Jacques Hétu

Jacques Hétu OC OQ FRSC (August 8, 1938 – February 9, 2010) was a Canadian composer and music educator. Hétu is the most frequently performed of Canadian classical composers, both within Canada and internationally.

Jacques Hétu was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec; he began his professional training at the University of Ottawa where he was a pupil of Father Jules Martel^[1] from 1955 to 1956. In 1956 he entered the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and studied there for five years with Melvin Berman (oboe), Isabelle Delorme (harmony), Jean Papineau-Couture (fugue), Clermont Pépin (composition and counterpoint), and Georges Savaria (piano); he also studied at the Tanglewood Music Center during the summer of 1959 with Lukas Foss.

In 1961 he won several important awards, including the first prize at the Quebec Music Festivals composition competition, a grant from the Canada Council, and the Prix d'Europe. The latter two awards enabled him to pursue studies in France at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1963 with Henri Dutilleux and at the Paris Conservatory with Olivier Messiaen in 1962–1963.^[2] Dutilleux encouraged Hétu to pursue his own style in composition and not be influenced strongly by current trends.^[3]

Hétu joined the music faculty at Laval University in 1963, remaining there through 1977. He taught music composition at the University of Montreal in 1972–1973 and 1978–1979. From 1979 to 2000, he was a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, notably serving as the director of that school's Music Department from 1980 to 1982 and from 1986 to 1988.^[2]

Hétu is the most frequently performed Canadian classical composer^[4] and was well-known for his five symphonies, all of which were enthusiastically received by audiences and critics.

His Variations Op. 8 for piano, composed in 1964, which displays his serial/atonal form of composition at that time, were recorded by Glenn Gould in 1967 as a project for the Canadian Centennial.^[5] As a result of the Gould recording, Hétu became a prominent name in Canadian classical music and was soon inundated with commissions for new works.^[3] Demand for his music remained strong for the remainder of his life.

Hétu's Third Symphony (1971) marked a clear turn in direction for his compositional technique toward a more tonal and traditional style. This work became an important success and was featured in world tours by the Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa.^[6]

In 1985, he composed Missa Pro Trecenteismo Anno, a large-scale choral setting of the Roman Catholic Mass, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth.^[7] The work was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and premiered on the CBC radio network.

Hétu's Trumpet Concerto (1987) was performed in its U.S. premiere by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in May 1992 conducted by Kurt Masur and with the orchestra's principal trumpet Philip Smith as soloist.^[8][9] This performance of a concerto which had been composed some years earlier on commission for a Canadian soloist served to increase Hétu's international profile.

His Concerto for Organ and Orchestra (2000) was premiered by the organist Rachel Laurin with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mario Bernardi in 2002.^[10]

Hétu's Concerto for Two Guitars was composed in 2007 and the world premiere was performed by guitarists Marc Deschennes and André Roi, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Orchestre Métropolitain.^[11]

Also from 2007 he composed Légendes Op. 76 for symphony orchestra, a musical depiction of three traditional Québec legends, incorporating French-Canadian folk music influences.^[12]

On 3 March, 2010 the Toronto Symphony Orchestra premiered his Fifth Symphony under the baton of TSO music director Peter Oundjian. It is not known whether this commission – his Op. 81 – was his last completed work.^[13] The final choral movement of this large-scale work is a setting of a famous “underground” poem by Paul Éluard, Liberté (poem), which circulated as part of the French Resistance during the German Occupation of France in 1940-1944. The same war in France forms the subject of the work as a whole. The four movements are 1) Prologue 2) L'Invasion 3) L'Occupation 4) “Liberté”.^[14]

Although Hétu studied in Paris with Dutilleux and Messiaen, he eventually reverted to include a tonal core to his compositional technique, and decided against following Pierre Boulez into serialism or atonality.^[15] Dutilleux encouraged Hétu to pursue his own style in composition and not be influenced strongly by current trends. ^[16] Hétu's Third Symphony of 1971 marked his firm return to tonal forms of music composition.^[17]

The influence of such twentieth century composers as Darius Milhaud and Béla Bartók are discernible in his work, and folk music sources and polytonality featured in his musical language. Hétu often composed in larger symphonic forms, especially symphonies, concertos, and tone poems, where the stylistic impact of late nineteenth century French composers ranging from César Franck and Ernest Chausson to Claude Debussy was apparent. These larger movements required tonal organizing principles to provide structural coherence.^[18]

Hétu's abandonment of serialism and atonality and his return to more historical musical traditions caused considerable resentment against him from the avant-garde proponents of modernism. His response was instructive for the musical community, "I handled the ostracism thanks to performers who played my music or commissioned works from me."^[13]

He was nominated for a 1989 Juno Award in the Best Classical Composition category.

In 1989, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2001 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.^[2]

Hétu died of lung cancer^[19] at his home in Saint-Hippolyte on February 9, 2010. He was survived by his wife, Jeanne Desaulniers, and five children.^[13]