Yvonne Desportes (1907-1993) France
- andreachamizoalber
- Sep 1
- 2 min read
Composer, writer, and music educator, she won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1932, taught at the Paris Conservatory, and wrote around 500 works.
She studied piano and took some music theory classes at the Paris Conservatory, also attended the École Normale de Musique for three years, and finally studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieure de Paris.
In 1927 she won the Prix de Rome in harmony and a year later she won it in fugue.
About her Cantata Actéon, Paul Bertrand said that "On the whole it is conceived harmonically and not contrapuntally, solidly established from the beginning in the tonality of E within which she deploys pleasant drumming chords. It is all delicacy, all femininity, attested by a marked predilection for ternary measures and rhythms, evoking with a pleasant spontaneaity, a touching freshness of feeling."
Didn't find the Cantata, but I'm sharing her French Suite for 4 clarinets. There won't be any sheet music for any of the works, as they're protected by copyright.
Her winning the First Grand Prix from the Institut de France in 1931, at a time when the French government was seeking to marginalize women from the domestic sphere and exclude them from public life, suggests that the Académie des Beaux-Arts accepted them enough to allow her to bestow its highest award on a young mother whose divorce and determination to succeed as a composer went against the usual social conventions of interwar France.
Desportes wrote nearly 500 works, including three symphonies, a requiem, and eight operas. Her compositional style, although influenced by Baroque music, leaned more toward the orchestral palette of the Russian Five, as well as the harmonic language of Ravel and early Stravinsky.
Below I share 2 dances for harp and strings.
In addition to taking her career very seriously, she was also very attached to her family life. In an interview, the interviewer asked her if he had forgotten any important aspects of her career, and she replied, "Yes, the part related to my two sons, ages 11 and 13, and my oldest daughter, age 17."
Finally, I share with you her Requiem Op. 77.
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