Boulez’s Formative Years: Two Labyrinths

to those of us who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the heroes of hardcore post-war modernism were at the height of their prestige and institutional power, it is strange to find oneself in a musical landscape in which those heroes, nearly all now dead, are so little celebrated and seem to have left such a modest mark on day-to-day musical life (concerts, recordings, playlists). I have had a Google alert on the word ‘Boulez’ for years and lately noticed that it reels in many more news items about concerts of non-Boulez music at one or the other of the Pierre Boulez Saal/Salle (in Berlin and Paris) than about the music of the composer in honour of whom these halls were named. A hopeful take (for Boulez and his cohort) might diagnose the present time as a requisite purgatory that precedes ultimate consecration in the pantheon, but this doesn’t have the ring of truth to it. Boulez, Stockhausen, and their contemporaries were already so confident of their roles in world-historical projects that one might expect a second consecration to come later by the hands of others. And yet in the realm of scholarship, the approach of Boulez’s 100th anniversary in 2025 has been the occasion for the publication of two new monographs on the composer, by Caroline Potter and Joseph Salem, both offering fresh takes, and one can hope that renewed scholarly interest in Boulez’s music will also result from the centenary celebrations.

The first and more accessible of the two is Caroline Potter’s Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium, which tells its story in under 200 pages.¹ Last year also saw two biographies of another pathbreaking French composer, Gérard Grisey, by Liam Cagney and Jeffrey Arlo Brown.² That two biographies of French modernist composers chose to use the word ‘delirium’ in their subtitles (Potter’s and Brown’s) must say something about the current reception of the twentieth-century French avant-garde. Potter’s message in a nutshell is: ‘Boulez sURREalist not sERIalist.’ There is much to like about this formula, though contending that Boulez has ‘usually been studied from a music analytical perspective in the context of serialism’ in the very first sentence sounds to me like a classic straw-person setup: what of the biographies, what of the multiple studies of Mallarmé’s influence on Boulez from a literary point of view? At any rate, Potter’s goal is ‘refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a more visceral, emotional response to his work’ (p. 1), a worthy goal, and one that recalls, with respect to Boulez’s spiritual father Arnold Schoenberg, book-length charm campaigns aimed at de-intellectualizing reception, by Allen Shawn and Olivier Revault d’Allonnes.³ Like those authors, Potter’s goal is salutary, although it does feel a little dispiriting after nearly a century of trying to dismantle the head/heart dichotomy to find ourselves still thinking about music in the same old binary terms (intellectual versus emotional) as if the two couldn’t be intermingled, both being located, after all, in the brain.

Potter focuses on the ‘broader intellectual context of [Boulez’s] formative years’, understood here as those that preceded the composition of the integrally serial Structure pour deux pianos, Livre 1, in 1952. Armed with a clear and succinct thesis regarding the role of surrealism in Boulez’s music, Potter is able to weave a brisk narrative meant to appeal to devotees of classical music as well as music scholars and students. (Potter has already shown her skill at mediating between French composers and curious readers with her award-winning Erik Satie, a Parisian Composer and his World, 2016.) There are many items to be found in Boulez’s historical record that can be placed on the surrealist side of the ledger: the title of Boulez’s work (in fact a family of related works) ‘…explosante-fixe…’ derived from a poem by André Breton; his personal connections with the Belgian surrealist musician André Souris and other links with Belgian literary surrealism (Souris was ultimately excluded, in 1936, from the Belgian Surrealists for the sin of conducting a religious work, but besides André Breton himself, it sometimes seems as if every other surrealist artist was expelled from the movement at one time or another); the abundant settings of surrealist verse by René Char, and the allusions in Boulez’s writings to Antonin Artaud, among many other connections. And yet, it might seem surprising to view Boulez, the prime mover of the post-war avant-garde, through the lens of such an iconic pre-war aesthetic as surrealism surely is. One is reminded of the composer Hans Werner Henze’s assessment of the stifling aesthetic atmosphere of avant-garde composition of the so-called Darmstadt School in the wake of the recent horrors of Germany’s Nazi past. Reminiscing about this period and the intolerant atmosphere from which he would soon escape, he wrote that ‘Expressionism and Surrealism were mystically remote; we were told that these movements were already obsolete before 1930, and had been surpassed’.⁴ And yet Potter shows that pre-war surrealism did in fact continue to exert a decisive influence on one of the most influential representatives of this youthful post-war avant-garde, and may therefore not have been as ‘mystically remote’ as it might have seemed initially. And besides, Potter sets out to answer questions that go beyond merely tracing Boulez’s links to surrealist artists. She asks, more broadly, ‘What is the cultural background—both musical and non-musical—to Boulez’s work? Where does the extreme energy and visceral emotional impact of Boulez’s music come from?’ (p. 8), which allows her to explore fascinating territory. This explains why, as the book moves along, Potter enlarges her thesis from demonstrating the surrealist roots of Boulez’s music to underscoring ‘the sensual, emotional side of Boulez’s art’ that ‘has been severely underplayed’ (p. 184), surely a worthy goal and a welcome tonic for Boulez reception.

