Pli selon pli

Pli selon pli (Fold by Fold) is a piece of classical music by the French composer Pierre Boulez. It carries the subtitle Portrait de Mallarmé (Portrait of Mallarmé). It is scored for a solo soprano and orchestra and uses the texts of three sonnets of French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and single lines from two other of his poems. At over an hour, it is Boulez's longest work.

The composition is in five movements, the first and last using a line from a Mallarmé poem, the three middle movements using the entire text of a Mallarmé sonnet. The movements and their associated poems are:

The title is taken from yet another Mallarmé poem, "Remémoration d'amis belges", in which the poet describes how a mist that covers the city of Bruges gradually disappears:

Boulez said: "So, fold by fold, as the five movements develop, a portrait of Mallarmé is revealed."

Boulez uses the five Mallarmé poems in chronological order, beginning with the early "Don du poème" of 1865 in the first movement and continuing to the late "Tombeau" of 1897 in the last. The work thus represents a life of Mallarmé, and it concludes with the word "mort" (death), the only clearly intelligible word of the last movement. The first movement uses just the first line of "Don du poème" and the last movement just the last line of "Tombeau". Describing the setting of these texts, a critic wrote that in the first and last movements "the voice is hardly present – though significant when it is" and that the voice "function[s] as an instrumental timbre in its own right." Of the work as a whole wrote: "The idea of 'setting' a text, however, in the conventional sense, is not adopted here. Rather, the soprano is an integral part of the instrumental fabric and only rarely are specific words or phrases 'illustrated' musically in the traditional manner."

Boulez composed the first two "Improvisations on Mallarmé" for soprano and percussion ensemble in 1957. In 1959 he wrote the a third "Improvisation" for soprano, instrumental ensemble, and a large group of percussion, as well as "Tombeau", for soprano and large orchestra. In 1960, he completed "Don" in a version for soprano and piano. In 1962, he rescored this movement for soprano and orchestra, and also rescored "Improvisation I", completing the work in its initial form.

As he did with so many of his compositions, Boulez returned to the work and revised it. In the 1980s, he rewrote "Don" and revised "Improvisation III". In both cases, Boulez removed some of the flexibility he had previously allowed the performers in determining the order in which to play the sections of these movements.

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Wikipedia