Piano sonatas (Boulez)

Pierre Boulez composed three piano sonatas. The First Piano Sonata in 1946, a Second Piano Sonata in 1948, and a Third Piano Sonata was composed in 1955–57 with further elaborations up to at least 1963, though only two of its movements (and a fragment of another) have been published.

Boulez's First Piano Sonata, completed in 1946, has two movements. It was his first twelve-tone serial work (together with his Sonatine for flute and piano), and he originally intended to dedicate it to René Leibowitz, but their friendship ended when Leibowitz tried to make "corrections" to the score (Peyser 1999, 162, quoted without a page reference in Ruch 2004).

The Second Piano Sonata of 1947–48 is an original work which gained Boulez an international reputation. The pianist Yvette Grimaud gave the world premiere on 29 April 1950 (Nattiez 1993, 37). Through his friendship with the American composer John Cage, the work was performed in the U.S. by David Tudor in 1950 (Nattiez 1993, 77–79). The work is in four movements, lasting a total of about 30 minutes. It is notoriously difficult to play, and the pianist Yvonne Loriod "is said to have burst into tears when faced with the prospect" of performing it (Fanning n.d.).

The Third Piano Sonata was first performed by the composer in Cologne and at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1958, in a "preliminary version" of its five-movement form. A subsequent Darmstadt performance by the composer, on 30 August 1959 in the Kongresssaal Mathildenhöhe, was recorded and has been released commercially on CD2 of the seven-disc boxed set, Neos 11360, Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4: Pianists ([Germany]: Neos, 2016). One motivating force for its composition was Boulez's desire to explore aleatoric music. He published several writings, both criticizing the practice and suggesting its reformation, leading up to the composition of this sonata in 1955–57/63. Boulez has published only two complete movements of this work (in 1963), and a fragment of another (in Universal Edition 1967), the other movements having been written up to various stages of elaboration but not completed to the composer's satisfaction. Of the unpublished movements (or "formants", as Boulez calls them), described in Edwards 1989, the one titled "Antiphonie" is the most fully developed. It has been analysed by Pascal Decroupet (2004, 152–59). The formant titled "Strophe" is the one least developed since the preliminary form but:

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