Music of Henri Dutilleux : a Critical Survey of the Major Works
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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Music of Henri Dutilleux : a critical survey of the major works. Thurlow, Jeremy Robert Yarker The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 The Music of Henri Dutilleux: A Critical Survey of the Major Works. Jeremy Thurlow. Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. King's College, University of London. 2 Abstract. This thesis is a study of the work of the contemporary French composer Henri Dutilleux (born 1916). In the first chapter, I examine a selection of the chamber works he composed during the 194 Os and consider the background influences on his early style, which include his formal training at the Paris Conrvatoire as well as a cautious but growing interest in the more modern music of some of the leading European composers of the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter ends with analyses of four movements, showing Dutilleux's changing approaches to sonata form throughout these years. The second chapter goes on to examine the two symphonies (1951 and 1959) and considers the relation of the harmonic and motivic language of these works to their overall formal design. In the music of the following decade there is, I suggest, a greater concentration and rigour in the harmonic and thematic material, and in chapter 3 this is discussed in relation to Métaboles (1964) and Tout un monde lointain... (1970). The rest of the thesis is devoted to an examination of Dutilleux's larger scores from the last twenty years: two nocturnal works from the 1970s - Ainsi la nuit (1976) and Timbres, espace, mouvement... (1978) - in chapter 4, and L'arbre des songes (1985), and Mystère de l'instant (1989) in chapter 5, again seeking to elucidate the way that the harmonies, motives and textures interact to create the overall form and character of the music. 3 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Contents. List of Tables. 5 Introduction. 6 Chapter 1 17 An extended apprenticeship: the chamber music of the 1940s. Chapter 2 101 The two symphonies. Chapter 3 192 New explorations: the orchestral music of the 1960s. Chapter 4 258 Night music: two works from the 1970s. Chapter 5 331 Late works: the orchestral music of the 1980s. Conclusion. 391 Bibliography. 394 4 The Music of Henri Dutilleux List of Tables. Table 1.1 Altered repetition as a structural principle in the exposition first-subject group, Allegro con moto (piano sonata) 78 Table 2.1 Formal plan of Passacaille (first symphony) 121 Table 2.2 Formal plan of Finale con variazione (first symphony) 137 Table 2.3 Formal plan of Aniinato ma misterioso (second symphony) 175 Table 2.4 Formal plan of Animato ma misterioso with sonata structure 178 Table 2.5 Formal plan of Andante (second symphony) 189 Table 2.6 Formal plan of Andante with symmetry and sonata structure 190 Table 3.1 Formal plan of Obsessionel (Metaboles) 223 Table 3.2 Formal plan of Flamboyant (Metaboles) 232 Table 4.1 Formal plan of Nebuleuse (Timbres) 311 Table 4.2 Formal plan of Constellations (Timbres) 312 Table 5.1 Formal plan of L'arbre des songes, i 342 Table 5.2 Alternative formal structures in L'arbre des songes, second movement 355 5 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Introduction Introduction Henri Dutilleux is generally recognised as one of the most 1 important French composers of the post-war era. His reputation first spread beyond French musical circles to Germany, Holland and the United States in the 1950s, in 2 the wake of performances of his first symphony (1951), and 3 since then has gradually become established worldwide. The catalogue of his mature works is not large, but though he composes slowly he is still continuing to produce new 4 works well into his ninth decade. Since the first symphony his output has been dominated by orchestral works (with the important exception of his string quartet Ainsi 1 See, for example, Oliver Knussen's comment that IDutilleux 'commands almost universal respect' amongst contemporary composers (EEC Radio 3, 21 June 1992, cited in Potter 1997: 204) 2 Throughout this thesis the date following a work indicates the year in which it was completed. 3 In 1994, for example, he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperial by the emperor of Japan. It is also during the 1980s that he has become well known in Britain: an important step in the growth of his reputation here was his invitation as guest composer to the Aldeburgh Festival in 1985. 4 His latest work, The Shadows of Time, was first performed in Boston on 10 October 1997. 6 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Introduction la nuit (1976)), but he has defined the composition of the orchestra differently for each work, and his choice of 5 scoring has become increasingly unusual in recent years. The development of Dutilleux's musical language has been generally smooth and consistent, perhaps unusually so considering the turbulent developments undergone by many other composers during the same years. Nonetheless, in over half a century of composing, the characteristics of Dutilleux's musical language have changed a great deal, and the aim of this thesis is to chart this development and to identify the different phases in which particular aspects of his compositional technique are introduced, rejected or refined. My discussion is organised chronologically, and centres on the detailed analysis of Dutilleux's most important and characteristic works, taking them in five successive stages, corresponding conveniently to five decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. There has been relatively little serious and extended discussion of Dutilleux's music in print until very recently, surprisingly, considering the very secure 5 Mystère de l'instant (1989 , which is scored for 24 solo strings, percussion and cimbalom, while The Shadows of Time is scored for full orchestra with three children's voices in unison in its third movement, m4moire des ombres. 7 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Introduction place it has both in the recording catalogues and concert programmes of major orchestras around the world. Dutilleux himself has given numerous interviews and written programme notes and essays about his own and other contemporary music. For the most part these remain scattered in different periodicals from the 1940s on, with the exception of his two most extensive interviews, one with Dam Angelico Surchamp published in an edition of the arts periodical Zodiaque devoted entirely to Ijutilleux (Surchamp 1983), and the other with Claude Glayman published as a full-length book (Dutilleux 1993). only one substantial interview, with Roger Nichols, has appeared in English translation (Nichols 1994). In these interviews and essays Dutilleux discusses with eloquence his memories of teachers, performers and other acquaintances, his reaction to different composers and stylistic movements, to the other arts, and to religious and spiritual ideas and the general characteristics of his music. But he is very unwilling to discuss his music analytically or give any detailed, technical account of its construction, believing that music should not require an accompanying verbal explanation or manifesto. In a conversation which I recorded with him in August 1992, my attempts to initiate a more detailed discussion of particular pieces were deftly and politely evaded, for the most part, and Caroline Potter has reported similar 8 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Introduction experiences on more than one occasion (Potter 1997: 61, 71) The writing on Dutilleux's music by other authors includes many pieces which are short and inevitably lacking in detail, such as encyclopaedia entries and newspaper articles; the more extensive studies include three full-length books. Pierrette Marl's monograph, first published in 1973 and updated in 1988, comprises a lengthy biographical section, a discussion of Dutilleux as 'man and creative artist', and a relatively brief account of each of the larger works from the piano sonata (1948) to L'arbre des songes (1985). Daniel Humbert's book (1985) concentrates exclusively on the music, and is able to go into more detail than Man has space for; it also includes at the end a discussion of the general characteristics of Dutilleux's musical language, in terms of harmony, counterpoint, form, orchestration, and so on. In terms of analytical discussion, however, both books are disappointing, largely because of the failure of either author to confront the consequences of Dutilleux's increasingly tenuous relationship to the forms and harmonic progressions of nineteenth-century tonality. Both authors attempt to describe the structures and processes of the music in thoroughly traditional terms, 9 The Music of Henri Dutilleux Introduction without qualification; when a suitable term cannot be found (which is increasingly often in the later works), they simply name the individual ingredients - the chords in a progression, even the notes in a chord - with the result that their accounts cast little light on how or why these constituent elements might have been combined, or what their function iS: that is, they catalogue rather more than they analyse.