Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician

Helen Julia Minors, Laura Watson, Helen Julia Minors, Laura Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351331098
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865–1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas's professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siècle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.

1 Introducing Dukas’s legacy

Helen Julia Minors and Laura Watson

This book is intended to introduce the legacy of French musician Paul Dukas (1865–1935) to an international readership of scholars, creative practitioners, and theorists active in music, culture, and the humanities. Dukas is best known as a composer, most famously for the symphonic poem L’Apprenti sorcier (1897), but he has around a dozen works to his name spanning the major late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century genres, such as the symphony, opera, piano sonata, ballet, and more. Beyond composition, Dukas was also a renowned creative and intellectual force. He was a prolific, imaginative critic and essayist on music in its historical, philosophical, social, and cultural contexts—in essence, he was a musicologist at a time when the field had yet to be defined. Furthermore, he was a highly regarded educator in France, involved in the oversight of regional teaching practices and subsequently employed as a teacher of orchestration at the Paris Conservatoire. Later, he taught composition at the École Normale de Musique, and the pinnacle of his mentoring career was the Professor of Composition post he held at the Paris Conservatoire late in life. In a sense, his public pedagogical mission continued with his editorial work on Beethoven, Couperin, Rameau, and Scarlatti.

This volume celebrates the multifaceted legacy of a musician and intellectual who was unjustly neglected for much of the twentieth century, and yet his innovative philosophy of music is still relevant for the twenty-first century. Why is this so, and what do we stand to learn from an individual who has been regarded as secondary to his more established canonic French peers, such as Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Maurice Ravel? This essay collection considers Dukas beyond borders that are usually delineated by discipline, style, history, nationality, and so on. By this token we consciously draw together panoramic perspectives of Dukas as a musician and thinker, in the broadest sense of these terms. Our contributors each engage in a larger conversation about Dukas’s creative and intellectual reach throughout the twentieth century and beyond. All view his work (and not simply his composition) as inherently innovative in ways that were apparent throughout his career in a variety of forms. For example, his criticism is not passive or reactive: it is proactive in constructing a new way of intellectually presenting music and music discourses. One of the relatively early essays, ‘La Musique et l’originalité’ (Music and Originality) (1895), is a call to a community of musicians to nurture and develop one’s own musical, spiritual capacity. Dukas’s definition of originality not only accounts for the effect on the listener, but also claims that:

One of the particulars of great musical individuality is that it tends to correspond very closely to the particulars of the moral and sensory temperament of its possessor. It is a direct expression of his personality as a man revealed through special faculties resulting from his gifts as an artist.¹

This matrix links his individual identity to thought and creativity. And while he stressed ‘greatness’ here, he invited not just professionals, but also students, to attend to the particular nature of their own personalities and compose in accordance with those sensibilities. Respect for individual artistry formed part of the philosophy Dukas espoused in the classroom at the developmental stages of burgeoning composers’ careers. In this role, he acted as more than a formal teacher; he remained a loyal personal mentor to those who had been under his tutelage, such as Elsa Barraine (1910–1999). A philosophy of lifelong learning is apparent across Dukas’s career, something that can be encapsulated in at least a couple of ways. To begin, Dukas ‘tested himself’ as a canonical composer in all the genres that mattered to a composer of his time and place—starting with the ritual of the Prix de Rome in the 1880s, proceeding to the post-Franck symphony in the 1890s, along the way pushing the boundaries of programme music, confronting the towering figure of Wagner (and subsequently Debussy) in opera, and responding to the presence of the Ballets Russes in Paris with La Péri. In addition, Dukas branched out to learn from non-musician artists in order to advance his aesthetic and French music via collaboration. This took multiple forms, but a key example is his interaction with theatrical artists such as the dancer Natalia Trouhanowa and artistic director Jacques Rouché in the aforementioned ‘poème dansé’ La Péri (1912).

In the spirit of continuing Dukas’s musical and intellectual conversations—conversation in the general sense of responding to historical eras, styles; and in the more specific way of directly citing and extending musical materials by individual friends and colleagues such as Debussy and Vincent d’Indy—this volume unites a wide range of international perspectives on Dukas beyond a francophone context to assert his transnational, transhistorical, and transcultural significance to twenty-first-century scholars and musicians. Authors from and working in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, the UK, and the USA represent the range of careers Dukas was active in: we are variously active as performers, composers, theatrical practitioners, critics and musicologists, and educators. Following Dukas, we take up the baton of his dialogic approach in the sense that we explore him as a musical citizen and intellectual in Part I, before we turn in Part II to charting and constructing his legacy via studies of musical citation and compositional development, as well as through an assessment of his teaching philosophy.

