Madame Françoise Xenakis, in conversation with Andreas Waldburg-Wolfegg, looks back on the fraught relationship between Iannis Xenakis and fellow composer Pierre Boulez, and recounts French President Georges Pompidou’s failed attempts to bring the two of them together. Listen to excerpts from the interview in the latest podcast from Tracing Xenakis.
Andreas: What fascinates me, speaking of construction, is that when I look at this period of Xenakis’ work, and I look at what he was doing as an architect and a composer, someone like me thinks—it’s something that I, personally, adore, that I find very interesting—but it’s not very popular. I wonder how he lived with that.
Mme X: He wasn’t preoccupied by it. I don’t know if he thought about it; it wasn’t his problem. He had this expression—“it’s not my problem”—which he used to brush a lot of things off. When he didn’t feel like dealing with some triviality, he would just say, “It’s not my problem.” His problem was creating, seeking, finding the unbeaten path. The rest…he never said “I don’t have time,” but he would say “I’m not interested.”
W-W: There were moments, if I’ve understood correctly, in which there was a lot of distance between him and his fellow composers.
X: He was hated. He was subverting…and then he met Boulez at Louis Saguerre’s. Saguerre was an old homosexual; delicious, but a bad composer. And [Saguerre] had put together this kind of salon where all the emerging composers came to see him. And Boulez was there—it was a musical atmosphere, and he was already a conductor, and Boulez had a group of followers who were all exceptionally eloquent. He is a man of striking intelligence. But Boulez hated Xenakis so much that he would speak out against him violently and in public. For him, [Xenakis] was something terrifying. That a man who was nothing, who only had a half a face, who was a communist … that was untenable for him, even though he may have thought highly of him. It never went away. They crossed swords. Boulez would say that Xenakis was telling architects that he was a composer and composers that he was an architect. But of course it wasn’t like that. He was dishonest.
W-W: It strikes me that Xenakis really remained an emigrant in perpetuity.
X: In perpetuity. He was a permanent emigrant.
W-W: It’s interesting because it’s very much like the history of classical music of the 20th century. It’s a kind of emigration until 1985, I think; all the composers—
X: They all came from abroad. Bartók, Shoenberg…they were in exile. But most of them, in literature as well, they were politically right-leaning. The reds…
W-W: There were fewer of them.
X: There were few and they weren’t seen well. Communism was scary at that time.
W-W: And there was also, if I understand correctly, a whole political aspect to Xenakis’ composing, naturally.
X: Of course, it’s very political.
W-W: Yes, all these institutions like Darmstadt and Ircam, all that is—
X: Absolutely. And Pompidou—we dined with Blaise at Pompidou’s three or four times—and he would say to Iannis: “you’ve got to get along, you both have” and so to earn a living Xenakis at first had to work at Ircam, and after 3 days he wrote, “I cannot go on; Boulez is taking over.” And Pompidou said “you’re not trying hard enough.” And Iannis said “I don’t have time for this.”
W-W: It’s pretty unbelievable that the president was involved in this at all.
X: And his failure to bring [Xenakis and Boulez] together was saddening. He thought it was really too bad.
… Stay Tuned!
Hear the full original conversation:
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Translated from the French by Sarah Green and Maro Elliott.
