Boulez’s early Notations manuscript heads to Paris auction

An autograph score of Pierre Boulez’s Douze notations is to be offered in Christie’s Paris online sale of rare books and manuscripts, running from October 27 to November 5.

Estimated at €30,000–€40,000, the manuscript is the copy presented to fellow composer Serge Nigg, the work’s dedicatee. Its appearance comes in the tenth anniversary year of Boulez’s death and directs attention to a remarkably compact work from the beginning of his career.

Boulez composed the piano pieces in 1945, when he was 20 and studying with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. Each of the twelve miniatures occupies twelve bars. Their brevity gives the collection its concentrated character, moving between explosive gestures, rhythmic insistence and quieter, suspended writing.

Pianist Yvette Grimaud gave the first performance on February 12, 1946. The work later acquired a second life when Boulez returned to its material for orchestral pieces, expanding ideas first set down within the tight limits of the piano originals.

The sale belongs to Christie’s Classic Week programme. A public exhibition is scheduled from October 30 to November 4, allowing visitors to see selected material before online bidding closes. Other manuscripts in the sale include unpublished notes by Jean-Paul Sartre and a 1918 collage-letter from André Breton to Louis Aragon.

Collectors should distinguish this offering from an earlier Notations manuscript sold in 2017. That earlier lot carried a different estimate and achieved €68,750; it is a historical sale record, not a result for the forthcoming auction.

The attraction of the present score lies in both the music and its personal destination. A manuscript given to Nigg records an exchange between young composers, placing a work now central to Boulez’s early output back within the friendships and experiments from which it emerged.