Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux
(b Angers, 22 Jan 1916). French composer. Dutilleux was born into an artistic family; a great-grandfather, Constant Dutilleux, was a painter and friend of Delacroix and Corot, and his maternal grandfather, Julien Koszul, was a composer, organist and lifelong friend of Fauré.

Koszul was director of the Roubaix Conservatoire, where his pupils included Roussel, whom he persuaded to leave the navy and devote himself to music. Dutilleux was brought up in Douai, studying harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the local conservatory until 1933, when he moved to Paris. Gallois also encouraged Dutilleux to play percussion in the local orchestra, an interest which later bore fruit in the elaborate timpani parts of many of his orchestral works. At the Paris Conservatoire, he studied harmony with Jean Gallon, fugue with Noël Gallon, history of music with Maurice Emmanuel, conducting with Gaubert and composition with Büsser; he won the Prix de Rome at his third attempt in 1938 with the cantata L'anneau du roi. He was aware of the limitations of his Conservatoire education, which did not feature much contemporary music and lacked an analysis class. To fill the gaps in his education, he studied d'Indy's composition treatise on his own during the war years (d'Indy's analytical approach to early music interested him), and discovered works by Stravinsky and Roussel. He did not become familiar with the music of the Second Viennese School or Bartók's later works until the postwar period. Dutilleux spent only four months in Rome as a Prix de Rome winner, returning to France before the outbreak of World War II. He was enlisted as a stretcher-bearer in September 1939. Demobilized in August 1940, he worked as chef de chant at the Paris Opéra for a few months (replacing the permanent member of staff) under the Occupation. From 1945 he was director of music productions at French radio, resigning from this post in 1963 to devote himself to composition. Dutilleux has had few formal teaching posts; he was professor of composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique (1961–70), and taught at the Paris Conservatoire (1970), but he has frequently attended summer schools (including Tanglewood) as a guest teacher