BIOGRAPHY
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Works     Works of Désiré Pâque  Composers  Désiré Pâque  Louis Lavoye  Albert Dupuis  Jean Rogister  Mathieu Jodin  Lucien Lambotte  Georges Antoine  Mathieu Debaar  Paul Rouault  Maurice Guillaume  Raymond Micha  Michel Leclerc  Pierre Froidebise  Berthe di Vito-Delvaux  Edouard Senny    Paul Barras  Henri Pousseur  Paul Sana  André Jadot  Roger Cornelis  Claude Siquiet  Albert Lomba  Pierre Matot  Firmin Decerf Marian Mitea  Alain Levecq  Leonello Capodaglio  Philippe Verkaeren  Michel Béro  Jean-Dominique Pasquet  Dominique Charle  Jean-Louis Cadée  Onofrio Palumbo  Thierry Chleide  André Giet André Klenes  Anne Martin Jeannine Gillard  Marcel Cominotto  Paul Detiffe  Jean-Luc Lepage  Pierre Liémans  Patrick Wilwerth  Jean Nadeau Michel Fourgon  Philippe de Val Laurence Jacquemin  Sébastien Letocart		Désiré PÂQUE (Liège 1867 - Bessancourt 1939 )
		Désiré Pâque was born in Liège on 21 May 1867 and died in Bessancourt, north of Paris, on 20 November 1939. He received a thorough training in organ and composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Music at Liège. He was one of several brilliant and hard-working students (Armand Marsick, Louis Lavoye, Charles Smulders, Léon and Joseph Jongen, principally) under an inspiring principal, Jean-Théodore Radoux. Désiré Pâque was adventurous and evidently somewhat headstrong. He choose to venture abroad to seek fame, but thisattempt to found a conservatoire in Sofia in 1897 was not successful. He then taught composition in Athens from 1900 to 1902, returning to Brussels in 1902, he went to Paris in 1905, then to Lisbon in 1906, where he remained until 1909. He was there remembered for a long time for having taught Luis Freitas Branco (Lisbon, 1890 - 1955). He left Portugal for good and moved to Germany in june 1909 (Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin) before he took root in Switzerland in 1913. When World War I broke out, the composer and his family settled in Paris in the month of May 1914. Désiré Pâque tries unsuccessfully to make his mark. From 1927 to 1939, he maintains a significant creative activity (almost a fourth of his work appears during this last period), but success eluded him. He became inward-looking in the course of his increasingly harsh and morose retreat in Bessancourt, in the Valley of the river Oise. Early in his carrer, in 1909, his friend Busoni made him aware of the aesthetic problems posed by the emergence of Schoenbergian atonality, and he was quick to seek to define a creative strategy in a period which had thrown up so many profound questions. He fashioned his own personal mode of expression, defending it without becoming dogmatic : he called it "adjonction constante d'éléments musicaux nouveaux" which might be translated "continuous musical sequence". This composition technique made its first appearance in his op. 67, the Organ Symphony, composed in Berlin in 1910, immediatly before his first Piano Sonata. It may be useful here to quote Désiré Pâque's own words : « The arranging of fresh musical elements in a continuous sequence as a method of developping a musical work is the direct antithesis of the thematic unity though not a stylistic unity, and it is important not to confuse the two. This new system of building up a musical work consists not of exploiting one or two themes but of multiplying the musical motifs. … Continuous sequence has manifested itself in our musical production so far two aspects or on two levels. On the first level the listener finds himself in the presence of numerous themes - they might also be called clearly-defined melodic timbres - rather than in the presence of an (ideally at least) endless melodic line. This method of construction preserves virtually all the compositional procedures, except (and this is the most important point) that during the course of the musical action, i.e. as the piece proceeds, the themes are repeated, transposed, augmented and diminished without ever being distorted or mutilated by fragmentation. They remain intact, just as they were at their first appearance or exposition. What varies is what accompanies them ». Philippe Gilson Bibliothécaire du Conservatoire de Musique de Liège Translated by Celia Skrine
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