As an aside, I feel personally vindicated by the arrival of Potter’s book, since I was once publicly castigated by a prominent performer of Boulez’s work at a round-table discussion on the composer. Recalling Boulez’s links with surrealism and specifically Antonin Artaud’s circles, I told the audience that in my classroom teaching I would play for my students excerpts from Artaud’s famously scatological ‘Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu’, replete as that radio play is with chants, cries, and drums beating in the background, and then immediately juxtapose it with a passage from Le Marteau sans maître—usually the final movement, ‘Bel édifice et les pressentiments (double)’—the goal not being to claim that the two were of a piece, but that in order to understand what Boulez meant when he spoke about ‘how to organize delirium’, it helped to have Artaud’s riotous performances as a kind of baseline experience. The performer took the microphone in order to distance himself publicly from my remarks, stating without providing a reason that he completely disagreed with me, even though, when I spoke to him privately after the event, citing such historical facts as Boulez’s attendance at Artaud’s public events at the Galérie Loeb in Paris, he admitted that I was correct, but that he had simply assumed that by linking Boulez to surrealism, I was uttering a crudely journalistic generality that needed to be quelled. Had Caroline Potter’s book been published then, I could have simply referred him to it. And indeed, Potter goes even further in likening Boulez’s aesthetics to Artaud’s when she produces a spectrogram of an excerpt of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu in order to show that the abrupt changes of dynamics and register parallel those of Boulez’s music, albeit not in Le Marteau, but in the Second Piano Sonata (p. 122).

The first chapter traces surrealism’s origins and evolution, chez André Breton et al., as well as direct or indirect musical manifestations before Boulez, in Erik Satie, André Jolivet, André Souris, or even in Messiaen (who once said that his music of the late 1940s was ‘more or less surrealist’, p. 34). Potter then goes on to offer an agreeably granular level of detail about Boulez’s formative years in the second of five chapters. Boulez’s first harmony teacher upon arrival in Paris? A certain Renée Jamet (p. 60). How did he then come to take private counterpoint lessons with Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger? Probably because her niece, Annette Vaurabourg, was a fellow pupil in his harmony class at the Conservatoire (p. 61). But this, of course, does not connect Boulez to surrealism: that connection is primarily established through Boulez’s interactions with the Brussels-based Souris. The other crucial link, of course, is to wayward surrealist Antonin Artaud, whom Boulez met near the end of the poet’s life, attending a private event at the aforementioned Galerie Loeb in Paris in July 1947 (p. 52). It is a highly plausible thesis that Artaud-inflected surrealism had a decisive influence on the young composer and Potter provides convincing evidence of a shift away from this influence at the turn of the 1950s, when a letter Boulez addressed to Pierre Souvtchinsky announces his new belief that Artaud was ‘on completely the wrong track’ and that Mallarmé’s ‘Coup de dés’ and the open/mobile forms it intimated were henceforth to be his new source of aesthetic guidance (p. 162).

