Death of the composer Henri Dutilleux
The French composer Henri Dutilleux has died at the age of 97. With his passing, "the international music world has lost one of its great personalities", writes the Schott publishing house.
In view of a long, fulfilled musical life, which he shared for many decades with his wife, the pianist Geneviève Joy, who died in 2009, he left behind a concentrated oeuvre of orchestral works, song compositions, ballet and chamber music, the publisher continued.
Born into a family of artists, Dutilleux experienced the multifaceted musical life of interwar Paris. As a student at the conservatory, he was in close contact with colleagues such as André Jolivet, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, but he did not become a member of the Groupe des Six or Jeune France.
In 1942, he temporarily became choirmaster of the Paris Opera. When the war ended, external conditions improved and Dutilleux switched to French radio. He later taught composition at the École Normale de Musique and at the Conservatoire. Two symphonies (1951 and 1959) brought the hoped-for international recognition as a composer.
Dutilleux was fascinated by the delicate polyphony of the Franco-Flemish masters; Bach chorales stayed with him throughout his life and the late works of Beethoven were a refuge for him. He described his own individual approach to harmony as free-tonal continuity, which harmonizes the classical theory of chords with modality, polytonality and atonality.
