"Une forme vécue dans le temps lui-même". L’ultimo Debussy e l'"Étude pour les quartes" secondo Pierre Boulez

The reception of Debussy's late works is indissolubly bound up with Boulez, and constitutes a distinctive feature of Boulez's thought on Debussy. "Jeux" appears in the conductor's repertoire as in that of no other colleague, and so too does the "Images" triptych, completed in 1912. References to the "poème dansé", to the "Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé", to "En blanc et noir", to the "Douze études" for piano, and to the three sonatas punctuate Boulez's writings, interviews, and lectures. The titles of "Jeux", the "Sonate pour flûte, alto et harpe", and the "Études" likewise recur in the programs and plans for composition courses documented in his correspondence. These works in particular, together with Anton Webern's Second Cantata, were the subject of the advanced analysis seminars held at the Basel Musik-Akademie in 1960–61. It is to this experience — singular in the composer's career for its type, duration, and intensity — that the autograph annotations and commentaries, or at least the greater part of them, entered by Boulez in his own copy of the Durand score, now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, are traced back. The first part of the essay takes as its point of departure a celebrated Boulezian lecture of 1955 and traces the references to Debussy found in Boulez's writings published over the preceding seven years: identified in chronological order are the parallel drawn early on with Webern, the centrality attributed to Debussy's late period, the paradigmatic value accorded to their forms, and the resulting construct within the writings of 1954. The second part reconstructs the genesis of this construct within the compositional thought developed during the composition and completion of Le Marteau sans maître (1952–55), as it emerges in the correspondence with Karlheinz Stockhausen. One letter in particular points to the étude pour les quartes, whose analysis by Boulez is then partly summarized in the third part of the essay. The example is representative of what the composer means when, in "…Near and Far" and "Current Investigations," he defines the new concept of musical form — "lived within time itself" and "interwoven [tressée]" — drawn from Debussy's late works.