In the third chapter, Potter examines the first two piano sonatas (1946 and 1948) and the Sonatine for flute and piano (1946; 1949). Rather than analysing their pitch organization, Potter concentrates on what she sees as surrealist elements in these works, mostly displayed in their rhythmic unpredictability, violence of expression, and abrupt juxtapositions of emotions: ‘The intensity and visceral power of Artaud and the surreal conflation of explosion and stasis, pithily expressed in Breton’s fragment “explosante-fixe”, are at the heart of the instrumental works of Boulez’s formative period, though he conceals their emotional world beneath the neutral titles “Sonata” and “Sonatine”’ (p. 104). Whether these aspects are enough to justify thinking of them as inspired by surrealism is a matter of opinion, but it’s hard to say what would count as proof positive of influence where any instrumental music is concerned. About the first sonata, Potter offers a fascinating discussion of the way Boulez deleted sections from earlier versions in the published score, contending that the deletions were motivated by a desire to hide sources of inspiration that he saw as too overt, such as passages inspired by André Jolivet or even Bartók. Potter goes on to hold up the second sonata, in particular, as the work that most expresses the aesthetic of Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’, in his famous coinage, as well as René Char’s surrealist poetics. Potter notes that the unusual performance instruction found in the Second Sonata inviting the pianist to ‘pulvériser le son’ may have been inspired by the title of Char’s volume ‘Le poème pulvérisé’, published a year before the completion of the sonata, which Boulez knew and admired well enough to ask the poet for permission to set one of its poems (p. 119).

A fourth chapter dives into Boulez’s engagement with the poetry and the person of René Char, the poet and resistance fighter whose last name—meaning ‘tank’—Boulez admitted to having been particularly struck by when he discovered his poems as a young man. A tank turns out to be an aptly belligerent term given Char’s role in the French Resistance, and Boulez in later life compared his discovery of Char’s poems to a bomb going off (p. 129). Boulez would go on to use Char’s verse in three key works: Le Visage nuptial (1946), Le Soleil des eaux (1948), and, of course, Le Marteau sans maître (1953–5), so given Char’s early ties with the surrealist movement, Potter has here the most secure evidence of her thesis imaginable. A fifth and final chapter looks forward to Boulez’s post-formative decades and finds a legacy of surrealism in his approach to objets trouvés, in this case objects found in his own back catalogue, taking the example of the frequent reuse of a seven-note motif from the seventh of the Douze Notations (1945) as well as a soggetto cavato on the last name of famed music patron Paul Sacher. Here the purely descriptive form of analysis of such works as Dérive 1 (1984) and Mémoriale (1985) seems to yield fewer returns, but the implication that strands born of his formative period continue to live on and even find ramifications in subsequent years is credible.

Potter’s commitment to the thesis that surrealism was the central aesthetic kernel of Boulez’s formative years leads her through enlightening avenues concerning Boulez’s many youthful intellectual and artistic passions, tracing his sustained interest in music of oral tradition (a musical mission to Indochina had been planned through the Musée Guimet but was aborted when war broke out there; one of his Douze Notations for piano initially bore the title ‘Afrique’ before Boulez scratched it out), the poetry of André Gide (later repudiated) and even Baudelaire, the religious and liturgical influences in his early works, and his performances on the ondes Martenot or on the piano of microtonal works by Ivan Wyschnegradsky. There is much here to enlarge the caricatured vision of the modernist composer of integral cerebralism. Potter’s sustained exploration of influences rehabilitates composers essential to Boulez’s development but whom he later disavowed, and who therefore got short shrift in much of the contemporaneous commentary on the composer, such as Jolivet, whose piano suite Mana was a major source of inspiration in early Boulez (pp. 87–8).

While seemingly aimed at a readership of cultivated concertgoers, the book does not shy away from score examples and analytical treatments of local passages Potter deems of interest. Particularly detailed and illuminating is the discussion of the Char-texted cantata Le Soleil des eaux and its derivation from a much longer score used as incidental music for a radio play (pp. 152–9). A small final point: not to begrudge the choice of cover image, but in a book that insists so forcefully on the intense emotion and colour of Boulez’s music it is somewhat odd to have a cover adorned with an uninterrupted greyscape of geometrical shapes. That said, the artist whose work it excerpts has impeccable Boulezian bona fides: the Portuguese abstract painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–92), about whom Boulez wrote a text included in the catalogue of an exhibition of her work in Lisbon in 1988. Still, surely other canvases by Vieira da Silva might have better conveyed a more ‘éclatant’ form of organized delirium, one that befits the colour and the drama of Boulez’s music that Potter ably evokes in her lively book.

