Henri Dutilleux  (born 22 January 1916 in Angers, Maine-et-Loire; died 22 May 2013 in Paris) is a French composer who was most active in the second half of the 20th century. His work, which has garnered international acclaim, follows 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 Büsser (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 1945 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 Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in 1970 and was composer in residence at Tanglewood in 1995 and 1998. His students included French composers Gérard Grisey and Francis Bayer, Canadian composers Alain Gagnonand Jacques Hétu, British composer Kenneth Hesketh, and American composers Derek Bermel and David S. Sampson. Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 16th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2006.

Influences and style

Dutilleux's music extends the legacies of earlier French composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel but is also clearly influenced by Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. His attitude towards serialism is more ambiguous. While he always paid attention to the developments of contemporary music and has incorporated some serialist techniques into his own compositions, he also criticized the more radical and intolerant aspects of the movement ("What I reject is the dogma and the authoritarianism which manifested themselves in that period").

 As an independent composer, Dutilleux 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 distant echoes of jazz as can be heard in the plucked double bass strings at the very beginning of his First Symphony and his frequent use of syncopated rhythms.

Dutilleux was greatly enamoured of vocalists, especially jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and the great French chanson singers.

Some of Dutilleux's trademarks include very refined orchestral textures; complex rhythms; a preference for atonality and modality over tonality; the use ofpedal points that serve as atonal pitch centers; 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). "A passage may be conceived as a symmetrical shape of notes on paper and only later given musical substance. He loves symmetrical musical figures such as palindromes or fan-shaped phrases..."

Dutilleux's music was often influenced by art and literature, such as the works of Vincent van Gogh,[9] Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust. It also shows a concern for the concepts of time and memory, both in its use of quotations (notably from Béla Bartók, Benjamin Britten and Jehan Alain), and in short interludes that recall material used in earlier movements and/or introduce ideas that will be fully developed later.

A perfectionist with a strong sense of artistic integrity, he allowed only a small number of his works to be published; what he did publish he often revised and adjusted many times subsequently.

Music 

Dutilleux numbered as Op. 1 his Piano Sonata (1946–1948), written for pianist Geneviève Joy, whom he had married in 1946. He renounced most of 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.

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— a passacaglia) and builds towards a fast climax (2nd—a scherzo and moto perpetuo), keeps its momentum (3rd—"a continuous melodic line that never goes back on itself"), and finally slowly fades out (4th—a theme and variations).

In 1953, Dutilleux wrote the music for the ballet Le loup.

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, woodwind, strings and percussion) and a bigger one at the back consisting of the rest of the orchestra. Although this brings to mind the Baroque concerto grosso, the approach is different: in this piece, the smaller ensemble acts as a mirror or ghost of 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. As a result, it can be considered as a concerto for orchestra. It quickly achieved celebrity and, following its première by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, was performed in several North American cities, then in France. Métaboles is now one of his most often performed works.

In the mid-sixties, Dutilleux met Mstislav Rostropovich, who commissioned him to write a cello concerto. Rostropovich premièred the work, titled Tout un monde lointain, in 1970. It is one of the most important additions to the cello repertoire of the second half of the 20th century and is considered one of the composer's major achievements. In five movements, Tout un monde lointain is a nocturnal, mysterious work with a delicate orchestration and an eerily beautiful, yet highly virtuosic 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 (3 Préludes, Figures de résonances) and 3 strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1976–1982) for solo cello. The latter work was originally composed on the occasion of Paul Sacher's 70th birthday in 1976, on a request by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to write compositions for cello solo using his name spelt out in musical notes as the theme eS-A-C-H-E-Re (Es is E-flat in German, H is B-natural in German, and Re is D in French; see Sacher hexachord). He also wrote the string quartetAinsi la Nuit (1976). It consists of seven movements, some of which are linked by short "parentheses". The function of these parentheses is to recall material that has already been heard and to introduce fragments that will be fully developed later. Each movement highlights various special effects (pizzicato,glissandi, harmonics, extreme registers, contrasting dynamics…) resulting in a difficult but fascinating work.

He then returned to orchestral works in 1978 with Timbres, espace, mouvement ou la nuit etoilée, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night. In this composition, Dutilleux attempted to translate into musical terms the opposition between emptiness and movement conveyed by the painting. The work employs a string section of only lower-register instruments: cellos and double basses, no violins or violas.

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 important addition to the instrument's 20th century repertoire. However, it is completely atonal, more in the mold of Arnold Schoenberg or Alban Berg, than of Ravel, Debussy or Roussel.[

Dutilleux later wrote Mystère de l'instant (for cymbalum, string orchestra and percussion, 1989), Les Citations (for oboe, harpsichord, double bass and percussion, 1991), The Shadows of Time (for orchestra and children voices, 1997), Slava's Fanfare (for Rostropovich's 70th birthday, 1997) and Sur le même accord (for violin and orchestra, 2002 - dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter).

