On everyone who writes opera today: "Since Wozzeck and Lulu, no opera worth discussing has been composed." On the Paris Opera: "Full of dust and dung." On the French musical community, which he left in 1959 to settle in Germany: "There is more stupidity there than anywhere else." On the verbiage of conductors who talk too much: "Sheer hocus-pocus."

New Audience. To the directors of the Philharmonic, Boulez's kind of belligerence is obviously a risk to be seriously weighed. So is his lack of experience in the bread-and-butter area of any symphony orchestra's life: the 19th century repertory. By and large he made his conducting reputation on no more than half a dozen works--notably Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, to which he brings astonishing rhythmic control and a primitive passion for the work's savage shafts of power. He does not much care for Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Bruckner, but his conducting of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn has been superb in its structural logic. During his Philharmonic stay, he attracted a younger, more intellectual audience than usual. Even the hard-to-please orchestra was impressed with his mentality and uncanny ear. "He's probably got the greatest musical ear in the world," says Saul Goodman, who has been playing timpani for the orchestra since the Mengelberg days of the late 1920s.

Boulez regards himself as an international partisan of new music, and he has no intention of abandoning his other conducting jobs. He plans to stay on as principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, who will be watching over the Philharmonic for the next two years as music adviser and senior guest conductor. And in 1971, Boulez takes over from Colin Davis as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony. Boulez will conduct the New York Philharmonic for eight weeks the first season, and a minimum of 14 weeks thereafter. He will spend four months a year composing at his home in Baden-Baden.

Boulez's free-wheeling approach is bound to change the Philharmonic's life habits. He would like to alleviate the fears of older concertgoers ("They say 'Let's not go; it's not going to sound pretty' "); yet he realizes that a major problem of concert life today is finding new listeners. He even has thoughts about changing Lincoln Center, the home of the Philharmonic. Boulez predicts that music will some day broaden out to incorporate the other arts, and that some of that broadening-out may very well take place in U.S. cultural centers. "Lincoln Center still represents no more than an accumulation of geographically adjoining artistic ghettos, with no interconnection between the jealously guarded fiefs," he says. "But once such a center were made to cross-fertilize, a new era of culture might begin to emerge."

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