* * *

Joseph Salem’s project in the other Boulez book of the year is intriguing and audacious.⁵ A critical biography, covering the most ‘electric’ stage of the composer’s career (Salem’s ‘formative period’ extends further than Potter’s, stretching until the early 1960s), that tells the story of Boulez’s evolution through the copious sketch material for his works that the composer left behind. The goal is to pull a biographical arc out of these pre-compositional documents now housed at the Paul Sacher Institute in Basel, as well as at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with which Salem has extensive familiarity. (In the interests of transparency, Salem reviewed my own monograph on Boulez, in 2013.) It is worth signalling the originality and heuristic potential of this methodology. The ambition of the book is to demonstrate how Boulez’s successive revisions of his works, some stretching over several versions and spanning decades, reveal his creative process as an evolving artist. ‘Revision’ is the key word, and the theoretical underpinning, or so one assumed from Salem’s 2018 article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, was to be Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence.⁶ In the book, though, unlike the earlier JAMS article, the Bloomian heritage is more or less absent: there are only two references to Bloom, and his name does not appear in the index. But the emphasis on revisions and what they reveal about a creative artist remains. And indeed, in his book Salem is good at describing Boulez’s available sketch material and in convincing us about why it is significant, for example, when discussing the famously withdrawn early integral serialist effort Polyphonie X (1951) (pp. 107–13).

The opening sentence of the Introduction announces: ‘In this book, I explore the music and aesthetics of Pierre Boulez during his formative period as a serial composer, from approximately 1925 to 1962.’ Imagining Pierre Boulez as a serial composer in 1925, having been born on 26 March of that year, recalls the episode in Tristram Shandy that describes ‘the great Lipsius’, a prodigy who ‘composed a work the day he was born’.⁷ Of course we understand that Salem’s panorama will include the very formative years of Boulez’s early childhood and later schooling, a natural starting point for a biography. But the book functions more as a critical or meta-biography that identifies common narratives found in extant biographies, and then compares and evaluates these competing narratives. For example: ‘Although the idea that Boulez’s opinions at the age of eighteen were lasting feels flawed, he does appear to form influential convictions in the politicized environment of post-war France during his early twenties—a time that frequently grouped together a person’s aesthetics with his or her national allegiances and regional “Frenchness”’ (p. 21). One has a vision of musicology soaring over biographical musicography, identifying tropes and assessing stories: ‘In traditional histories of music, Pierre Boulez is most often introduced alongside the rise of integral serialism and the guiding influence of the Darmstadt summer music festival during the post-war years. Examining Boulez’s life and works before Structure 1a, however, provides a different aesthetic trajectory’ (p. 106). As such, Salem’s book is not advisable for someone looking for an introduction to Boulez: it takes for granted that one has already read other standard biographies, say Dominique Jameux’s biography (English edition from 1990), or, for French readers, Christian Merlin’s fully up-to-date one from 2019. Readers are also assumed to be conversant with Boulez’s artistic and intellectual milieu: do not expect to find potted biographies of René Leibowitz, Madeleine Renaud, Hans Rosbaud, Pierre Souvtchinsky, Wolfgang Steinecke or Suzanne Tézenas here. It is assumed you know that Boulez’s counterpoint teacher, ‘Andrée Vaurabourg’, on p. 19, is one half of ‘the Honeggers’ referred to on p. 23. This gives the book the air of being an ongoing (and valuable) conversation with other Boulez scholars rather than an invitation to discover the composer for audiences or music students.