Dukas: becoming an intellectual and musical citizen

In treating Dukas as an intellectual and musical citizen, we begin with his entry into the music profession in the 1890s, around 20 years into the French Third Republic (1870–1940), at a time when the nation’s musical culture was becoming highly politicised.² We could date the first minor public acknowledgement of the composer to his student years in the 1880s, to the two occasions when he came close to winning the Prix de Rome and was correspondingly acknowledged in the press as a promising musician. His post-Conservatoire career began in 1892 with the premiere of his overture Polyeucte and, in June that year, his debut as a critic when he published in the new journal La Revue hebdomadaire the first of around 500 chroniques musicales he would go on to write. Later, his career expanded to encompass additional roles such as: regional inspector of music education; orchestration instructor at the Paris Conservatoire; libretti contributions to theatrical projects; editor of Beethoven, Couperin, Rameau, and Scarlatti; composition professor at both the Conservatoire and the École Normale de Musique; informal mentor to past pupils; and elected member of prestigious cultural councils such as the Académie des Beaux-Arts; as well as occasional conductor.

For a period of over 40 years (from 1892 until his death in 1935) and across various activities that often chronologically overlapped, Dukas was a musical citizen in the most holistic meaning of that term. As Jann Pasler has illustrated, music was crucial to the social and cultural construction of the Republic—and the ‘public utility’ of music, as she puts it, did not fall solely under the control or ownership of the creative, compositional elite.³ In accordance with French Republican ideals, individuals of every background were encouraged to model themselves as musical citizens. Foundational to this citizenship was the practice of active listening that audiences could engage in at very affordable public concerts.⁴ This functioned as a form of political engagement, as Pasler argues:

It supported the training of citizens in two crucial ways: through teaching judgment and helping people imagine a new world. […] Learning critical judgment through contemplating differences, making comparisons and forming opinions connected art to politics, active listening to active citizenship.⁵

That concept of proactively engaging with and reflecting on music was aligned with Dukas’s values and embedded in every facet of his musical activity. His activities were rooted in active listening, especially composing, criticism, and pedagogy. Each of his major compositional works can be understood as the outcome of the act of ‘listening’ to musicians: for example, his Piano Sonata in E Flat Minor (1901) partly responds to his frequent experience of hearing Beethoven’s piano music performed in Paris.⁶ Moreover, working as a critic naturally demanded a formalised, highly sophisticated capacity for active listening, and in Dukas’s case additionally meant bringing his specialised, often transhistorical or transnational knowledge to bear on a given performance or work. His critiques of Wagner productions in Paris, for example, were informed by his experience of having heard the music-dramas in Bayreuth and London.

While Dukas’s expertise and prominence categorised him as an elite cultural figure, his sense of communal duty towards composers and readers, and later his students, fostered a further type of musical citizenship, both within him and within others. Borrowing again from Pasler, who asserts that duty, ‘the essence of one’s utility to one’s country […] became central to the Third Republic’s moral agenda’,⁷ Dukas’s activities show him assuming the mantle of public educator on a national (and sometimes international) scale. For example, he made it his duty to enlighten readers, performers, scholars, and students on Rameau’s invaluable contribution to music history—by composing the Variations, interlude et finale sur un thème de Rameau for piano (1899–1902), by discussing in the Revue hebdomadaire the lack of Rameau editions, and by helping to remedy that same issue by contributing to a project that began shortly thereafter: Durand’s complete edition of the Baroque composer.

In the classroom and in the press, he encouraged aspiring composers of all abilities. Although he prioritised teaching and discussing canonic works, he nonetheless urged others to remain true to their artistic nature. In addition, as a critic, he modelled how to engage sensitively and productively with those works by his French contemporaries that he judged flawed. Take, for example, his review of Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise (1900). It oscillates between outright criticism, on the one hand, and sincere praise, on the other, as illustrated in the brief excerpt below:

In truth, a lot of the principal themes in Louise are insubstantial […] The music is composed following a vocabulary and syntax that are partly derivative; but the qualities of decisiveness, clarity, colour […] are the work of a rare and strong musical individuality.⁸

Despite perceiving the work as lacking by the measures of weight and originality, Dukas ultimately respected how it embodied Charpentier’s personal voice. In doing so, he culturally affirmed the political and social French Republican principle that emphasised the rights of the individual. Furthermore, his acceptance of the individual’s intrinsic value may have inculcated or strengthened his students’ sense of their worth as ‘musical citizens’—notably, those such as Yvonne Desportes (1907–1993), Claude Arrieu (1903–1990), and Barraine, who, as women, were treated as second-class citizens in other aspects of their lives. Barraine’s Jewish background, a quality that she shared with Dukas, additionally defined this female composer’s cultural identity.

According to the letter of the law, French Jews were entitled to the same rights as everyone else in the Third Republic, but the Dreyfus Affair shed light on the prevalence of anti-Semitism in that society. In 1894, the Jewish soldier Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by court martial and sentenced to life imprisonment despite no evidence of his wrongdoing. The subsequent discovery of an army cover-up deepened the scandal and mobilised Dreyfus supporters (most famously, Émile Zola), thereby exposing fault lines in French society between Dreyfusards, who insisted upon the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Note on the text
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing Dukas’s legacy
• PART I: Becoming a musical citizen and intellectual
• PART II: Constructing Dukas’s legacy
• Bibliography
• Index