Boulez and the blight of the opera

So is he now, did he ever, or does he still? His answers are unequivocal, but complex. He isn't at work on an opera, nor has he ever been. Which is not to say that he wouldn't like to. He has no qualms about the scope of such an undertaking and envisages something "full-length, for a full-scale orchestra, but not for a conventional stage".

He is fascinated by the oriental theatre, and the possibility of using masks and puppets, as well as electronics (oddly, in as much as it incorporates all these elements, he has never seen or heard Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, although he is an avowed admirer of the composer). He has made two attempts to find himself a text, "but both times the writer has died on me, so I'm a bit superstitious about looking for a third candidate".

In the late Sixties, he began exchanging ideas with the radical French playwright and novelist Jean Genet. "I gave him some musical ideas and he wrote a few scenes. But not enough survives for me to make anything of them."

Then he found the minimalist Heiner Müller, who began work on a reduction of Aeschylus's The Oresteia. He promised to hand Boulez a test in February of this year, but died in December - again without leaving anything usable. "I feel very frustrated," Boulez admits. "Now I am thinking of Edward Bond's The War Plays or Lear. But only thinking."

Meanwhile, Boulez has not altogether recanted on his views of opera in general. He is no buff: most opera fills him with stupefied boredom, if not bafflement. "I've always been troubled by the basic convention: why should these people be singing? It amazes me how easily most people accept this strange idea - it seems as oddly ritualised to me as Kabuki and Noh seem to other people.

We had made many plans - a Ring, Don Giovanni, Boris Godunov, Lulu

"Perhaps my thinking has been conditioned to some extent by the very poor standard of opera I saw in my youth. The performances in France in the 1940s and 1950s were dreadful: there was no tradition of theatre people working in opera - it was all cardboard, and the acting was dreadful. I heard [Kirsten] Flagstad in Wagner once - she was absurd! So it is no wonder I thought opera was creatively dead, a museum art."

THE turning point came in 1963 when he was lured to work in an opera house for the first time, conducting a production of Berg's Wozzeck, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault. From the success of this collaboration Boulez came into contact with Wagner's grandson, Wieland, one of the most significant revolutionaries in the field of opera production.

"We were excited by each other: there was an immediate rapport," Boulez recalls. "We did another Wozzeck, this time in Frankfurt, and then a Parsifal for Bayreuth. Sadly, Wieland became very ill and he had to direct this production from his hospital bed, with the help of tapes. We had made many plans - a Ring, Don Giovanni, Boris Godunov, Lulu, Pelléas et Mélisande. But he died and they all fell apart - except the Pelléas which ended up at Covent Garden in 1969, with another director."

Why the bile in Der Spiegel? "I was very disillusioned by a revival of Wozzeck in Frankfurt - a terrible experience. There was no rehearsal, no care taken over anything. The cynicism of the way an opera house like that was run disgusted me. It still disgusts me."

"There are enough compromises to be made, even in these so-called 'ideal' situations"

Since then, Boulez has only agreed to work in opera houses in very special (and prohibitively expensive) conditions, where every detail of the rehearsal schedule is rigorously particularised. Apart from a Tristan und Isolde with Birgit Nilsson in Japan that he would rather forget, this means that he has confined himself over the past 25 years to a Lulu in Paris, the centenary Ring at Bayreuth, a Pelléas et Mélisande for Welsh National Opera and now Moses und Aron.

In a better world, he would like to have done more - Boris Godunov, Meistersinger, Don Giovanni - but if he can't negotiate the right conditions and colleagues of the calibre of Peter Stein (the director of Pelléas as well as Moses und Aron) and Patrice Chereau (Lulu and the Ring), he's not prepared to budge.

"There are enough compromises to be made, even in these so-called 'ideal' situations," he explains. And does he, as conductor, always insist on having the last say? "Ultimately, the conductor is in charge. He has the responsibility of making the performance cohere." Has he ever quarrelled with a director? "I never say no to a director without trying his ideas first."

The Pelléas for WNO was one of the most difficult stagings he has ever worked on, with elaborate sets which simply couldn't be made to operate reliably in primitive British regional theatres. For a revival, Boulez insisted that they shouldn't be modified. "I was patient the first time, but not the second." He won't say whether this was against Stein's will or not.

Cuts in the Bastille's budget have meant that the project has never been completed, and the building remains a useless shell

This sort of frustration led Boulez to involve himself with a prototype for a new sort of space for opera, originally planned to form a wing of the Opéra Bastille in his native Paris. This was to be the Salle Modulable, a hall in which the walls and ceiling could expand and contract to create a variety of performing environments. Cuts in the Bastille's budget have meant that the project has never been completed, and the building remains a useless shell.

Boulez has finally given up hope. "I've wasted so much time talking to ministers, trying to convince them of the worth of this experiment. If they do finish it now, they won't do it properly."

The Opera Bastille, he feels, is altogether "a disaster", even under the spiky new broom of its director, Hugues Gall. "The administration may have improved, but artistically, it remains null. A supermarket - no excitement or creativity."

Boulez is happier with his own technologically sophisticated concert hall, built as part of the showpiece of Cité de la Musique in the Parc de la Villette, and has to some extent retreated from his front-line position in the battles which rage over French musical life.

Not that he is visibly slowing down; despite some heart trouble, he is an ever busy conductor (next appearing in London in February with the BBC Symphony Orchestra), he continues to revise, refine and expand compositions like his new piano work Incises, and, with his perfectionist temperament, he continues to be exercised by the meticulousness of recording.

"I don't see that any of these are pushing forward the frontiers of theatre, and that's the possibility in opera that has always interested me"

He has just finished work on Mahler's 9th Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and his electrifying Moses and Aron is released next week by DG. Eschewing the fashionable view that "live" performances are preferable to edited ones, Boulez has recorded this in the studio, in between performances of the Amsterdam run.

"That is how to combine the best of both words. You benefit from the energy of the theatre, but you don't have to suffer all the little mistakes."

For the remainder of the composing fraternity's efforts to renew post-war opera, he has little time. Britten doesn't figure in his world view (nor, incidentally, does Verdi: "Picture postcard music" he calls it, "I want to see a whole landscape").

"Musically, there is much of interest in the operas of Berio and Birtwistle, perhaps Zimmermann's Die Soldaten too. But I don't see that any of these are pushing forward the frontiers of theatre, and that's the possibility in opera that has always interested me."

If Boulez ever does produce his own opera, statements of this nature may prove hostages to fortune. He certainly has some pretty high standards to live up to.

• 'Moses und Aron' (DG 449 174-2; 2 CDs) will be released on Sept 16.