In three parts, Salem’s book follows a chronological narrative. Part I, ‘A Path Toward Integrating Serialism’, covers Boulez’s student days and compositions from the late 1940s; Part II, ‘The Challenges of Integral Serialism’, focuses on the first book of Structures and the abandoned Polyphonie X, and the Marteau sans maître; and Part III, ‘Testing the Limits of Serialism’, takes us up until Pli selon pli, i.e. until 1963. If these section titles prepare us for a book essentially about serialism, Salem’s book is not chiefly concerned with serial technique, but rather with broader questions of creative process. Part I, the most biographical of the three, takes us through Boulez’s childhood in the first chapter and then devotes a second one to his Conservatoire days, followed by another covering the Sonatine and the first two piano sonatas, with explicit reference, as in Potter, to surrealism. Surprisingly, the backdrop of the Second World War barely figures in the account, no doubt a consequence of the book’s focus on sketches rather than biography in the traditional sense. Still, a mention of Boulez’s first encounter with Messiaen in June of 1944 (p. 17) makes us want to know more about the lived experience of a meeting occurring only two months before the liberation of Paris. Part II looks at ‘a series of musical failures’ (p. 95) emerging from Boulez’s adoption of multiparametric serialization. After a discussion of the Boulez–Cage correspondence, the first chapter, ‘Before Integration’, goes on to discuss Boulez’s ur-failure Polyphonie X, and specifically the ‘self-critical epiphany’ (p. 118) that it prompted within himself. Chapter 5, portentously titled ‘Self-Ordained’, looks at several years starting from 1951, covering Boulez’s relationship with friend and rival Karlheinz Stockhausen and his foray into electronic music. Salem focuses on the way the available machinery of the studios in which Boulez worked strongly determined his compositional preoccupations in his electronic works, while cautioning that ‘discussions about technology may have been more consequential than the affordances of studio equipment’ (p. 127). In the same chapter he then discusses the composition of Stuctures, Book 1, making for a fairly heterogenous chapter, chronology being the unifying element. Chapter 6, ‘Other Theatrics’, begins with a discussion of Boulez’s early involvement with theatre, most notably as musical director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company. Salem claims that ‘It is no exaggeration to suggest that Boulez’s relationship to the theater is the most consequential topic in recent scholarship on his early development’ (p. 156), which might seem overstated until he explains convincingly that Boulez’s output for the theatre ‘shifts these commissions from incidental to influential as a reflection of his changing working methods’ (p. 157). The same chapter then goes on to deal with the intricacies of a non-theatrical work, Le Marteau sans maître; once again, chronology taking priority over thematic unity. The technical middle section of chapter 6 cogently explains the ins and outs of Boulez’s personal approach to serial technique via ‘multiplication’ and the resultant ‘blocs sonores’ that provided him with the harmonic material that would regulate both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of musical writing for the better part of his subsequent compositional career.

Part III is devoted to the works from the Le Marteau onward. Salem’s position, straightforwardly, is that Boulez’s subsequent creative productivity cannot only be understood as springing on the heels of Le Marteau sans maître (1953–5), the pump having been primed over the course of several years that precede that work. Chapter 7 looks at the tangled web of compositions Boulez worked on in 1954–5: not only the Marteau, but also the lost Symphonie concertante, the theatre piece L’Orestie, and the second book of Structures, ending with the famously aleatoric Third Piano Sonata. Chapter 8 looks mostly at Boulez’s writings from the later 1950s, offering some penetrating readings of well-known texts, such as the 1955 ‘At the Edge of Fertile Lands’, Boulez’s most significant early essay on electronic music. Salem shows, for example, how Boulez’s presentation of studio work for the electronic composer put the creation of electronic sounds in the purview of studio technicians while keeping ‘creative and conceptual control (i.e., what the resultant object should sound like) in the hands of the composer’ (p. 230). He also notes that Boulez’s characterization of the output of the electronic music studio as ‘sound-complexes’, by which he means the synthesized sounds produced in the studio, map onto his ‘blocs sonores’, his post-serial method of pitch organization used abundantly in his non-electronic works at this time and thereafter. Elsewhere he notes that Boulez’s ‘ungenerous critique’ of Cage and his acolytes in ‘Aléa’ constituted a ‘purposeful misreading’ (p. 232). Salem chides Boulez’s monograph Penser la musique aujourd’hui: ‘Beyond intimidating audiences with complex graphics, a myriad of musical examples, and trivial lists of binary oppositions, Penser also coerces otherwise curious readers to look backward at private grudges rather than following Boulez’s forward development’ (p. 244). Chapter 9 looks at Boulez’s two orchestral works from the late 1950s: Doubles (1957) and Poésie pour pouvoir (1958), emphasizing the former’s indebtedness to the precompositional material of the Third Sonata and the metaphorical spirals of the former, the later withdrawn work for spatialized orchestra and tape. Chapter 10 begins with a discussion of Boulez’s conducting career and goes on to study unpublished works such as Strophes, a work that would be mined in a variety of later works. Chapter 11 ends with the major opus that bookends what Salem calls Boulez’s formative period—Pli selon pli (1958–63), the large-scale work ultimately scored for soprano and orchestra. Examining the sketches of the Mallarmé portrait and other archival sources, Salem perceptively notes that despite the title and texts of the work deriving from Mallarmé’s poetry, since the ‘Improvisations themselves [comprising the inner movements of the work] are heavily reliant on repurposed music that originally had nothing to do with Mallarmé or his texts’, the work’s sources go well beyond symbolist poetry. He therefore posits that ‘the techniques found in Pli selon pli owe more to Boulez’s contemporaneous surroundings as a palimpsest of previous works’ (p. 309), because Pli selon pli ‘began not with Boulez’s newfound interest in Mallarmé’s Livre but with the earlier composition of Strophes and the idea for a set of improvisations’ (p. 313). This last chapter fulfills the promise of writing biography through a comparison of sketch materials, and Salem’s sketch-based methodology fruitfully unearths this network of self-borrowings in Boulez’s music from this period. The larger purpose is to show that this methodology of revision was fundamental to the composer’s creative process, and not just the expediency of a harried composer, sidelined by conducting and administrative duties, looking for ways to meet looming deadlines. For Salem, Pli selon pli’s willy-nilly genesis is emblematic of Boulez’s creative process in the 1950s and early 1960s: ‘It is piecemeal in its construction, problematic in its length, and uneven in its use of ensemble, color, and harmony, and it is frankly confusing as an homage to modernism. It is, in sum, a near-perfect encapsulation of Boulez’s formative period’ (p. 348).

