Henri Dutilleux

His Life and Works

Caroline Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351563888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Henri Dutilleux (born 1916) is one of France's leading composers, though until recently his music received more attention in the United States than in Europe. A fiercely independent composer who pursues his own musical path regardless of fashion, he has never courted the public eye, yet in this book he is revealed as a composer very much engaged with the work of other artists from all spheres. Caroline Potter's fascinating survey examines the relation of some of these artists to Dutilleux's music. In literature, the notions of memory and time found in the writings of Baudelaire and Proust have had profound effects on his compositional development, whilst the visual arts have informed his aesthetic ideas and their expression in both his music and even in his meticulously produced scores. Always a perfectionist, Dutilleux now rejects those earlier works which are not representative of his mature style. By analysing these early pieces, Dr Potter traces the evolution of his musical style, and she investigates his compositional process and use of particular referential devices in later works. Whilst his music is unequivocally of our time, Dutilleux has never lost the ability to communicate with a wide-ranging audience. Drawing on interviews with the composer, this study provides penetrating insights into this complex composer's musical world.

Chapter One
The life of Henri Dutilleux

Henri Paul Julien Dutilleux was bom in Angers on 22 January 1916, the youngest of four children. His family were from Douai, but his mother fled to her brother’s home in Angers with her children at the outbreak of World War I while his father was fighting at Verdun. The family did not return home until 1919; their house and printing workshop had been destroyed.

However, any biography of the composer should begin in the previous century, as Dutilleux has often spoken of the importance of his artistic ancestors in his musical development. His paternal great-grandfather, Henri-Joseph-Constant Dutilleux (1807-65) was a painter and lithographer who is best remembered as a close friend of Eugène Delacroix and of Camille Corot and other members of the Ecole de Barbizon. He was deeply affected by the death of Delacroix in 1863, and was one of the seven executors of his will.¹ Henri Dutilleux learned only recently that his great-grandfather owned Delacroix’s famous portrait of Chopin which is now in the Louvre.

After a period of study in Paris, Constant Dutilleux returned to his home town of Douai and then moved to Arras, where he taught painting and started a printing business which is still in the Dutilleux family. Several of his paintings, which are strongly influenced by Corot, are in the collections of various galleries in Northern France, and he is still remembered in Arras, where there is a church decorated with his paintings and a street named after him. A work by Corot from his collection is still in the possession of the Dutilleux family and currently hangs in the main room of Henri Dutilleux’s Paris flat. The composer claims that he has no talent for drawing and his great-grandfather’s example has inhibited him from ever attempting to paint,² but he has always felt attracted to the visual arts and there is even a visual dimension to his music that will be explored in Chapter 5.

Dutilleux’s maternal grandfather, Julien Koszul (1844-1927), was an organist, composer and the director of the Conservatoire at Roubaix. He was of Polish descent; the name was originally Kosziel, but the musician’s grandfather, Matteuz Kosziel (1784-1858), a soldier who married an Alsacienne, changed the spelling of the name on taking French citizenship. Like Constant Dutilleux, Julien Koszul is better known as a friend of more celebrated contemporaries than as an artist in his own right. Koszul studied at the Ecole Niedermeyer, where he was a contemporary of Fauré (who remained a lifelong friend) and pupil of Saint-Saëns.³ In a letter written in the last year of his life to Koszul, Fauré reminds him that it was he who introduced their circle of friends to the music of Schumann,⁴ which was not considered to be suitable for the school’s curriculum. Some of Koszul’s songs and piano pieces were published by Parisian firms, and if the works in the Bibliothèque Nationale are representative of his style, he was a competent, though not outstanding, composer of salon music. His Huit petits préludes ou versets for piano or harmonium (published by Hamelle in 1925) reveal that he was influenced by Schumann. In addition he set several poems by Victor Hugo, which Fauré also set, including La fleur et le papillon and Puisqu’ici-bas toute âme. While he was head of the Conservatoire of Roubaix, Koszul encouraged Albert Roussel to abandon his naval career to devote himself to composition, suggesting that Roussel should study in Paris with Eugène Gigout, another friend from his Ecole Niedermeyer days. Koszul lived with the Dutilleux family in his last years, and no doubt his grandson grew up with his musical reminiscences.⁵

