The great conductor and composer was someone who was never shy of saying exactly what he thought. Here, in a piece originally published in 2015, are some of his most notorious pronouncements

Classical music’s most celebrated maverick, widely regarded as the 20th century’s greatest innovator of classical music has died. Boulez’s 1967 proclamation that the answer to the stagnation of opera was to “blow the opera houses up”, is just one of many bold and candid statements that have won him recognition as one of classical music’s most outspoken and controversial figures.

But he has also said: “I don’t want my statements to be frozen in time. A date should always be attached to them. Certainly if you take a picture of yourself 30 years ago, that same picture cannot be used as a picture of yourself today.” His incendiary comments, whether directed at his contemporaries (he has described Duchamp as ‘a pompous bore’, Cage as ‘a performing monkey’, and Stockhausen, ‘a hippie’), or more general topics such as culture and history, however, suggest that he enjoys the controversy. Here are some of his most memorable quotations, some best taken with a pinch of salt.

In praise of Pierre Boulez at 90 Read more

‘Blow the opera houses up’ 1967

“Only with the greatest difficulty can one present modern opera in a theatre in which, predominantly, repertoire pieces are played. It is really unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses up.

But don’t you think that would be the most elegant? […] Or one can play the usual repertoire in the existing opera houses, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, up to about Berg. For new operas, experimental stages absolutely need to be incorporated.

This apparently senseless demand has already been widely realised in other branches of the theatre.”

‘All the art of the past must be destroyed’ 1971

“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All the art of the past must be destroyed.”

1972: “I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa; it should simply be destroyed. All I meant was just to urge the public to grow up and once for all to cut the umbilical cord attaching it to the past. The artists I admire – Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Berlioz – have not followed tradition but have been able to force tradition to follow them. We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.”

‘The Paris Opera is full of dust and crap […] Operatic tourists make me want to vomit’ 1967

“In the provincial town of Paris the museum is very badly looked after. The Paris Opera is full of dust and crap, to put it plainly. The tourists still go there because you ‘have to have seen’ the Paris Opera. It’s on the itinerary, just like the Folies-Bergere or the Invalides, where Napoleon’s tomb is. […] These operatic tourists make me vomit. If I write a work for the stage I certainly won’t write it for star-fanciers; I shall be thinking of a public that has an extensive knowledge of the theatre.”

‘They decry the Taliban for destroying everything, but civilisations are destroyed to be able to move on’ 2011

“We live in a century of libraries, drowning under the weight of amassed documents. They decry the Taliban for destroying everything, but civilisations are destroyed to be able to move on. In general you understand that under excessive conservatism there has always been explosion.”

‘From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés’ 1952

(writing after Schoenberg’s death): “[Schoenberg’s dodecaphony (12-tone writing) is] a direction as wrong as any in the history of music. From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés and formidable stereotypes redolent of the most wearily ostentatious romanticism… those fake appoggiaturas, those arpeggios, tremolandos and note repetitions, which sound so terribly empty… finally, the depressing poverty, even ugliness of the rhythms.” (Download a PDF referencing the 1952 essay)

‘Supermarket music’ 1987

(on music that is a reaction to previous music, such as, according to Boulez, minimalism): “If you want a kind of supermarket aesthetic, OK, do that, nobody will be against it, but everybody will eventually forget it because each generation will create its own supermarket music - like produce that after eight days is rotten and you can’t eat it anymore and have to toss it away.”

Pierre Boulez at 90: reviews from the archive Read more

‘Excite the curiosity of the snobs’ 1970

(on how to urge audiences to engage with new music): “...By exciting the curiosity of the snobs. And I am not against it, I must say. I did it in Paris and it worked very well. To start, you always find 200 fanatics. They are very easy to find, too easy sometimes. What is important is to raise the number. If you have a few, people will think, ‘I must go there. I should know about it.’ I have witnessed cases of people who came out of mere curiosity because they thought, ‘I’ve heard about it. I think I must go and see what it is. I don’t want to seem backward.’ And finally, gradually, these people came.”

‘I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler’ 2000

“Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time, I find. It’s like olive oil, when you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler. I think, with Shostakovich, people are influenced by the autobiographical dimension of his music.

‘Any musician who has not experienced... the necessity of 12-tone system is USELESS’ 1952

“[Composers of 12-tone music] give themselves over, as a group or individually, to frenetic arithmetic masturbation. For in their necessitous speculation they have forgotten to go beyond the elementary stage of arithmetic. Do not ask them for anything more: they know how to count up to 12 and in multiples of 12.”

(in the same article): “What can we conclude? The unexpected: I, in turn, assert that any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced – the necessity for the dodecaphonic [12-tone] language is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

‘A civilisation that conserves is one that will decay’ 1975

“I believe a civilisation that conserves is one that will decay because it is afraid of going forward and attributes more importance to memory than the future. The strongest civilisations are those without memory - those capable of complete forgetfulness. They are strong enough to destroy because they know they can replace what is destroyed. Today our musical civilisation is not strong; it shows clear signs of withering… […] Conducting has forced me to absorb a great deal of history, so much so, in fact, that history seems more than ever to me a great burden. In my opinion we must get rid of it once and for all.”