One senses—and this is a feature it has in common with Joan Peyser’s much-maligned but well-researched and still essential 1976 biography⁸—that Salem began the book as a Boulez booster but completed it in a state of greater circumspection. As he writes, ‘My own ambivalence toward serial music plays a large part in what follows’ (p. 2). Salem’s objective seems to be to move from the sketches to an almost Kermanian music criticism, an admirable—and far from easy—task. In fact, Salem laid out this critical ambition in an earlier contribution on Boulez in a multiauthor volume, observing that ‘as scholarship on Boulez continues to proliferate, it is worth re-evaluating the goals of manuscript studies of his works in particular, especially as they relate to the development of a hermeneutics to guide the interpretation and poetics of Boulez’s music above and beyond its mere explication’.⁹ Hermeneutics, not mere explication, is the goal here. And indeed, Salem seems quite comfortable with donning the critic’s hat in a way that one associates more with U.K. than U.S. scholars (a sample: ‘Hence, once assumes that Tombeau continues to bewilder uninitiated listeners as a memorial, even if it succeeds in creating a magical, existential free-fall into another dimension’; p. 341). He sometimes even goes so far as to identify flaws or false starts in Boulez’s production—something rarely dared by Boulez scholars in the composer’s lifetime, except in the case of withdrawn works that Boulez himself admitted to being failures. Many of the music-critical passages of Salem’s book are enlightening and refreshing. He can be engaging in critic mode and sometimes even amusingly catty (Pli selon pli could be heard as ‘a curated collection of misfits’ (p. 347); the Livre pour quatuor is ‘perhaps the greatest unrequited time investment of any piece in his oeuvre (equaled only by the enormous, one-hundred-plus-page extension of Éclat/Multiples that was never performed)’ (p. 105)). Elsewhere, with regard to Polyphonie X’s sketch material, we find the zinger ‘If all of this sounds unmusical, it’s because it is’ (p. 112). Despite the occasional rebuke directed at Boulez, Salem for the most part approves of the extant scholarship on the composer. Although the critical biography genre might suggest that Salem would sift through the available commentary on Boulez, sorting the wheat from the chaff, he mostly offers praise.

Let it be said that Joseph Salem’s book could have benefitted from more rigorous in-house editing that would have weeded out various typos, misspelled names, and imprecise work titles. In a quoted letter, for example, Boulez did not refer to ‘non-improved constructions’ in Cage’s prepared piano pieces but to ‘non-improvised’ ones (p. 101). Nevertheless, Boulez scholars owe a debt to Joseph Salem for his novel insights, his synthesis of available scholarship on the composer, as well as for the way he has shown that sketches can be made to speak: to tell a story, and a musical one at that.

Footnotes

Author notes