BIOGRAPHY Désiré
Pâque 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