Pierre Boulez

Context: Pierre Boulez was born on 26 March 1925, in Montbrison, a small town in the Loire department of east-central France, to Leon and Marcelle (nee Calabre) Boulez. He was the third of four children: an older sister, Jeanne (b. 1922) and younger brother, Roger (b. 1936) were preceded by a first child, also called Pierre (b. 1920), who died in infancy. Leon (1891-1969), an engineer and technical director of a steel factory, is described by biographers as an authoritarian figure, but with a strong sense of fairness; Marcelle (1897-1985) as an outgoing, good-humoured woman, who deferred to her husband's strict Catholic beliefs whilst not necessarily sharing them. The family prospered, moving in 1929 from the apartment above a pharmacy at 29 rue Tupinerie, where Boulez was born, to a comfortable detached house at 46 avenue d'Alsace-Lorraine, where he spent most of his childhood. From the age of seven he went to school at the Institut Victor de Laprade, a Catholic seminary where the thirteen-hour school day was filled with study and prayer. By the age of fifteen he was sceptical about religion ("what struck me most was that it was so mechanical: there was a total absence of genuine conviction behind it") and by eighteen he had repudiated Catholicism, although later in life he described himself as an agnostic. As a child he took piano lessons, played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. After completing the first part of his baccalaureate a year early he spent the academic year of 1940-41 at the Pensionnat St. Louis, a boarding school in nearby St. Etienne. The following year he took classes in advanced mathematics at the University of Lyon with a view to gaining admission to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. His father hoped this would lead to a career in engineering. He was in Lyon when the Vichy government fell and the Germans took over. The city became a centre of the resistance and Boulez later recalled the terrible reprisals: "when there was a bomb in a cafe where the military had been drinking next day there was a poster saying hostages had been shot. It was not a gentle time, and nothing to eat, and terribly cold." It was in Lyon that he first heard an orchestra, saw his first operas (Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg) and met the well-known soprano Ninon Vallin, who asked him to accompany her in arias from Aida and La Damnation de Faust. Impressed by his ability, she persuaded Leon to allow his son to apply to the Conservatoire in Lyon, but the selection board rejected him. Boulez was determined to pursue a career in music. The following year, with his sister's support in the face of opposition from his father, he studied the piano and harmony privately with Lionel de Pachmann (son of the pianist Vladimir). "Our parents were strong, but finally we were stronger than they," Boulez would later say. In fact, when he moved to Paris in the autumn of 1943, hoping to enrol at the Paris Conservatoire, Leon accompanied him, helped him to find a room (at 14 rue Oudinot, near the Invalides) and subsidised him until he could earn a living. In October 1943 he auditioned unsuccessfully for the advanced piano class at the Conservatoire, but he was admitted in January 1944 to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. His progress was so rapid that by May 1944, Dandelot's report describes him as "the best of the class". Around the same time he was introduced to Andree Vaurabourg, wife of the composer Arthur Honegger, and between April 1944 and May 1946 he studied counterpoint privately with her. He greatly enjoyed working with her and she remembered him as an exceptional student, using his exercises as models in advanced counterpoint until the end of her teaching career. On 26 August 1944, the day of de Gaulle's return to Paris, Boulez was among the crowd in the Place de la Concorde, which came under sniper fire from the few remaining Germans and collaborators. In the autumn he joined Olivier Messiaen's advanced harmony class at the Conservatoire and attended the private seminars which Messiaen gave to chosen students, where key works of the early twentieth-century, including Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, were subjected to intensive analysis. In January 1945 Boulez moved to two small attic rooms at 4 rue Beautreillis in the Marais district of Paris, where he lived for the next fourteen years. The following month he attended a private performance of Schoenberg's Wind Quintet, conducted by Rene Leibowitz, a follower of Schoenberg. The piece was a revelation to him and he organised a group of fellow students to take private lessons with Leibowitz. It was here that he first studied twelve-tone technique and discovered the music of Webern. Around this time he was one of a number of Conservatoire students (organised, it was said, by Leibowitz) who booed a performance of Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, a work whose neo-classicism represented the pre-war culture he was determined to reject. Eventually he also found Leibowitz's approach too doctrinaire and he broke angrily with him in 1946 when Leibowitz tried to criticise one of his early works. In June 1945 he was one of four Conservatoire students awarded premier prix, the only member of Messiaen's class to achieve this distinction. He was described in the examiner's report as "the most gifted--a composer". Although nominally still registered as a student of the Conservatoire for the academic year 1945-46, his only attendance was at Simone Ple-Caussade's counterpoint and fugue class, which he joined in January 1946. He was so infuriated by what he described as her "lack of imagination" that he boycotted the class and organized a petition that Messiaen be given a full professorship in composition. Over the winter of 1945-46 he immersed himself in Balinese and Japanese music and African drumming at the Musee Guimet and the Musee de l'Homme in Paris: "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time." A planned field trip to Cambodia was prevented only by the outbreak of the First Indochina War. CANNOTANSWER

Question: Did Pierre Boulez receive any special recognition as a student?
Answer: Dandelot's report describes him as "the best of the class