His catalog includes no more than thirty compositions. Nevertheless, a significant portion of them is still regarded as a bouquet of masterpieces of Western musical literature, moral heirs to the French tradition represented by Debussy and Ravel.
The author's unrelenting preference for quality over quantity and high level of self-demand led to the publication of such a small corpus. The beginning of World War II also played a role.
He returned to Paris shortly before France entered the war, having to serve his country as a stretcher-bearer until the Armistice of 1940. In the following years, he lived poorly in the occupied city. However, he had access to some positions in the Paris Opera and Radio France, continuing his training almost on his own, reading composition treatises and learning about the avant-garde by hearsay.
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| Henri Dutilleux (1916 - 2013) |
In 1941 he met Genevieve Joy, a fellow student at the Conservatoire, which in occupied France was still functioning as much as possible. They married at the end of the war. From then on and for a long time, Genevieve became the interpreter and disseminator of his piano works, especially his only Sonata, composed between 1948-49 and dedicated to Genevieve, as you may have guessed.
True to his overwhelming claim to his own work, the composer labeled the piece as Opus 1, thus relegating to a ghost plane the earlier, shorter works that had emerged over a ten-year period, because he considered the Sonata to be the first work up to his mature standards.
Movements:
A work of enormous technical demands (Genevieve must have excelled at, for sure), it combines two great concerns of the mature Dutilleux: formal rigor and harmonic research. Hence the traditional three-movement structure on the one hand, and the sustained tonal ambiguity (more: sometimes tonal, sometimes atonal) on the other.
00:00 Allegro con moto: Beginning openly in 2/2 rhythm, soon there will be changes in the rhythmic structure (the "accent pattern"). The harmonic ambiguity already mentioned is also present here from the first bars, leaving the listener perplexed by the immediate change from a minor key to a major key and vice versa, giving the impression that the performer has not started where he should have, or that this particular video is badly edited. There is no such thing. The piece begins like this.
08:13 Lied: The shortest of the three movements, written in ternary form (theme A, theme B, return to theme A). Here also there are signs of tonal ambiguity, although a basic tonality is in principle discernible (D-flat major).
13:57 Choral et variations: An imposing chorale (in four voices according to scholars, though I struggle to hear three) is followed by four variations: Vivace 16:16 - Un poco più vivo 17:39 - Calmo 19:56 - Prestissimo 22:05. The work ends with a recapitulation of the opening chorale, with variations.
Some scholars have described the work as "brilliant, multi-layered with echoes of Bartók and Prokofiev". Others claim it could have been written by Debussy: a "sensual yet classical" sonata.
The rendition is by the Franco-German pianist Emil Reinert. Live recording during the European International Piano Competition, the year 2021.
