La Mer – Les Siècles at Festspielhaus Baden‐Baden

About the Event

The poet Stéphane Mallarmé liked to invite people to a meeting in his Paris apartment on Tuesdays, and they came: Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George.
Pierre Boulez first performed his composition “Pli selon pli”, based on Mallarmé poems, in 1957 and revised it again and again until 1990. What Mallarmé and Boulez had in common was that they both strived for the “complete, absolute” work of art, knowing full well that this did not exist. Pierre Boulez, meanwhile, also reflected on the work of Claude Debussy, whom he admired. The famous “La Mer” is considered a masterpiece of musical impressionism and stands far less for a description of nature than for absolute virtuosity in the orchestration of abstract musical ideas.