Musicians - Henri Dutilleux

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	Musicians - Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux (born January 22, 1916 in Angers, France) is one of the most important French composers of the second half of the 20th century, producing work in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in a style distinctly his own.

Life

As a young man, Dutilleux studied harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the Douai Conservatory before leaving for Paris. There from 1933 to 1938 he attended the classes of Jean and Noël Gallon (harmony and counterpoint), Henri-Paul Busser (composition) and Maurice Emmanuel (history of music) at the Paris Conservatoire.

Dutilleux won the Prix de Rome in 1938 for his cantata L'anneau du roi but did not complete the entire residency in Rome due to the outbreak of World War II. He worked for a year as a medical orderly in the army and then came back to Paris in 1940 where he worked as a pianist, arranger and music teacher and in 1942 conducted the choir of the Paris Opera.

Dutilleux worked as Head of Music Production for French Radio from 1943 to 1963. He served as Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1970. He was appointed to the staff of the Paris Conservatoire in 1970. His students include French composers Gérard Grisey and Francis Bayer and Canadian composer Jacques Hétu.

Style

Some of Dutilleux’s trademarks include very refined orchestral textures, fluid and intricate rhythms, and “reverse variation” by which a theme is not exposed immediately but rather revealed gradually, appearing in its complete form only after a few partial, tentative expositions. His music also displays a very strong sense of structure and symmetry. This is particularly obvious from an "external" point of view i.e. the overall organisation of the different movements or the spatial distribution of the various instruments but is also apparent in the music itself (themes, harmonies and rhythms mirroring, complementing or opposing each other).

Most of his works have a dreamlike, highly poetic quality, which makes them relatively more accessible than those of many other post-World War II composers.

Much of Dutilleux's music has been influenced by art and literature, such as by the works of the painter Vincent van Gogh, poet Charles Baudelaire and novelist Marcel Proust.

A perfectionist with an acute sense of artistic integrity, he has allowed only a small number of his works to be published, and what he does publish he often revises and adjusts even after.

Music

Dutilleux numbered his Piano Sonata completed in 1948 as Op. 1, and has renounced the works he composed previously because he did not believe them to be representative of his mature standards, considering many of them to be too derivative to have merit. (The sonata was written for the pianist Geneviève Joy whom he had married in 1946.)

After the Piano Sonata, Dutilleux started working on his First Symphony (1951). It consists of four monothematic movements and has a perfectly symmetrical structure: music slowly emerges from silence (1st movement) and builds towards a fast climax (2nd), keeps its momentum (3rd) and finally slowly fades out (4th).

In 1953, Dutilleux wrote the music for the ballet “Le Loup”. It was a considerable success and made him known to a wider audience.

In his Second Symphony, titled “Le Double” (1959), the orchestra is divided into two groups: a small one at the front with instruments taken from the various sections (brass, woodwinds, strings and percussions) and a bigger one at the back consisting of the rest of the orchestra. Although this brings to mind the Baroque Concerto Grosso, Dutilleux has clearly stated that that was not the idea behind the work. Rather, the smaller ensemble acts as mirror or a ghost for the bigger one, sometimes playing similar or complementary lines, sometimes contrasting ones.

His next work, "Métaboles" (for orchestra, 1965) explores the idea of metamorphosis, how a series of subtle and gradual changes can radically transform a structure.

In the mid-sixties, Dutilleux met Mstislav Rostropovich who commissioned him to write a cello concerto. Rostropovich premiered the work, titled “Tout un Monde Lointain”, in 1970. It is one of the most important additions to the cello repertoire of the 20th century. “Tout un Monde Lointain” is a nocturnal, mysterious work with a delicate orchestration and an eerily beautiful solo part. While most of the concerto is introspective and meditative, it also has occasional outbursts of violence and a frantic build-up to the ambiguous, suspended finale.

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