Composer of the month:
Henri Dutilleux

Every month the Concertzender devotes attention to the work of a composer. In December that's Henri Dutilleux.

The French composer and music teacher Henri Dutilleux was born on 22nd January 1916 in Angers in Mid-France. When he was six his family set up house in Douai in French-Flanders. From a very young age Dutilleux's talent for music was obvious.

During his schooldays he was already following lessons from Victor Gallois in piano, harmony and counterpoint at the conservatorium in Douai. Between 1933 and 1938 he studied at the Conservatoire National Music in Paris. With Jean and Noël Gallon he studied harmony and counterpoint, with Henri Paul Busser composition and with Maurice Emmanuel musical history.

When he won the Prix de Rome in 1938, he was able to start the residential study at the Villa Medici that was associated with the prize, but then the Second World War broke out and he had to return to France for military service. Shortly afterwards he was exempted. He was appointed chorus conductor at the Opéra in Paris.

In 1944 he became leader of music production for the ORTF, the French broadcaster; he stayed there until 1963. From 1961 to 1970 he was music teacher at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and from 1970 to 1971 he was guest professor at his alma mater the Conservatoire National.

Major prize

In 1967 he won another major prize: the French Grand Prix National de la Musique. In 1994 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for his oeuvre. In 1999 he won the Cannes Classical Award for The Shadows of Time and the Grand Prix 1999 awarded by the international music press.

Dutilleux was a member of the Conseil International de la Musique of UNESCO, the Académie Royale de Belgique and from 1981 honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York. He died at the age of 97 on the 22nd May 2013 in Paris.

Broadly oriented

In Dutilleux's early work there are clear influences of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Albert Roussel, such as in the Sonata voor piano which was first publicly performed in 1948 by his wife Geneviève Joy.

Although his personal contacts with colleagues such as André Jolivet, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric also left a mark on his music, Dutilleux cannot be placed within a certain group or school. He was broadly oriented; his work comprises symphonic works, concertos for cello and violin, chamber music, ballet music and even works for harmony orchestra.