One of France's leading composers, he used colour, harmony and form to magical effect
Henri Dutilleux, who has died aged 97, was the outstanding French composer between Messiaen and Boulez and, like both of them, achieved a wholly individual synthesis of ear-catching colours and harmonies with formal rigour. In a musical world where many loudly proclaim their independence, he was a true but discreet indépendant.
His Piano Sonata (1948) was a large work that moved away from the Ravelian influence bedevilling much of French music in the 1930s and early 40s, and celebrated a pianism that is "sensual, not too dry". It marked a turning point in his career, and from here on he was "increasingly interested in large forms, with a desire to change and renew them". But he never returned to the piano for this purpose, preferring to limit himself to shorter pieces in what he confessed was a difficult medium for the 20th-century composer.
Nor did he experiment with electronic music, although his post as head of musical illustration at French Radio for 18 years from 1945 gave him access to the wherewithal. The time that had to be spent to produce what were then rather crude sonorities seemed to him excessive.
Instead, he preferred to see what could still be made with traditional resources. The answer, as provided by his First Symphony, was "a great deal". Its broadcast, in June 1951 under the baton of Roger Désormière, led to many performances over the next few years and to the spread of Dutilleux's reputation outside France. His independence of traditional models shows both in his adoption of a passacaglia as the opening movement and in the smaller instrumental groups (for instance, piano, timpani and clarinets) that often oppose the orchestral mass.
This success was repeated by his music for Roland Petit's ballet Le Loup (The Wolf, 1953). Later he would accept only the second of its three scenes as worthy of performance, but the whole score, transmuting various Stravinskian rhythmic and melodic procedures and with more than a nod in the direction of Ravel's La Valse, is among the most sheerly beautiful scores he ever wrote, with a bittersweet tone that was to become one of his hallmarks.
The Second Symphony, premiered by Charles Münch in Boston in 1959, continued the antagonistic preoccupations of the First, with a constant smaller orchestral group formally acknowledged in the score. But again Dutilleux was not merely copying the procedures of the 18th-century concerto grosso: the interplay is highly nuanced, with the smaller group prompting, interrupting, even contradicting the larger one, and the brass writing, as the composer admitted, owes something to Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Its subtitle, "Le Double", also bears on Dutilleux's interest in flux and, nourished by his love of Proust, in the actions of memory. These preoccupations informed each of the four major orchestral works that Dutilleux laboured on between 1959 and 1985.
Métaboles was commissioned by George Szell for the Cleveland Orchestra, and it was premiered by them in 1965. Dutilleux referred to it as "a concerto for orchestra" and he had in his mind's ear "the purity and timbral éclat" of the Cleveland players, "their luminosity, especially in the woodwind". The "méta" of the title indicates what Dutilleux called the "progressive growth" of one idea into another, this growth being coloured by the privileging of the different orchestral families in the course of the work's five movements, culminating in a more expansive version of the opening Incantation.
This allusion to the magic of music was not haphazard. Dutilleux believed in composition as a quasi-sacred occupation and permitted himself to utter (for him) harsh words about composers who spent more time in front of television cameras than in front of their manuscript paper.
The three orchestral works that followed touched again on virtuosity and its relationship with structure. The two concertos – Tout un Monde Lointain (A Whole Distant World, 1970) and L'Arbre des Songes (The Tree of Dreams, 1985) – written respectively for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist Isaac Stern, are grounded respectively in the world of Baudelaire and in the idea of arboreal ramification, and both conjunctions brought with them a high degree of virtuosity, focused, in the case of Tout un Monde, on Rostropovich's especially beautiful tone high on the A string. But, as usual, these virtuosic and colouristic aspects are set against formal ones, such as the retrogrades in the cello concerto's fourth movement, Miroirs.
Between these two concertos came Timbres, Espace, Mouvement (1978), inspired by van Gogh's painting La Nuit Etoilée (Starry Night). Like Debussy over L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Dutilleux was quick to resist the notion of any too schematic correspondence between the music and what it refers to, but he did admit that his omission of violins and violas was suggested by "the vertiginous impression of space, of emptiness" between the church and the cypress on the ground and "the celestial vault". Although Dutilleux never used overtly religious words or symbols in his music, he recognised the "mystic, cosmic" element in this piece, quoting Van Gogh's letter to his brother: "I have a terrible need for religion. So I go outside at night to paint the stars."
One of the works of which Dutilleux was proudest was his string quartet Ainsi la Nuit (1976). Before writing it, he studied the literature intensely (Beethoven, particularly Opus 95 and Opus 127, Bartók, Webern's Bagatelles, but not Berg's Lyric Suite - "I didn't want to get too close to it!") and even after that went through the stage of writing sketches, called Nuits, exploring individual string textures.
Only then did he set about constructing what he later felt was one of his most coherent works, coherence for him standing higher in the hierarchy of aims than any melodic, harmonic or colouristic features. The work immediately became a classic of the genre.
That Dutilleux was no ivory-tower composer but one alive to the darker side of the 20th century became clear in his chamber work Les Citations (1985), originally written for Aldeburgh but revised for the 50th anniversary in 1990 of the composer Jehan Alain's death on active service, and in The Shadows of Time (1997), in which three boy soloists, representing concentration camp victims, sing the heartbreaking refrain "Pourquoi nous?"
Between these two he broke new ground for him in Mystère de l'Instant (1989), one of the last of Paul Sacher's commissions for the Basel Chamber Orchestra: instead of the Proustian density of interrelated thoughts, the work consists of "ten sequences of varying proportions, each conveying a particular aspect of the sound world, recorded spontaneously without a prepared outline as a basis". But on repeated listening the hand of Dutilleux, the master of structure, remains audible, even if less conspicuous.
