High Notes
This week at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
Henri Dutilleux, who died five years ago at the age of ninety-seven, was the most exquisite of modern French composers. He did not gain the worldwide prominence of the mind-blowing Olivier Messiaen, who was about seven years older, or the fractious Pierre Boulez, who was nine years younger; but neither was he ignored, racking up an impressive list of honors and decorations that included Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (1994), Germany’s Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2005), and, from Great Britain, the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (2008).
On Tuesday, Aug. 14, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival includes in its noon program a work by Dutilleux: Les citations (The Quotations), a quartet for the unorthodox combination of oboe, harpsichord, double bass, and percussion. The performing roster comprises three members of the New York Philharmonic — oboist Liang Wang, harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon, and percussionist Daniel Druckman — plus Leigh Mesh, who, as associate principal bassist of the Metropolitan Opera, works next door to those fellows at Lincoln Center. A punctilious stylist, Dutilleux was well known for continuing to revise his works after he had presumably completed them. Usually this took the form of pruning any sound that might qualify as extraneous, but Les citations went in the opposite direction: It grew.
Thinking about this piece takes me back to my student days. I went to conservatory as an oboist. Smitten with the French school of oboeplaying, which differs considerably from what is practiced in the United States, I headed off in 1973 to France. There I studied with Maurice Bourgue, an inspiring musician then in the middle of his 12-year tenure as principal oboist of the Orchestre de Paris. The subject of Dutilleux came up often. Three years earlier, Bourgue and his wife, the pianist Colette Kling, had released a recording that included a sonata Dutilleux had composed in 1947 as a competition piece for that year’s adjudications of the oboe pupils at the Paris Conservatoire. Bourgue had failed to realize — or Dutilleux had failed to make clear — that the piece had been disowned by its composer. Dutilleux went through the roof when, in 1973 ( just as my time in Bourgue’s studio began), the record came out in a new pressing with a gorgeous cover and attracted a great deal of attention. Recriminations ensued, but there was no overlooking that, even if Dutilleux had dismissed the piece as a product of his callow youth, Bourgue’s interpretation was stunning.
Rather than let the animosity simmer, Bourgue addressed the matter with Dutilleux and won his admiration. We move ahead a dozen years. In 1985, Dutilleux was artist-in-residence at the Aldeburgh Festival, formerly the domain of the late Benjamin Britten and still beneath the thrall of Britten’s spouse, the tenor Peter Pears. For his residency, Dutilleux wrote a movement titled For Aldeburgh 85, as a 75th-birthday tribute to Pears, and he incorporated a quotation from one of Pears’ most famous roles, the “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” aria from Peter Grimes .He scored it for oboe, harpsichord, and percussion. He related: “I wanted to experiment with certain possibilities of the oboe, for example multiphonics. So I had a number of sessions with that marvelous player Maurice Bourgue.”
Not atypically, Dutilleux withdrew the piece immediately after its premiere and set about adding a second movement, called “From Janequin to Jehan Alain,” and at that point he expanded the instrumentation to include a double bass. The composer observed: “While I was working on this second movement in June 1990 I was haunted by the memory of Jehan Alain. … Exactly fifty years earlier, on 20 June 1940, he had died a hero’s death going on a voluntary reconnaissance mission during the defense of Saumur. So I put into this second movement a quotation
from a ‘theme and variations’ by Alain, together with a phrase attributed to Janequin which Alain had used in one of his organ works.” Alain, an older brother of the famous organist Marie-Claire Alain, had been among Dutilleux’s fellow students at the Paris Conservatoire, and to the end of his days Dutilleux would cite him as an unjustly neglected figure. The work he quotes is Alain’s organ piece Variations sur un thème de Clément
Jannequin [sic], from 1937. Back when I was working with Bourgue, I was also taking the continuo classes taught at the Institut de Musicologie de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne by the late Huguette Dreyfus, as delectable a person as she was a harpsichordist. Those studies were long in the past when the revised and expanded piece received its first performance, at the Besançon Festival in 1991, under the title Diptyque: Les citations. I nonetheless took immense joy in reading accounts of that premiere, for which the oboist was Maurice Bourgue (to whom the new movement was dedicated) and the harpsichordist was Huguette Dreyfus.
That was not the end of the story. In 2010, Dutilleux altered the piece yet again, composing an interlude for double bass, titled “As for the Wolf’s Moan,” to connect the two existing parts. In that new segment he quoted himself, borrowing a theme from Le loup (The Wolf), a ballet he had written in 1953 for the Roland Petit dance company. Les citations was introduced in its final form that summer at the Festival d’Anvers-sur-Oise and, yet again, the oboist was Maurice Bourgue. Dreyfus, by then in her eighties, had played her final recital the preceding year, so the keyboard part was entrusted to one of her students, the American harpsichordist Jory Vinikour.
Memory plays a key role in Dutilleux’s compositions. Analysts often speak of his concept of “progressive growth,” whereby themes gradually materialize out of ideas originally glimpsed in fragmentary form, their eventual resonance relying on the listener’s recall of those adumbrations. He spoke of “the importance of ‘memory’ with all that entails in terms of variation, prefiguration, premonition. There we’re touching on the question of musical time, a particular perception of time, almost in the Proustian sense (and Proust has influenced me greatly).” When an interviewer pressed him about this process, he responded, “Isn’t music constantly concerned with memory?”
We might view the musical quotations in Les citations as a particularly obvious harnessing of Dutilleux’s own memories — of a summer at Aldeburgh, of a tenor’s phrase that impressed him, of a long-deceased friend he admired. But music is not self-contained; it reaches out from the composer to trigger personal responses from listeners who encounter it. The principal pleasure of Les citations comes from the composition itself and the memories Dutilleux encoded within it. And yet the piece may also resonate with memories that were not his at all, but nonetheless become part of its landscape through the curiosity of coincidence.
Memory plays a key role in Dutilleux’s compositions. Analysts often speak of his concept of “progressive growth,” whereby themes gradually materialize out of ideas originally glimpsed in fragmentary form.