Livre pour quatuor
Livre pour quatuor is a composition for string quartet by Pierre Boulez.
Background
The bulk of Livre pour quatuor was composed during 1948–1949, immediately following completion of the Second Piano Sonata, and contemporary with the publication of the essay "Proposals." Boulez's first instrumental piece without piano, it can be seen as marking a transition between the hyper-expressivity and reliance on traditional forms found in the earlier works, culminating in the Second Sonata, with the serial experiments that followed. In a 1950 letter to John Cage, Boulez acknowledged the influence of the older composer, stating: "Meeting you made me end a 'classical' period with my quartet."Sketches for Livre pour quatuor reveal Boulez's initial experiments with applying serial techniques to both pitch and rhythm. In an interview, he recalled that he "began by using completely independent schemes in which pitches, durations and rhythms were combined at first starting from cells, but these cells became so independent that they virtually became rhythmic series." Boulez would continue these experiments in the works that followed, namely Polyphonie X, Deux Études for tape, and the first book of Structures.
Livre pour quatuor was also the first of Boulez's compositions to reflect the influence of poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Boulez noted that the idea for the quartet came to him while reading Mallarmé's Igitur and Un Coup de Dés, during which he came to see the poetry as forming "a continuity from which sections could be detached because they had meaning and validity even when taken out of the continuous context in which they were placed." Boulez's quartet was initially conceived as a group of six separable movements, or "feuillets", from which the performers would select the ones they wanted to play. He would continue to explore such ideas in later works, such as the Third Piano Sonata.
The quartet remained in a state of flux for many years, as Boulez grappled with its technical and expressive challenges. Although he completed movements 1, 2, 3, and 5 by mid-1949, movement 6 was not completed until 1959, while movement 4 remained incomplete. He revised the piece in 1959 with the help of members of the Parrenin Quartet, and, during 2002–2012, he continued the revisions, working with the Diotima Quartet.
Over the years, as Boulez attended performances of individual sections of the work, he grew dissatisfied with it due to the numerous performative challenges resulting from his inexperience at the time it was written. He concluded that it "posed great interpretative problems for a quartet," and suggested that "you would need a conductor to solve them." In the late 1960s, he withdrew the work from his catalogue, requesting that it no longer be performed except by quartets that had already rehearsed and played it, and began rewriting it for string orchestra. His recomposition of the two-part first movement became Livre pour cordes, while rewrites of the remaining movements remained forever incomplete.