FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF MUSIC

MUSICAL POETRY IN HENRI DUTILLEUX'S

TROIS STROPHES SUR LE NOM DE SACHER

By
DARON KIRSCH

A Prospectus submitted to the

Professor of Bibliographies
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the course of
Music Bibliography

Fall 2012

BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE

Composers have sought inspiration from prose and poetry alike for hundreds of years,
and there is a long tradition of the intertwining of instrumental music and literature, the most
overt example of which are the symphonic tone poems of Franz Liszt. These works aimed to tell
stories through musical imagery and exploited the full force of the orchestra in their service. In
1899, however, Arnold Schoenberg's Verklrte Nacht revolutionized the genre by translating the
concepts of tone poems into a work for chamber ensemble. Later still, in 1926, Alban Berg
encoded his love affair with Hanna Fuchs in every aspect of his Lyric Suite, the finale of which
has been discovered by George Perle to contain a song without words setting of poetry by
Charles Baudelaire, telling a tragic story without uttering a word. Since then, many composers
have written their inspirations into their compositions in ways too numerous to count, and among
their most successful modern exponents is the French composer Henri Dutilleux.
Henri Dutilleux is known for his meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail in his
compositional process and even in the preparation of his manuscripts. He has been known to
withhold publication of works because the visual impact of the score itself wasn't up to his
standards, and in his long career has averaged less than a single published work per year the
Piano Sonata (Op. 1) appeared in 1948, and he has since then produced roughly thirty works.
Such a slow method of composing is married with an extreme awareness of process to create
scores where every detail is carefully considered, and Dutilleux manages to embed a staggering
amount of refinement in his works.
Nearly half of his output has been dedicated to symphonic and concertante-style works;
among these, the most popular are Mtaboles (1964), the cello concerto Tout un monde
lointain... (1970), and Timbres, espace, mouvement (1978). The last of these is subtitled La nuit

etoile (The Starry Night), as it is directly inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's painting of the same
name. It attempts to evoke the almost cosmic whirling effect which (the painting) produces
through its use of instrumentation and textural effects. A heavy complement of winds symbolized
the swirling upper half of the painting, and an unusual string section of just celli and basses
represent the negative space in the lower half through the absence of violins and violas.
Tout un monde lointain was one of several commissions from cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich, and finds its inspiration in the poetry of Baudelaire. The movements of the work
all bear inscriptions from poems in Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, with the title of the work itself
also being found in one of them (La Chevelure). Dutilleux has said that while the work is not
programmatic in its conception, the movements are still linked to their respective stanzas. He
attempts to recreate in music his own personal emotional responses to reading each of the poems,
and the result is a spacious, meditative work in a style unique to Dutilleux.
Rostropovich came to Dutilleux again in 1976 to commission another work, this time for
solo cello, as part of a collection of works to celebrate the birthday of Paul Sacher. Composers
with some connection to Sacher were asked to produce a solo cello piece utilizing Sacher's name
translated into the musical pitches eS A C H E Re (Eb A C B E D); 11 obliged Conrad Beck,
Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Fortner, Alberto Ginastera,
Cristbal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Klaus Huber and Witold Lutosawski
and one (Pierre Boulez) produced a work for six celli with a seventh as principal. Dutilleux's
contribution was a short work that was eventually extended with two additional movements in
1982 that became the Trois Strophes sur le nom Sacher. While not initially conceived as a
collected work, Dutilleux's choice of title unifies the set with a suggestion of poetic elements;
this paper will argue that this was not simply a random decision or the result of a hunt through a

thesaurus, but, as is typical for the composer, a calculated decision based on the structure of, and
elements contained within, the work.

PURPOSE
Dutilleux is one of a number of composers who have acknowledged literature as a source
of inspiration for their composition. While the manifestation of these inspirations vary greatly,
Dutilleux is known for his extremely methodical composing and great attention to detail; he is a
composer of intent, rather than coincidence. This paper will discuss works by Schoenberg and
Berg, and provide an analysis of Dutilleux's Trois Strophes sur le nom 'Sacher' to determine the
extent of which Dutilleux incorporates conventions and elements of poetry, as suggested by the
work's title.

SURVEY OF LITERATURE
Much has been written on the music of Schoenberg and Berg, owing to their position
along with Anton Webern as heads of the Second Viennese School. Ethan Haimo has provided an
broad analysis of Schoenberg's turn toward serial atonality in Schoenberg's Transformation of
Musical Language (2006), and Walter Frisch's The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 18931908 (1993) examines the work more closely while reaching many of the same conclusions
about motivic and harmonic motivation for the work's progression.
His own discovery of a secondary secret program in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg is
detailed by George Perle in Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg (1995), a discovery
that reignited scholarly research on the work and brought to light the true poetic connection of
the work. The serial nature of the work combined with its romantic, extramusical influences has

naturally led to a number of analytical approaches to the work, both musical and semantic. Arved
Ashby's The Lyric Suite and Berg's Twelve-Tone Duality (2008) takes a close look at the sketches
of Berg and the process through which he moved from a freer style of composition toward a
more serial approach. Conversely, Gottfried Scholz's More on Secret Programs in Berg's
Instrumental Music in Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music (1998) tackles the work
semantically, incorporating analyses from other authors to draw conclusions about Berg's ability
to encode a plethora of autobiographical details in the Suite.
Literature on Dutilleux is less available, due at least in some small part to his still being
alive at the time of this writing. The quasi-biography by Caroline Potter, Henri Dutilleux: His
Life and Works (1997) provides a relatively brief biography of the composer, but focuses mainly
on his compositional output, process and influence. Caroline Potter and Caroline Rae have
written an number of articles on a number of topic regarding his music, several of which are
collected in a festschrift, Dutilleux at 95. Claude Glayman's Henri Dutilleux: Music Mystery
and Memory: Conversations with Henri Dutilleux (2003) provide fascinating, if meandering
insights into the genesis of many of Dutilleux's works, and he makes mention of the influences of
Baudelaire and Marcel Proust in several of his compositions. Writings on the Trois Strophes are
almost non-existent, despite being the only work for a solo instrument other than piano Dutilleux
has written.

METHOD
The tradition of literature inspiring and influencing composers is one that must be
understood in order to show the advances therein made by Dutilleux. Initially, this paper will
require research into the musical background from which Dutilleux's Trois Strophes sur le nom

de Sacher emerges. It will also require two separate analysis of the Trois Strophes, one musical
and one not. Musical analysis of pitch, rhythm and form will be undertaken, with special
attention given to the eSACHERe hexachord and its various permutations. A pseudohermeneutic analysis will also be done, giving focus to elements of poetry such as rhyme scheme
and poetic feet. Together, these elements will be mapped these onto the piece to establish it as a
piece of musical poetry and show the exactness of Dutilleux's choice of title.

TENTATIVE CHAPTER HEADINGS

I.
II.

III.
IV.

Introduction
History of musical poetics
a. Lyric Suite
b. Verklrte Nacht
Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher
Conclusion