Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux was born on 22 January 1916 in Angers (France). He first studied music at the conservatory in Douai, then at the Paris conservatory from 1933 to 1938. His teachers include Noel and Jean Gallon, Henri Büsser and Maurice Emmanuel. In 1938 Dutilleux won the Premier Premier Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata "L'anneau du roi" but did not complete his entire residency in Rome due to the outbreak of World War II. After the war Dutilleux worked as head of music production for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. In 1961 he became professor for composition and taught at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris until 1970 when he continued his lectures at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. In 1995 and 1998 Henri Dutilleux was also composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood Festival.
The work catalogue of Henri Dutilleux is small but of highest quality. Among his works are several that count already to the most important compositions of the 20th century. His oeuvre includes 2 symphonies, the orchestral pieces "Metaboles" and "Timbres, espace, mouvement", a violin and a cello concerto, the ballet "Le Loup", a piano sonata, a string quartet, and "Deux sonnets de Jean Cassou" for voice and piano.
Henri Dutilleux died on 22 May 2013 in Paris (France).

study works from the archive of Claude Pascal

Claude Pascal (1921-2017) was a French composer (see my writings on him here). He was a musical prodigy and entered the Paris conservatory already in 1931, a year before Henri Dutilleux enrolled there. Both Pascal and Dutilleux were students in the harmony class of Jean Gallon and became close friends over the time. When Claude Pascal won the Premier Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1945 it was Henri Dutilleux who visited him at the Villa Medici a year later. The friendship of the two composers continued and Pascal and Dutilleux shared and discussed thoughts and ideas throughout their lifetimes.

Shortly after Claude Pascal passed away in 2017 a large part of his musical estate was for sale at a Parisian auction house where I bought it. The estate included also documents from his time at the Paris conservatory. It seems Claude Pascal was a diligent, accurate person because I found two large manuscript books with clean copies of compositional results of his lessons. That includes not only his personal works but also results from his fellow students. These notes by Claude Pascal are of enormous historical value because other composers were not that diligent. So without these transcripts many student works were lost nowadays.

Among the many transcripts penned down by Claude Pascal are six compositions that have a reference to Henri Dutilleux - either he contributed the subject or the composition. With interest I noticed that the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung also owns transcriptions by Claude Pascal in their Dutilleux archive. I received the answer that the copies in the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung are different to the ones in my archive. For that reason I decided to publish the compositions for information purposes.

I would like to thank the Dutilleux family for their kind permission to publish these compositions via my website.