Une poétique musicale au tamis de la guerre : le sas de 1919 – la singularité Durosoir

Probing the idiosyncratic nature of Lucien Durosoir’s compositional skill necessarily involves examining the reasons for his singularity, and reviewing the full details of this body of work and the genius of its composer (1878-1955). Dating from the end of the Great War, which was spent in the trenches at the front for the five years between 1914 and 1918, and after spending the whole of 1919 engaged in intensive preparatory exercises, Lucien Durosoir’s compositions displayed an immediate maturity. His initial influences had been transmuted into a powerful and accomplished whole, which was all the more remarkable because he was partly self-taught. His strong will along with with his vast knowledge of music as a Europe-wide violin virtuoso from 1897 to 1914, coupled with the brutal ordeal of the Great War resulted in—and for good: from 1919 to 1950—the highest possible artistic ambition for his works: he aimed to approach the “essential” through a poetics of music in symbiosis with the creation-representation of poets taken as an example-model of a poiêsis leading to the very essence of reality. Not according to some Ideal of a Romantic self, but according to an Ideal of the work with an—ontological—world dimension, like the thaumaturgical example of a Leconte de Lisle in poetry. And, after a wonderful early harvest of “ripe fruit” in 1920-21-22, this was done in a dynamic of growing magnitude, at its peak work after work until 1934, and by applying the principles of a rigorous modernity, which was both audacious and dispassionate, mindful of—like a Paul Valéry in his poetry as in his Poetics—the clarity of his forms and flux, which was never inchoative: modern without modernism.