Louis Durey (27 May 1888 3
July 1979) was a French
composer.
Life
Louis
Durey was born in Paris
, the son of
a local businessman. It was not until he was nineteen years
old that he chose to pursue a musical career after hearing a
performance of a
Claude Debussy work.
As a composer he was primarily self-taught. From the beginning,
choral music was of great importance in Durey’s productivity. The
first work to gain recognition in the music world was for a piano
duet titled
Carillons. At a 1918 concert this work
attracted the interest of
Maurice
Ravel, who recommended him to his publisher.
Durey communicated with his colleague,
Darius Milhaud, and asked him to contribute a
piano piece that would bring together the six composers who, in
1920 were dubbed
Les Six. Durey was
the oldest member and in the beginning was the moving spirit of the
renowned assembly of composers. However, despite the acclaim they
received, Durey did not participate in the group's 1921
collaborative work
Les Mariés de la Tour
Eiffel, a decision which was a source of great irritation
to
Jean Cocteau.
After the Les Six period Durey continued with his career. Never
feeling the need to belong to the musical
establishment,
he voiced his growing left-wing ideals that put him in an artistic
isolation that lasted for the rest of his life.
Following the break with Cocteau, Durey withdrew to the south of
France to work at the home he owned in St Tropez. In addition to
chamber music, at Saint-Tropez he wrote his only opera,
L'Occasion. In 1929, he married Anne Grangeon and moved
back to Paris the following year. In the mid-thirties he joined the
Communist Party and became active in
the newly formed
Fédération Musicale
Populaire. During the years of the
Nazi
occupation of
World War II, he worked
with the
French Resistance and
wrote
anti-Fascist songs. After the war he
embraced hard-line communism and his uncompromising political
attitudes hindered his career. Needing to earn a living, in 1950 he
accepted the post of music critic for a communist newspaper in
Paris.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s he continued to compose but
produced nothing of significance.
His work on Vietnamese
themes in the 1960s, based on his disgust with the
turmoil France had left in Vietnam (formerly French Indochina) and the ensuing
American-run war, seemed at that time in Paris to be a voice in the
wilderness.
Probably
the least remembered of Les Six, Louis Durey died at Saint-Tropez
, Var
, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
, France in
1979.
References
- Randel, Don Michael (1996). , p. 232. Harvard University Press.
ISBN 0674372999.
- See Randel and article on Les Six.
External links
Wikis
Map
Search