About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Henri Dutilleux

Encyclopedia : H : HE : HEN : 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. Although his output is relatively small, its high quality and originality have won international praise.

Contents

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.

Influences and Style

Dutilleux's music extends the legacies of earlier French composers like Debussy and Ravel but is also clearly influenced by Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. His attitude towards Serialism is more problematic. While he has always paid attention to the developments of contemporary music and has incorporated some serialist techniques into his own compositions, he has also denounced the more radical and intolerant aspects of the movement. As an independent composer, Dutilleux has always refused to be associated with any "school". Rather, his works merge the traditions of earlier composers and post-World War II innovations and translate them into his own idiosyncratic style. His music also contains echoes of jazz as can be heard in the double bass introduction to his First Symphony and his use of syncopated rhythms.

Some of Dutilleux's trademarks include very refined orchestral textures, fluid and intricate rhythms, a preference for atonality and modality over tonality 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 as Op.1 his Piano Sonata (1946-1948), written for pianist Geneviève Joy whom he had married in 1946. He has renounced the works he composed before it because he did not believe them to be representative of his mature standards, considering many of them to be too derivative to have merit. These works include among others a flute sonatina, "Sarabande et Cortège" for bassoon, a oboe sonata - all of which are nevertheless still played nowadays - and "L'Anneau du Roi".

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 which 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. A different section of the orchestra dominates each of the first four movements before the fifth brings them all together for the finale. It is one of Dutilleux' best known and most acclaimed compositions.

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.

After the cello concerto, Dutilleux turned to chamber music for the first time in more than 20 years and published various works for piano (Figures de Résonances, 3 Préludes) and "3 Strophes sur le Nom de Sacher" (1976) for solo cello. But his most important work of that era is the string quartet "Ainsi la Nuit" (1976). Each of its movements highlights various special effects (pizzicato, glissandi, harmonics, extreme registers…) resulting in a difficult but fascinating work, which is among Dutilleux's very best.

He then returned to orchestral works in 1978 with "Timbres, Espace, Mouvement", inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night". In this composition, Dutilleux attempted to translate in musical terms the opposition between emptiness and movement conveyed by the painting with strikingly successful results. He achieved this by using a strings section without violins and violas - thus consisting only of the lower-register instruments: cellos and double basses.

In 1985, Isaac Stern premiered "L'Arbre des Songes", a violin concerto that he had commissioned Dutilleux to write. Like its cello counterpart, it is an essential addition to the instrument's 20th century repertoire

Dutilleux later wrote "Mystère de l'Instant" (for cymbalum and chamber orchestra, 1989), "Les Citations" (for oboe, harpsichord, double bass and percussion, 1991), "The Shadows of Time" (for orchestra and children voices, 1997) and " Sur un Même Accord" (for violin and orchestra, 2002 - dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter).

In 2003, he completed "Correspondances", a song-cycle inspired by poems and letters by Prithwindra Mukherjee, Rilke, Soljenytsine and Van Gogh.

Now over 90, Dutilleux is busy composing a work for American soprano Renée Fleming.

Awards and Prizes

-Grand Prix de Rome (for his cantata L'Anneau du Roi) - 1938

-Grand Prix National de Musique (for his entire oeuvre) - 1967

-Praemium Imperiale (Japan - for his entire oeuvre) - 1994

-Prix MIDEM Classique de Cannes (for The Shadows of Time) - 1999

-Ernst Von Siemens Musikpreis (for his entire oeuvre) - 2005

References

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: