Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician is the first non-biographical study of Dukas's career in any language, and on its publication was the only book on the composer in English. With the arrival a few days later of co-editor Laura Watson's Paul Dukas: Composer and Critic, one is tempted to agree with the front matter of the book at hand that a ‘neglected’ composer is finally getting the attention he deserves.

How much attention does Dukas deserve? Few composers have enjoyed higher esteem for less music, performed (with one exception) so infrequently. But if the author of L'Apprenti sorcier escapes the one-hit wonder stereotype, one issue has tended to dominate the literature, such as it is: his perplexing non-productivity. These new arrivals announce a shift towards a holistic view of Dukas's varied career. The significant subtitle of Watson's biography already reminds us that, until Ariane et Barbe-Bleu, Dukas the critic enjoyed the higher standing, and indeed achieved it at the composer's expense. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician goes a step further: both composer and critic make room for the teacher and colleague (the performer, editor and functionary never really make an appearance, which is probably just as well). This is relational musicology in a most literal sense: a book about Dukas's relationships, within his generation (Part I) and beyond (Part II).

Fittingly enough, Laura Watson leads off, with a chapter on Dukas's criticism that works in the interstices of Paul Dukas: Composer and Critic. Where the biography plumbed the critical essays for insight into Dukas's composing, the chapter looks outward to their place in the history of the genre itself. And an important place it was, Watson finds: Dukas's unprecedentedly rigorous journalism paved the way for the new breed of French musicologists who, doctorate in hand, were aspiring to a more scientific criticism in the decade after 1900. But when Dukas's contribution is reduced from nebulosities (‘reflective, historically grounded, contextualized modes of enquiry’, p. 18) to specifics (support for innovation, engagement with earlier critics, historical erudition, philosophical ambition, attention to national ‘schools’), none of this seems particularly groundbreaking. And his putative influence on the new musicologist-critics, though certainly plausible, must remain speculative, for lack of concrete evidence; after all, Dukas never ended up contributing to the Mercure musical or the Revue musicale (not the same as the Revue musicale founded in 1920). His main tribune, the Revue hebdomadaire, offered a long-essay format but a non-specialist readership, and to my judgment the product resembles the writing of Louis Laloy or Jules Combarieu no more than that of, for instance, Camille Bellaigue of the conservative Revue des deux mondes, who likewise tackled the big aesthetic questions of the day in the best literate, amateur-philosophical French manner. Unquestionably, Dukas participated in a general rise in French critical standards towards the end of the nineteenth century; but his role in a process driven by increasing competition and professionalization in the press, and increasing exposure to unfamiliar music (new and old), remains difficult to pin down.Footnote ¹ If anything, Watson has me wondering whether we overestimate the newness of the new musicological criticism, perhaps uncritically accepting its claims to have swept away ‘amateurish biographies of musicians or anecdotal concert reviews’ (as Michel Duchesneau puts it) with analysis and objectivity.Footnote ²

William Gibbons continues the theme of criticism, if not so much of Paul Dukas: despite a gracious effort to keep the protagonist to the fore, this is really a study of Gluck reception in turn-of-the-century French criticism generally, and a good one. During that time of heightened musical nationalism, Gluck's music was paradoxically enjoying a surge in popularity in France, and ultimately (so Gibbons argues) forced critics to confront the artificiality of their notions of musical Frenchness. In particular, Gibbons cites Romain Rolland, Jean d'Udine and Dukas as seeing in Gluck not merely an assimilated Frenchman but an international hybrid, for Rolland even a European man before his time, beyond any one nation's grasp. Gibbons's classification of the contrasting strategies used to make Gluck French will no doubt prove valuable to the numerous scholars concerned with similar issues. A reservation does, however, stay with me on the claim that these critics effectively abandoned the notion of mutually exclusive national styles when they admitted the possibility of hybridization: in the passages cited, all three unambiguously continue to conceptualize national traits as distinct, definite entities, even when combined, as in Gluck. This oppositional definition of national styles is particularly clear in the slim quotation from Dukas, though it is somewhat lost in the translation (p. 46). There remains room to doubt, therefore, how ‘radical’ was the rethinking of musical nationality precipitated by the encounter with Gluck, particularly when we consider that Rolland would have held his internationalist views one way or another.

Nicolas Southon pieces together the friendship between Dukas and Fauré in a chapter of much charm and biographical interest, translated by Roger Nichols. One can only wish that the composers had exchanged more in the way of ideas, musical or otherwise. ‘He's not a great talker: so we'll spend a happy day, each of us thinking about his own music!’, predicted Fauré of one of their outings (p. 54). And, indeed, it seems to have been a recognition that each would be quite happy not digging too deeply into the other's thoughts that brought these introverted souls together in the first place. The irony is that when their friendship deepened, in Fauré's late years, it left less trace: they were neighbours, and had no need to write. Even so, by putting together their correspondence and their public writings Southon is able to confirm that artistically they shared the core values of sincerity and originality.

Paulo F. de Castro continues the relational theme with La Plainte, au loin, du faune …, Dukas's contribution to a tombeau for his friend Debussy. In this very close, close reading, generously laden with theory, La Plainte becomes ‘the focus for a disquisition on processes of semantic generation, transfer, and dissemination, informed by the contexts of dialogism and intertextuality’ (p. 71). The reader must prepare to confront Eco's ‘cultural unit’, Monelle's ‘indexicality’, Gérard Genette's ‘hypo-’ and ‘hypertext’, and Robynn Stilwell's ‘fantastical gap’, not to mention Ezra Pound's ‘melopoeia’, Pierre Schaeffer's ‘objet sonore’, the figures of classical rhetoric, topic theory … Five pages in and still surmounting the second beat of bar 3, I began to wonder whether the remarkable density of concepts encountered per second of music might not be a cunning mimesis of the piece's own concentrated language. But thoroughness has its advantages, including a happy minimum of the kind of ‘We hear this as …’ assertions that can make close readings uncomfortable, and all the while de Castro wards off the dullness endemic to the genre with lively style. The hoped-for general model for approaching musical intertextuality (or whatever we call it these days) never quite congeals from the eclecticism, but this chapter remains a model of sensitive musicality and expert sleuthing of musical links. The demonstration is all the more welcome for illuminating Dukas's most cryptic work.

From one tombeau to another: Helen Julia Minors introduces Part II and the construction of Dukas's legacy, via the special issue and musical offerings dedicated to the late composer in Henry Prunières's Revue musicale in 1936. Posthumous tributes can make frustrating sources: they speak well of the dead, and typically steer clear of the sorts of controversy the historian lives for. Certainly, Dukas's posthumously constructed legacy radiates promise as a topic: how was he fit into narratives of an ‘école française’ congealing around the Fauré–Debussy–Ravel trinity? How (if at all) did admirers argue for his relevance to a young generation now born around the time he effectively stopped composing? But if the Revue musicale offers insight into such questions, we get little of it from Minors, who does her best to make something out of variations on the theme of Dukas's sincere and thoughtful personality. From the tombeau the clearest point to emerge is simply that the contributors referenced Dukas's own style. Whether a symptom or a cause of this lack of friction, the chapter settles into a curiously haphazard structure. Seven pages into a study of the special issue and tombeau for Dukas in the Revue musicale, it is explained for a fourth time that, indeed, the Revue musicale dedicated a special issue and tombeau to Dukas – in case anyone was still wondering, apparently.

