pierre boulez
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Do you wish that you could devote more time to composition?

Yes, I wish that. I've wished that for a long time, already. The concerts I give generally consist of contemporary music. Not always, but mainly. But if you do contemporary music, you have to do the repertoire; an orchestra cannot survive without the repertoire. Therefore, you have to make… not a compromise in the bad sense, but a good compromise. It has to do with the audience: when the audience is confident that you can conduct all the pieces, they will follow you more; because they are confident that what you do is not simply absurd.  

In the next few years, are you going to devote more time to composition?

Yes, to composition.  

Will you write an opera?  

Yes—I am supposed to do so! The first thing I said to Daniel Barenboim [Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra] was that I don't want any deadline. I have conducted opera, not quite a lot, but sufficiently enough to be aware of the difficulties. And I want to do for the opera what I did with Répons: to not have only a conventional setting. Of course, conventions are existing not just because they are conventional, but because they are efficient, for instance acoustically. Once I saw in Paris a production of Boris Goudonov. Joseph Losey, the movie director, was doing it. He wanted direct contact between the singers and the audience members. They covered the [orchestra] pits completely and placed the orchestra behind the singers, like a band shell. The contact was terribly difficult, of course, because the conductor could not see the performers; so there were only monitors, everywhere, in front of the singers, in front of the conductor. The balance was completely off! When the chorus was at the front of the stage, you could barely hear a note of the orchestra. You heard the singers out of proportion. When a singer was in front, you heard the singer with a kind of background orchestra. So you cannot simply decide, “I will put the orchestra there, I will put the singer there.” You have to take into consideration the acoustical problems. I want to think about that, and to decide with the playwright how to use that. Music is much less flexible than theatre.  

You enjoy the theater. Do you go to the cinema?  

Rarely. I look at movies when I am lazy; when I am tired, I look at movies on television. They appear on television one year late; and most of the movies can wait a year, I suppose.  

But traditionally France has held the cinema in high regard, more seriously than in the United States, maybe.

Yes, in a way: there is a conception that is tied much more directly to the author, to an individual. But not always for the better, either. It reminds me sometimes of theatre at the beginning of this century, at the end of the nineteenth century, with these kinds of psychological and family situations which are not terribly exciting. In film, in France, you have nobody the size of Beckett, for instance.

Now, I mean. You had [Robert] Bresson, for instance, who made very good films; but the best film I saw recently, not now but a few years ago, was a Russian one, by [Sergei] Paradzhanov. It was called Sayat Nova [The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969]. It lasted for only eight days in the theatre; but it was extraordinary.