Mov.I: Aria, Grave 00:07
Mov.II: Scherzo, Vif 2:55
Mov.III: Final, Assez allant 6:36
Ob. Gianfranco Bortolato
Pf. Roberto Arosio
Henri Dutilleux was born on 22 January 1916 in Angers, Maine-et-Loire. He was the great-grandson of the painter Constant Dutilleux and grandson of the composer Julien Koszul. He was also a cousin of the mathematician Jean-Louis Koszul. As a young man he studied harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the Douai Conservatory before leaving for the Conservatoire de Paris. There, between 1933 and 1938, he attended the classes of Jean and Noël Gallon (harmony and counterpoint, in which he won joint first prize with the cellist Paul Tortelier),[3] Henri Büsser (composition) and Maurice Emmanuel (history of music). He studied music at the Conservatoire in the same class as Maurice Baquet, Henri Betti, Paul Bonneau and Louiguy.
Dutilleux won the Prix de Rome in 1938 for his cantata L'anneau du roi but did not complete his entire residency in Rome due to the outbreak of World War II. He worked for a year as a medical orderly in the army and then returned to Paris in 1940, where he worked as a pianist, arranger and music teacher. In 1942 he conducted the choir of the Paris Opera.
Dutilleux worked as Head of Music Production for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. He served as Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1970. He was appointed to the staff of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in 1970 and was composer in residence at Tanglewood in 1995 and 1998. His students included the French composers Gérard Grisey and Francis Bayer, the Canadian composers Alain Gagnon and Jacques Hétu, the British composer Kenneth Hesketh, and many others. Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 16th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2006.
For many years, Dutilleux had a studio on Île Saint-Louis, which was the heart of his existence. He died on 22 May 2013 in Paris, aged 97 and was buried in Section 12 of Montparnasse Cemetery, in the same grave as Geneviève, his wife who pre-deceased him in 2009. His tombstone is made from grey granite and bears the epitaph "Compositeur".
Dutilleux's music extends the legacies of earlier French composers such as Debussy and Ravel but is also clearly influenced by Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. Among his favourite pieces, he mentioned Beethoven's late string quartets and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.
His attitude toward serialism was more ambiguous. While he always paid attention to the developments of contemporary music and incorporated some serialist techniques into his own compositions, he also criticized the more radical and intolerant aspects of the movement: "What I reject is the dogma and the authoritarianism which manifested themselves in that period". As an independent composer, Dutilleux always refused to be associated with any school. Rather, his works merge the traditions of earlier composers and post-World War II innovations and translate them into his own idiosyncratic style. His music also contains distant echoes of jazz as can be heard in the plucked double bass strings at the very beginning of his First Symphony and his frequent use of syncopated rhythms.
A perfectionist with a strong sense of artistic integrity, he allowed only a small number of his works to be published; what he did publish he often repeatedly revised. In his own words:
"I always doubt my work. I always have regrets. That's why I revise my work so much and, at the same time, I regret not being more prolific. But the reason I am not more prolific is because I doubt my work and spend a lot of time changing it. It's paradoxical, isn't it?"