Henri Dutilleux’s parents, Paul Dutilleux (1881-1965) (who was a printer, continuing the family tradition) and Thérèse Koszul (1881-1948), were an amateur violinist and pianist respectively who often organized chamber music concerts in their home. Their repertoire included violin sonatas by Franck, Fauré, Lekeu, Piemé and, surely exceptionally for the time, Debussy’s sonata.⁶ All four of their surviving children: Hélène, Paulette, Paul and Henri (a third daughter died in infancy) attended the Conservatoire in Douai, and Henri Dutilleux’s brother remembers that it was always difficult for them all to find time to practise their instruments, especially when the end-of-year Conservatoire competition approached.⁷ Henri’s father tried to persuade his son to follow in his footsteps and play the violin, but the boy was far more attracted by the piano because he wanted to play chords. He was also haunted by the famous carillon of Douai and wanted to try and reproduce its sound.⁸ His love of bells has lasted all his life, as revealed in the final bars of his string quartet Ainsi la nuit (1973-76) and the unifying ‘carillon theme’ of his violin concerto Varbre des songes (1979-85).

On the advice of his grandfather, Henri Dutilleux enrolled in the Conservatoire at Douai in 1924, whilst attending firstly the Ecole Ste-Clotilde, then the Institution St-Jean. His days were fully occupied, as the solfège class at the Conservatoire took place at 6.30 in the morning; he then went to school, and during the two-hour-long lunch break from noon he would practise the piano.⁹ The director of the Conservatoire, Victor Gallois,¹⁰ recognised his gifts and taught him harmony and counterpoint almost simultaneously, a rarity in French musical education at the time as students normally had to achieve a certain standard in harmony before being permitted to enrol in a counterpoint class. As Gallois was keen for Dutilleux to be involved in the Conservatoire orchestra, he played percussion as well as the piano. His precocious interest in music is revealed by the fact that his parents gave him the score of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande for his twelfth birthday; one is reminded that the ten-year-old Olivier Messiaen was given an identical present. The first original composition that Dutilleux remembers writing is a song, La fleur, composed in 1929 to a Romantic poem by Charles-Hubert Millevoye. Dutilleux remembers being particularly proud of the final modulation of this song, which he would play over and over again.¹¹ One of his strongest early memories is of the Sundays he spent studying music in the printers’ workshop attached to his home; he still remembers the quality of the silence, which was all the more striking because during the week the printers’ machines provided a constant noise.¹² He continued to receive a general education until the age of sixteen, studying French, Latin, English (he can still speak the language quite well), natural science which was his favourite subject, and maths, for which he claims to have no talent,¹³ but in 1933 he left Douai to enrol in the Paris Conservatoire.

When Dutilleux arrived in Paris, he lived with his elder sister Hélène and attended Henri Busser’s composition class as an auditeur for one year.¹⁴ From 1934 he studied harmony with Jean Gallon, fugue with his brother Noël Gallon, history of music with Maurice Emmanuel, and composition with Busser, and he was to remain at the Conservatoire until 1938. His fellow students included Jean-Jacques Grünewald, Raymond Gallois-Montbrun, Henri Challan, Gaston Litaize and Marcel Landowski, and with characteristic modesty, he assured Pierrette Mari that their work was ‘far better’ than his.¹⁵ Dutilleux remembers Busser as one ‘whose career followed the official paths, but I think he did not take himself too seriously, and in the end this sense of humour took over from teaching’.¹⁶ For a year, he also attended Philippe Gaubert’s conducting class, though unlike his near-contemporaries Sir Michael Tippett and Witold Lutoslawski, Dutilleux has never wanted to conduct his own works. As a student he felt nervous standing in front of his classmates,¹⁷ and he has since stated that Ί would have been a poor advocate of my music’.¹⁸

