Le marteau sans maître

Le marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master) is a composition by the French composer Pierre Boulez. First performed in 1955, it sets the surrealist poetry of René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists.

Before Le marteau, Boulez had established a reputation as the composer of modernist and serialist works such as Structures I, Polyphonie X, as well as his infamously "unplayable" Second Piano Sonata (Jameux 1989b, 21). Le marteau was first written as a six-movement composition between 1953 and 1954, and was published in that form in the latter year, "imprimée pour le festival de musique, 1954, Donaueschingen" (though in the end it was not performed there) in a photographic reproduction of the composer's manuscript by Universal Edition, given the catalog number UE 12362.

In 1955 Boulez revised the order of these movements and interpolated three newly composed ones (Mosch 2004, 44–45). The original, six-movement form lacked the two "Bel édifice" settings and the third commentaire on "Bourreaux de solitude". In addition, the movements were grouped in two closed cycles: first the three "Artisanat furieux" movements, then the three "Bourreaux de solitude" ones, otherwise in the order of the final score. The first movement, though fundamentally the same composition, was originally scored as a duet for vibraphone and guitar—the flute and viola were added only in the revision—and numerous less significant alterations were made to playing techniques and notation in the other movements (Siegele 1979, 8–9).

It received its première in 1955 at the 29th Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden (Jameux 1989b, 21). Boulez's work was chosen to represent France at this festival. The French members of the committee were against this, but Heinrich Strobel, then director of the Baden-Baden Südwestfunk Orchestra, which was scheduled to give all of the concerts at the festival, threatened to withdraw the orchestra if the work was not accepted (Jameux 1989b, 21). The first performance was given on June 18 1955 conducted by Hans Rosbaud, with Sybilla Plate as the solo singer (Steinegger 2012, 240–42).

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