Paul Dukas’s female composition students: Elsa

Abstract

In the autumn of 1927, Paul Dukas succeeded Widor as one of the composition professors at the Paris Conservatoire. Well known as a talented and nurturing teacher, Dukas’s Conservatoire classes of the late 1920s and early 1930s were distinguished by the high number of students who went on to pursue successful careers as composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Tony Aubin, Georges Hugon, and Maurice Durufle. These young men, however, studied alongside a group of equally talented young women, including Elsa Barraine, Yvonne Desportes, and Claude Arrieu, all of whom also went on to be amongst the most prolific French composers of their generation. Dukas was not, of course, unusual in admitting women to his composition class. As discussed in chapter 2, by the late 1920s, women could benefit from equal opportunities in music education. Widor had also welcomed female students into his Conservatoire class, and many women were admitted to study composition at the Schola Cantorum. In Dukas’s class, students of both genders could benefit from his fresh approach to Conservatoire composition studies and caring treatment of his charges.