“For over half a century, a stately Belle Époque villa in the German spa town of Baden-Baden served as a redoubt for French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez,” writes J.S. Marcus in Wednesday’s (5/9) Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Boulez’s … heirs have put the property on the market for €2.5 million ($3 million). The pink sandstone mansion … was built in a stately neo-Gothic style as Baden-Baden was entering its long twilight as a grand European resort … for European aristocrats, from Queen Victoria to Richard Wagner…. In 1960, Pierre Boulez rented the first floor…. By 1970, he was renting the whole house and he finally bought it in 1985…. He alternated between an apartment in Paris and his Baden-Baden base, while appearing as a guest conductor at ensembles including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. In the 1970s, he was music director of the New York Philharmonic…. His nephew, Parisian engineer Stéphane Boulez, 52 years old … is selling the house with his twin brother, Léandre, and their three cousins…. The home’s interior was Midcentury Modern…. Photographs document a modernist rigor that seemed to match Mr. Boulez’s formal, even spartan reputation.”
Posted May 14, 2018
