ABSTRACT
Dutilleux was brought up in a cultured and artistic family and he has always loved the visual arts, especially painting. As was the case with Debussy, who described Turner as ‘the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art’ 1 this interest has proved a fertile influence on his music. He claims to have no talent for drawing or painting, but his knowledge of, and interest in, the visual arts is obvious from his extensive library and his frequent statements on the stimulating influence of art on his music. 2 His own tastes include the Impressionists, whom he discovered in his youth, and abstract painting since Kandinsky 3 and his portrait has been painted by the French artist Jacques Chesnel. An exhibition held in Caen in 1993, which was devoted to some of Dutilleux’s favourite contemporary painters, included this portrait and works by Sergio de Castro (a friend of the composer), Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean Bazaine and Nicolas de Staël. I feel there are affinities between Vieira da Silva’s labyrinthine, multi-layered paintings which seem to draw the observer into the canvas, and the intricate and alluring art of Dutilleux. Any opinion of this type is necessarily subjective, but it is certain that Dutilleux’s love of the visual arts is reflected in his mature music in two different ways. Firstly, the orchestral work Timbres, espace, mouvement (1976-78, revised 1990) was inspired by Van Gogh’s La nuit étoilée (1889), and secondly, many passages in works which were not inspired by a visual stimulus have a strong graphic appeal. It would be easy to dismiss the appearance of any composer’s music as being unimportant; it goes without saying that music is a sonic and temporal art rather than a visual one, but I hope to dem onstrate that the visual dimension to Dutilleux’s music is very far from negligible.