Looking back on his Conservatoire studies, Dutilleux regrets that he was pushed so quickly by Busser into the Prix de Rome race and wishes that he had spent more time in Emmanuel’s history class. (However, unlike Messiaen, also a student of Emmanuel, Dutilleux has never used Greek or Hindu rhythms in his music.) Most of all, he regrets that there was no analysis class and that nobody at the Conservatoire introduced him to the music of contemporary composers.¹⁹ Dutilleux knew only a few works by Bartok and was almost entirely unaware of the achievements of the Second Viennese School until after World War II. This ignorance can partly be attributed to the restricted concert life in Paris during the German occupation, especially the Nazi’s blanket ban on music by Jewish and other composers whose music they considered to be ‘degenerate’, but even before the war there was little interest in avant-garde music in academic circles and, judging by Dutilleux’s descriptions, the teaching at the Conservatoire was heavily Francocentric. Dutilleux remembers attending rehearsals of Ravel’s last works, where he often saw the composer, and Ravel is perhaps the strongest influence on his earliest compositions. Nothing is known about the music he wrote as a student at the Conservatoire which was not destined for the Prix de Rome because he has now destroyed everything he wrote in class.

Dutilleux won first prizes in harmony and fugue in 1936, the year he first attempted the Prix de Rome. His Fugue à quatre parties was published by Heugel, as was then the custom for Conservatoire prize-winning pieces. In 1991 Dutilleux told Roger Nichols that Ί liked fugues a lot when I was young, and I must say that perhaps this is because I come from Flanders’,²⁰ and he has always admired the Flemish contrapuntists, particularly Josquin and Ockeghem. He was placed first in the qualifying competition for each of the three years he attempted the Prix de Rome, but the cantata he composed in 1936, Gisèle, won only the ‘Deuxième Second Grand Prix’. My researches have uncovered only the baritone part for his 1937 attempt at the Prix de Rome, La belle et la bête; in any event, he did win the Premier Grand Prix at his third attempt in 1938, with L’anneau du roi. This victory was celebrated in Douai with a parade in the streets of the sort that would today be reserved for local sports heroes. At the prizewinners’ concert, Charles Panzéra sang the role of King Salomon and Irène Joachim, the princess Djellah. Joachim is still a close friend of Dutilleux, and Panzéra was associated with many of his other early vocal works.

Dutilleux received a letter from Maurice Emmanuel shortly before his former teacher’s death congratulating him on his success in the Prix de Rome; Emmanuel hoped that he would profit from the four years he would spend in Rome and return as an accomplished artist.²¹ Although he would have preferred to travel, perhaps in Germany, rather than stay in Rome, he told Claude Glayman that the Villa Medici, the prizewinners’ home, was ‘a wonderful place, and being able to work there for four years without financial worries is a unique opportunity’.²² But this was not to be, as although Dutilleux left for Rome in February 1939, he was forced to return in June that year due to the pressure of events in Europe leading up to the Second World War. Dutilleux frequently visited Florence, which he preferred to Rome, during his short period in Italy and he very much enjoyed discovering Renaissance art at first hand. But he was appalled by the depth of support for the fascists in Italy and their rejoicing at the fall of Madrid in March 1939 which marked the end of the Spanish Civil War.²³ He was mobilized at the outbreak of the war, acting as a stretcher bearer until his demobilization in September 1940.

Dutilleux is all too aware that he was not as deeply affected as some people by World War II; the composer Jehan Alain (whom he greatly admires) was killed at the age of 29, and Dutilleux’s brother Paul spent five years as a prisoner in Stalag VIIIC. He was also very moved by ...