Théodore Dubois was a prominent French composer, organist, theorist, and teacher in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he is perhaps better remembered for a monumental deficit in judgment than for his music itself. He was a staunch conservative, and as director of the Paris Conservatoire, he refused to award the Prix to Rome to Maurice Ravel in 1905; the outpouring of consternation among the public and among musicians led him to resign his position. Dubois had won the Prix de Rome as a young man ...
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Théodore Dubois was a prominent French composer, organist, theorist, and teacher in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he is perhaps better remembered for a monumental deficit in judgment than for his music itself. He was a staunch conservative, and as director of the Paris Conservatoire, he refused to award the Prix to Rome to Maurice Ravel in 1905; the outpouring of consternation among the public and among musicians led him to resign his position. Dubois had won the Prix de Rome as a young man and had the beginnings of a successful career in composition, but his music never caught fire in the popular imagination, and his dismissal of impressionism doomed his later work to be considered stodgy and old-fashioned. Dubois wrote with facility and had a gift for melody and traditionally Germanic thematic development. There is little in his chamber music that would make it immediately recognizable as the work of a French composer; in fact, his music sounds almost Brahmsian, but...
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