Frenchmaster

Roger Nichols shares his personal recollections of the much esteemed yet reserved French composer Henri Dutilleux, who died ten years ago this month

- Roger Nichols

I first met Henri Dutilleux in the late 1980s, through my friendship with Darius Milhaud’s widow, Madeleine. She had known Dutilleux and his wife Geneviève for years and was constantly amused by the differences in their characters. Where Dutilleux was in general peaceful (except on odd occasions, as we shall see), Geneviève was a bundle of energy with strong opinions, as you can judge from her 1988 recording of the Piano Sonata Dutilleux wrote for her shortly after their marriage in 1946. Dutilleux was obviously very fond of Madeleine, whom he once described to me as ‘un cas’ (‘a case’).

In 1991 I interviewed him for a now defunct magazine in celebration of his 75th birthday that January, and from then on I would always go and see him when we were both in Paris, and this would inevitably include a meal in a restaurant, Dutilleux enjoying his food as much as he did his red wine, which he claimed was responsible for his longevity. I once risked suggesting to him that a taste for good food chimed in with the rich textures of his orchestration, and he didn’t deny it. He was aware, of course, that these textures, building as they did on those of Debussy and Ravel, might seem old hat to some younger composers, but he was also aware of the extent to which he had developed that inheritance, through both harmonies and timbres. He did, however, absolutely understand that it was healthy for the young to rebel: he remembered arriving at the Paris Conservatoire in 1933 and finding that Ravelism was rampant – not the real Ravel, for which he always had huge admiration, but pastiche Ravel. Just before the war, Messiaen echoed his thoughts, chastising as ‘Lazy: those writers of sub-Fauré and sub-Ravel. Lazy: the fake Couperin maniacs, writers of rigaudons and pavanes.’