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A guide to Henri Dutilleux's music

The Frenchman has transformed his astonishing compositional refinement and willingness to take
inspiration from other art forms into works of real emotional immediacy
Tom Service
Monday 21 January 2013 16.19GMT

I could do this with any piece of Henri Dutilleux's, the French composer whose 97th
birthday is this week. But seeing as it's one of my favourites, we might as well start with
his Cello Concerto, Tout un monde lointain, the visionary five-part piece he wrote for
Mstislav Rostropovich in 1970. It's music of sumptuous but rigorous splendour, music
whose sheer attractiveness belies the refinement of Dutilleux's harmonic and structural
imagination, and which seduces you into a faraway world of heightened feeling. I defy
you not to be won over by this music.
As one of music history's most fastidious perfectionists, Dutilleux's published works are
few. There are two symphonies and other orchestral works, a handful of concertante
pieces, a series of pieces for voice and orchestra, and a small but significant canon of
chamber music, including a dazzling string quartet, Ainsi la nuit. Together, all of them,
from his First Symphony, composed in 1951, to a recent masterpiece, Correspondances
from 2003, which sets the letters of artists and writers from van Gogh to Rilke for
soprano and orchestra, is proof of a fundamental sometimes little-understood truth
about French musical life in the postwar period: there is another way apart from Pierre's
(Boulez's, that is). Dutilleux never accepted any of the dogmas of the avant-garde, above
all, what Boulez called at one stage the necessity of serialism, a systemisation that's
anathema to Dutilleux's creative sensibilities. As Dutilleux told Stuart Jeffries in these
pages a decade or so ago when a mere whippersnapper of 86, "I don't speak about him,
and he doesn't speak about me. I admire his work for the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
He has made his choices and he has the right to make his choices. But there are things I
cannot accept, and I don't like people who are never in doubt." (Ironically, the richly
decorative surfaces of some of Boulez's recent orchestral music approach but do not
surpass the refinement and richness of Dutilleux's. A few years later, Dutilleux told
Jeffries that at the moment, "I have no problems with [Boulez]. I even like the fact that
he is no longer certain, but is a man riven by doubt, as we all should be.")
Dutilleux's anti-ideological approach to music history, his refusal to belong to or to
establish a school of composition, despite his decades of teaching at the Paris
Conservatoire, and his unashamed continuation of the concerns of earlier and not
exclusively French traditions Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, but also Stravinsky, and Bartk
has created some of the most poetically flexible music of recent decades.
If you listen to his Second Symphony, Le double, or his Violin Concerto, L'arbre des
songes (the tree of dreams), you'll hear a rarefied, epicurean beauty that seems to exalt
in its fluency and self-contained world of musical coherence. (That fluency of Dutilleux's
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music is an illusion, however; it's rather a hard-won prize of sometimes years of hard
graft and applied craft and there's another ironic echo of Boulez's mania for revision
that Dutilleux is also a meticulous reviser of his pieces.) But that's to miss how
Dutilleux's music is so often inspired by other art forms and experiences. Timbres,
espaces, mouvements is a vivid orchestral explosion of Dutilleux's way of seeing Van
Gogh's hallocinogenic Starry Night; his The Shadows of Time is an astonishing and
paradoxically radiant meditation on loss, partly catalysed by Anne Frank's diaries, and
written for the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war; the piece is
dedicated to Anne Frank "and all the children, innocents of the world". At the heart of
The Shadows of Time is a movement called "memory of shadows" that includes music
for three children's voices - an inspirational idea that came from Dutilleux's overhearing
the sounds of children in a playground near his studio. The effect is devastating because
of its directness, but Dutilleux's music is never mawkishly sentimental.
The influence of Dutilleux's music on the 20th and 21st centuries isn't to be measured in
how his work revolutionised the languages of musical possibility, or even in the roster of
his pupils (who include Grard Grisey). Instead, his music is a realisation of a complete
world, independent of concerns for cutting-edge contemporaneity, and one that
becomes more essential the more you hear it, above all for how he transforms his
astonishing compositional refinement into real emotional immediacy. That's something
that infuses every bar of Ainsi la nuit, or The Shadows of Time, or Correspondances, or
well, pretty well everything he has published. Happy birthday, Henri.

Five key links

Cello Concerto: Tout un monde lointain
Mtaboles
Timbres, espaces, mouvements
Symphony no. 2, Le double
String Quartet: Ainsi la nuit
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