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Le marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master) is a composition by the French composer Pierre Boulez. It is a setting of the surrealist poetry of René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists. It was first performed in 1955.
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The work has nine movements, four of which set the text of three poems of René Char. The remaining movements are instrumental extrapolations of the other four:
Before Le Marteau, Boulez had established a reputation as the composer of modernist, and serialist works such as Structures I, and 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 Sudwestfunk Orchestra, scheduled to give all of the concerts at the festival, threatened to withdraw if it was not (Jameux 1989b, 21). The first performance was given on June 18, 1955 conducted by Hans Rosbaud, with Sybilla Plate as the solo singer.
Boulez, notorious for considering his works to be always "in progress", made further, smaller revisions to Le Marteau in 1957, in which year Universal Edition issued an engraved score, UE 12450. In the years that have followed, it has become Pierre Boulez's most famous and influential work.
The instrumentation was quite novel for Western music at the time, lacking any kind of bass instrument, and drew some influence from the sound of "non-European" instruments. The Xylorimba recalls the African Balafon, the Vibraphone Balinese Gamelan, and the Guitar the Japanese Koto, though "neither the style nor the actual use of these instruments has any connection with these different musical civilizations" ("Speaking, Playing, Singing" (1963) in Boulez 1986, 341). Boulez chose the collection with a continuum of sonorities in mind: "a number of features shared by these instruments (forms) a continuous passage from voice to vibraphone" (Boulez 1986, 340). The purpose is to allow a graduated deconstruction of the voice into percussive noises, a compositional technique which has been common throughout Boulez's work (e.g. the recent Sur Incises of 1998 similarly breaks down the sounds of the piano by combining it with harp and percussion). The voice and five pitched instruments can be arranged in a line, each pair connected by a similarity, as in the following diagram (quoted from Grondines 2000):
The vocal writing is challenging for the singer, containing wide leaps, glissandi, humming (notated bouche fermée in the score), and even Sprechstimme, a device found in the work of the Second Viennese School before Boulez. There are also deliberate similarities to Arnold Schoenberg's song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire (Jameux 1989a, 19), one of which is that each movement chooses a different subset of the available instruments:
The writing is often hermetic: the three cycles each use different serial techniques. The "L'Artisanat furieux" movements, for example, use a technique Boulez called "pitch multiplication" in Boulez on Music Today (Boulez 1971). Lev Koblyakov identified its use in Le Marteau (Koblyakov 1977, 1981, and 1990). Later, a complete explanation of the processes themselves was made by Stephen Heinemann (1993). Pitch, durations, and dynamic associations in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were described by Winick (1986) and Wentzel (1991), and the deployment of these materials was discussed by Ulrich Mosch (1997 and 2004).
The opening of the third movement in the flute is typical of the difficulties required of performers including wide range, large leaps, and complex rhythms:
The text for this work was taken from René Char's collection of poems, Le Marteau sans maître, written in the 1930s while Char "still shared the surrealist views of poets like André Breton and Henri Michaux" (Grondines 2000). Boulez had earlier written two cantatas, Visage nuptial and Le Soleil des eaux in 1946 and 1948, which also set poems by René Char.
| L'artisanat furieux
La roulotte rouge au bord du clou |
The furious handicraft
The red caravan on the edge of the nail |
| Bourreaux de solitude
Le pas s'est éloigné le marcheur s'est tu |
Executioners of solitude
The step has gone away the walker fell silent |
| Bel édifice et les pressentiments
J'écoute marcher dans mes jambes |
Stately building and the presentiments
I hear marching in my legs |