Pierre Boulez's masterpiece Pli selon Pli is a kind of musically self-fulfilling prophecy. Taking its title from a poem by Stephane Mallarmé, in which "folds upon folds" of mist gradually dissipate to reveal the stone walls of Bruges, the piece itself has unfolded in a similar manner: it began as a set of three "Improvisations on Mallarmé" composed at intervals during the late 1950s, was expanded with the composition of a "Tombeau" in 1959, and reached near-completion with the prefatory "Don [du poème]" added in 1960. Boulez's accretions and adjustments didn't stop there. In 1962, he adjusted the orchestration by expanding the "Don" from a simple soprano/piano duo to a large ensemble and enlarging the instrumentation used in the first Improvisation, as well, in order to give the overall orchestration of the whole five-movement structure a double hairpin form: from large to small (in the second, central Improvisation) to large. Finally in 1989, Boulez made one last set of alterations, solidifying the structural ordering of sections in certain movements that had originally been left structurally variable in performance.

The work's long and tenuous gestation reflects the elusiveness that characterizes the poetry by Mallarmé that it sets. Mallarmé's symbolisms are as rich with meaning as they are ambiguous and intractable—that is, meaning whose presence and breadth can often be sensed, but whose actual content remains hard to apprehend. Boulez seeks a musical analogy to this quality. Every gesture and sonority seems utterly precise and deliberately crafted, yet the work as a whole remains fluid and diaphanous, with a sense of flow more than form. The "Don" begins with a sudden, strident bang, exploiting from the first moment the work's enormous percussion battery, but then immediately turns willowy and veiled. Likewise, after the initial utterance of the opening line ("Behold, the child of an Idumaean night!"), the voice becomes a ghost, haunting the varied orchestral landscape with intermittent textual foreshadows of the Improvisations to follow. Even though the poetry of the central movements proceeds in a more discernible fashion, with more lyrical contours in the voice, occasionally the angularity of line and exaggeration of articulation strains against the bounds of the grammatical and seeks transcendence in the purely acoustic. The Tombeau, growing slowly from its initial pianistic mumblings into a frenetic orchestral jumble, concludes the piece with a shimmering setting of a most Mallarméian sentiment: "A trickling stream we vilify as death."

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