In his chapter on Dukas's composition class at the Paris Conservatoire, Christopher Brent Murray proposes to bring administrative records to bear on an understanding of Dukas the teacher hitherto gleaned from student testimonials. Right or wrong, a certain image persists of the Conservatoire's composition training, exception made for a few liberal-minded teachers (Fauré, Dukas): grey functionaries cram their pupils with operatic formulas in preparation for irrelevant and probably corrupt competitions. Somewhat refreshingly, Murray's findings lead not to the expected celebration of Dukas as a beacon of liberality at an otherwise stuffy institution, but to a rather more complicated picture of how he compared to his colleagues and predecessor on the composition staff (Paul Vidal, Henri Busser and Charles-Marie Widor). His students fared averagely or a little better in competitions, which indeed were already being liberalized by the time of his appointment. If he appears indifferent to the Prix de Rome alongside Busser, the same evidently goes for Vidal and Widor. As to the really interesting question of how the more adventurous students spanned the gulf between their traditionalist harmony and counterpoint training and the kinds of music they would go on to write after graduation, Murray unfortunately has to conclude that student reminiscences remain our best window onto what actually took place in the advanced composition seminars. His chapter is best read as a study of the composition programme in general at Henri Rabaud's Conservatoire, channelling a range of French research and new archival digging into a very readable survey that will appeal to anyone interested in the period. That programme appears as a formidable bastion of technical rigour, still, in the interwar era, coming to terms with instrumental music, and worlds away from the avant-garde. By my calculations, the composition professors averaged about 64 years old during Dukas's tenure – after, that is, Widor's retirement at 83.

Laura Hamer subsequently explores the complementary student perspective, in this case that of Elsa Barraine. Slight incongruities might indeed have been ironed out here; Hamer's claim that Dukas ‘revitalis[ed] composition study at the Paris Conservatoire’ and looked beyond the ‘narrow, specific’ requirements of the Prix de Rome (p. 132) seem a little insouciant so soon after Murray's findings. In any case, Barraine's experience certainly confirms a picture of Dukas as a dispenser of wide-ranging sagacity more than a taskmaster, a mentor who left his students free to follow diverse paths but stayed with them the whole way. Dukas himself keeps a low profile in this chapter, though; it seems that his side of the correspondence is lost, as is Barraine's after 1930. Hamer's work rhymes with Southon's in its straightforwardly biographical purpose, but the biography is Barraine's this time. The story of a Jewish girl winning the Prix de Rome at 19 and spending the residence under Fascist eyes rewards acquaintance for its own sake.

In this chapter, the issue of identity surfaces via Jewish-themed works dedicated by Barraine to Dukas, works which say little about the teacher himself. Here, as at several other points in the book the topic is broached without a tremendous amount of follow-through. In the end, though, I find this completely understandable, for Dukas made it difficult to say much about his identity, Jewish or otherwise. Perhaps responding at some level to the cloud of vulnerability descending on the Jews of France during his formative years, he seems to have built himself a persona as the very archetype of the cultivated fin-de-siècle Parisian, a product of a humanistic education and an ultra-refined aestheticist milieu. He incarnated the ultimate values of this civilised world too well to get down in the mud of factional strife; liberality, independence, seriousness, originality and sincerity resound so frequently through the documents of the age that we stop noticing them in the long run. Perhaps his commitment to the project of ameliorating Parisians’ musical sophistication had a vaguely republican, even nationalistic stripe to it, but he was anything but engagé. For this reason, the co-editors’ tub-thumping insistence on Dukas's status as an intellectuel rings a little hollow, especially when we add that his diverse array of career activities was entirely typical for a French composer of that era.

Throughout their chapters and introduction, Minors and Watson yield to an urge to heap praise on Dukas, to underline his importance as though raising a tombeau of their own. So long as showing keeps pace with telling, the eulogistic tone remains a minor botheration, like the numerous small errors confined to these sections. Every chapter of this book will be met with warm interest by students of Dukas, and at the cost of a little heterogeneity the contributions of Gibbons, de Castro, and Murray in particular will appeal to their respective, and somewhat broader, readerships. Is it an accident that Dukas's career and legacy feature as a sort of MacGuffin in the most impactful chapters? I cannot help but wonder whether the composer himself would have been surprised by the interests of future musicologists. He had his own opinion, perplexing as it is: ‘la critique passe et les oeuvres restent’.Footnote ³