In 2003, he completed Correspondances, a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra inspired by poems and letters by Prithwindra Mukherjee, Rainer Maria Rilke,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vincent van Gogh. This work has received a very enthusiastic reception and has been programmed several times since its première.

One of his last works was another song-cycle entitled Le temps l'horloge, written for American soprano Renée Fleming. It consists of four pieces and an instrumental interlude on two poems by Jean Tardieu, one by Robert Desnos and one by Charles Baudelaire. The first three songs were premièred at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, Japan in September 2007. The American première of this partial version took place in November 2007 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The complete work was unveiled on May 7, 2009 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris where the 16-minutes song-cycle was immediately encored.

Later still, Dutilleux added a third movement to his chamber work Les Citations. The expanded version was premiered at the Festival d’Auvers-sur-Oise on 24 June 2010. In 2011, Pascal Gallois transcribed, with Dutilleux's approval, his Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou for bassoon and piano (originally for baritone and piano).

Before his death, Dutilleux expressed the wish to write more chamber music, notably a second string quartet, a genre he felt he had neglected.

Links with painters 

Henri Dutilleux was the great-grandson of painter Constant Dutilleux and of composer Julien Koszul. He also had a long friendship with Maurice Boitel, whose exhibitions he regularly visited.

Works 

Orchestral [edit]

• Symphony No. 1 (1951)
• Symphony No. 2 Le double (1959)
• Métaboles (1964)
• Timbres, espace, mouvement ou la nuit etoilée (1978)
• Mystère de l'instant (1989)
• The Shadows of Time, for 3 children voices and orchestra (1997)
• Slava's Fanfare for spatial ensemble (1997)

Concertante 

• Cello Concerto - Tout un monde lointain [A whole distant world] (1970)
• Violin Concerto - L'arbre des songes [The Tree of Dreams] (1985)
• Nocturne for violin and orchestra Sur le même accord [On just one chord] (2002)

Chamber/instrumental 

• String Quartet Ainsi la nuit (1976)
• Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher for solo cello (1976–1982)
• Les citations for oboe, harpsichord, double bass and percussion (1985/1991/2010)
• Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou for bassoon and piano (1954/2011 - same as the vocal work, transcribed by Pascal Gallois with the composer's approval)

Piano 

• Au gré des ondes (1946)
• Piano Sonata (1948)
• Blackbird (1951)
• Tous les chemins mènent à Rome (1963)
• Bergerie (1963)
• Résonances (1965)
• Figures de résonances (1970) for two pianos
• Trois Préludes (1973–1988):
  • D'ombre et de silence (1973)
  • Sur un même accord (1977)
  • Le jeu des contraires (1988)
• Air à dormir debout (1981)

Vocal

• Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou, for baritone and piano (1954)
• San Francisco Night, for voice and piano (1963)
• Hommage à Nadia Boulanger, for soprano, 3 violas, clarinet, percussion and zither (1967)
• Correspondances, for soprano and orchestra (2003)
• Le temps l'horloge, for soprano and orchestra (2007–2009)

Ballet

• Le loup (1953)

Arrangements 

• Choral, cadence et fugato for trombone and symphonic band (1995 - same as the chamber work, orchestrated by Claude Pichaureau)

Early works 

Dutilleux disowned most of these pieces, written before his Piano Sonata. Some of them are nonetheless played and recorded regularly, in particular the Sonatine for Flute and Piano.

Chamber/instrumental 

• Four Exam Pieces for the Paris Conservatoire (1942–1954)
  • Sarabande et cortège for bassoon and piano (1942)
  • Sonatine for Flute and Piano (1943)
  • Oboe Sonata (1947)
  • Choral, cadence et fugato for trombone and piano (1950)

Vocal 

• Barque d'or for soprano and piano (1937)
• Cantata L'anneau du roi (1938)
• Quatre mélodies, for voice and piano (1943)
• La geôle, for voice and orchestra (1944)

Piano 

• Au gré des ondes (1946)

Awards and prizes 

• Grand Prix de Rome (for his cantata L'Anneau du Roi) - 1938
• UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers (for Symphony No. 1) - 1955
• 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 Music Prize (for his entire oeuvre) - 2005
• Prix MIDEM Classique de Cannes (for his entire oeuvre) - 2007
• Cardiff University Honorary Fellowship (for his entire oeuvre) - 2008
• Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society - 2008
• Kravis Prize - 2011
• Grand-Croix de la Légion d'honneur - 2004