In 2002 he wrote Sur le Même Accord (On the Same Chord) for Anne-Sophie Mutter, and this was followed by two orchestral song cycles, Correspondances and Le Temps l'Horloge (Time and the Clock). As often, he had particular performers in mind: for Correspondances, completed in 2003, Dawn Upshaw and what he heard as the "instrumental quality" of her voice. The texts are letters from Prithwindra Mukherjee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rainer Maria Rilke and Vincent van Gogh – the latter the quotation given above, followed by an extract from Timbres, Espace, Mouvement.
In writing the four songs of Le Temps l'Horloge he had in his ear the rich, dramatic voice of Renée Fleming. He also valued the long, enthusiastic letters she wrote him as the composition proceeded, and not least her professionalism at the premiere of the whole cycle in Paris in 2009, when she was unhappy with her performance and insisted immediately on singing it again. For the first two songs he turned to poems by Jean Tardieu, for the third to Robert Desnos's Le Dernier Poème, already set by Poulenc, and for the last song he returned to Baudelaire and to his injunction to: "Get drunk! On wine, poetry, virtue, or whatever!"
Although Dutilleux's longevity may partly be ascribed to regular consumption of the best Bordeaux could provide, his compositional control was, needless to say, as complete as ever. As in Correspondances, the accordion is brought in off the boulevards to make a respectable contribution.
Artistic talent came to Dutilleux from both sides of his family. His paternal great-grandfather was a friend of Delacroix and Corot: a Corot landscape, handed down through the family, hung above the fireplace in the composer's Paris apartment. His maternal grandfather, Julien Koszul, of Polish descent, had been a fellow-pupil of Fauré at the Ecole Niedermeyer and later, as director of the conservatoire in Roubaix, near Lille, had encouraged Albert Roussel to leave the navy and concentrate on music.
Born in Angers, Dutilleux moved to Douai after the first world war with his family. He studied at the local conservatoire with Victor Gallois who, unusually for the time, made him work at harmony and counterpoint almost simultaneously, instead of regarding the first as a preparation for the second.
Gallois also had the distinction (unenviable, in Dutilleux's view) of having won the Prix de Rome in 1905, the year Ravel was disqualified in the preliminary round. "My own reservations", wrote Dutilleux later, "with regard to the Institut [de Fance] and officialdom in general stem in part from that."
But he always spoke highly of Gallois's teaching, and when he entered the classes of the Gallon brothers, Noël and Jean, at the Paris Conservatoire in 1932, he was déjà armé. He flourished too in the composition class of Henri Büsser, but in retrospect wished that he had been able to profit more from Maurice Emmanuel's history classes and even that he had pursued his early organ studies with Marcel Dupré – even though he never regarded Dupré highly, either as player or composer. "Tournemire was a different matter."
This ambivalent relationship with virtuosity lasted throughout his life. On the one hand, unlike most students, he actually enjoyed writing fugues as an abstract discipline. On the other, he enjoyed, by his own admission, not only "a taste for a beautiful chord" but also the visceral excitement of fine performers doing difficult things well: he liked Daniel Barenboim's recording of his First Symphony because he took the scherzo at the correct, headlong tempo. Setting one aspect off against the other produced many of the most exciting and rewarding moments in his music.
In 1938 he crowned his Conservatoire career by winning the Prix de Rome, although, in line with his cool attitude to official honours, he thought his 1937 entry, when he had come second, was a better piece. But perhaps the most perceptive comment on Dutilleux's Prix de Rome offerings had been made in 1936 by Maurice Emmanuel, who wrote to Büsser that "at no point was Dutilleux banal: perhaps he interpreted the subject in too gloomy a light, but several happy ideas on the melodic front justified his [third] prize."
Dutilleux's fight against banality was indeed to be chronic, and one of the things that made him a slow composer, to his own chagrin. An attraction to melancholy was also innate, if counterbalanced by his increasing admiration for Berlioz.
The outbreak of war cut short his stay in Rome, and he returned to Paris. During the Occupation he was accompanist for a singing class at the Conservatoire and was appointed chef de chant at the Opéra – preparing Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina in 1942 was one of the most miserable experiences of his life.
Following a wartime performance of his Sarabande pour Orchestre, his abilities as an orchestrator were widely remarked upon, but the mature Dutilleux had little time for any of the music he wrote before the Piano Sonata. It was premiered by Geneviève Joy, whom he had married in 1946. At the end of 2009 she died of cancer, and he missed the support of her cheerful, vigorous common sense.
In the last decades of his life, Dutilleux was invited all over the world to performances of his music. His generosity in accepting was counterbalanced by his unwillingness to leave his studio on the Ile Saint-Louis, which was the heart of his existence.
If never exactly clubbable, Dutilleux was one of the gentlest and most charming of men, with a delightful sense of humour. He was also inexhaustibly kind: what other composer of international stature would offer to find out for an English visitor the Bibliothèque Nationale's dates of opening? He had a strong line in self-deprecation (on learning that a young British composer was notably slow in delivering, he commented, "Il n'est pas le seul") and this, together with his refusal to pontificate, perhaps contributed to the slow growth of his fame.
But it was indeed a "croissance progressive", and by the time of his death it had reached a climax comparable with that of Métaboles. Its "résonance", and that of his highly wrought, intellectually tough and deeply passionate music, will undoubtedly ring on through the 21st century and beyond.
• Henri Dutilleux, composer, born 22 January 1916; died 22 May 2013
Roger Nichols
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