Vladimir Dukelsky was a Belarusian-born American composer noted for his sophisticated melodies for films, Broadway musicals, and revues. He became Vernon Duke, one of the most successful American songwriters sophisticated popular songs of the Depression era, scoring a series of hits including the standards "April in Paris," "Autumn in New York," and "I Can't Get Started"; under his real name Vladimir Dukelsky, he also enjoyed a concurrent career.
Background
Ethnicity:
He was born into a noble family of mixed Georgian-Austrian-Spanish-Russian descent.
Vladimir Dukelsky was born on October 10, 1903 at a small railroad station Parafianovo, Vilnius Governorate, Russian Empire (now Belarus). His mother was traveling to Pskov at the time, but was detained at a railway station in the nearby village of Prafianovo in order to give birth. His family belonged to the Russian nobility-one of his grandmothers held the rank of Princess. Later the family moved to Kiev. In the summer 195, he visited Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The impressions of that remarkable summer were later echoed in Dukelsky's most daring classical composition, the Russian oratorio The End of St. Petersburg (1931–1937).
Education
Growing up in Kiev, Dukelsky showed remarkable musical talent early as a child, and was admitted to the Kiev Conservatory when he was eleven years old. At the Conservatory, he studied with the distinguished composer Reinhold Gliere, and one of his contemporaries there, born less than two weeks earlier, was the young Vladimir Horowitz. In 1919, his family escaped from the turmoil of civil war in Russia and spent a year and a half with other refugees in Constantinople. In 1921, they obtained American visas and sailed steerage class on the SS King Alexander to New York. Impressed upon hearing George Gershwin’s “Swanee,” he developed a lasting interest in American popular music.
Career
In 1921, the Dukelsky family managed to reach New York, where Vladimir Dukelsky's classical compositions began to receive attention, and where Dukelsky became friendly with George Gershwin. Gershwin encouraged him in his ambitions to write popular songs in the American style, saying, "Do not be scared about going low-brow". Gershwin also suggested that, if he wanted to be part of American popular culture, "Vernon Duke" might be a good pen name. Dukelsky accepted Gershwin's suggestion and from that time he used "Dukelsky" for his classical works and "Vernon Duke" for his popular songs.
In 1924, he moved to Paris, where, as Vladimir Dukelsky, he wrote music for Serge Diaghilev's renowned Ballet Russes (Zephyr and Flora, 1925, with choreography by Leonide Massine and sets and costumes by Georges Braque), First Symphony (1928) that was premiered by Koussevitsky and other classical works. During this time he became close friends with the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev as well as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, George Balanchine, and Coco Chanel. He frequently visited London, where, as Vernon Duke, he contributed songs to British musical comedies, including The Yellow Mask, a musical with a book by Edgar Wallace, which ran for 17 months.
In 1929, Duke returned to the United States, and quickly he established himself as a writer of popular songs. By 1932, he had written his first complete Broadway score, a revue called Walk a Little Faster, which starred Beatrice Lillie. It was this show that introduced Duke’s "April In Paris" with words by E.Y. Harburg. Working again with words by Harburg, he wrote "I Like The Likes Of You" and "What Is There To Say" for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. In that same year, he wrote both words and music for "Autumn In New York", introduced to Broadway as the closing number of a revue called Thumbs Up. The Ziegfield Follies of 1936 introduced "I Can't Get Started", with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. When George Gershwin's tragically premature death left the two Gershwin's last Holly wood movie musical incomplete, Duke was chosen to finish the score.
Duke's first book-show for Broadway came in 1940, when he wrote the score for Cabin in the Sky. The musical, with a book by Lynn Root and lyrics by John Latouche, featured a black cast, including Ethel Waters and Todd Duncan, and introduced the song "Taking A Chance On Love". The show ran for 156 performances.
During this period, his alter ego Dukelsky was also quite active. Koussevitsky conducted the Boston Symphony in the premiere of Dukelsky's Second Symphony (1930) and in other premieres in the years that followed, notably Dukelsky's "Dedicaces" (1938). His oratorio, "The End of St. Petersburg" (1938), was performed in New York by the Schola Cantorum and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra.
In 1936 (some sources say 1939), he became an American citizen. During World War II, he was a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, where he wrote the score for a Coast Guard revue, Tars and Spars, starring the young and then-unknown Sid Caeser.
Following the war, he lived for a time in France, where Vernon Duke continued to write popular songs, now with French lyrics, and Vladimir Dukelsky composed classical works. In 1948, he returned to the U.S., where he lived first in New York and then in California. By 1955, he dropped the name Dukelsky, and from that time both his classical and popular compositions were credited to Vernon Duke. In that same year, he published an autobiography, Passport to Paris and in 1957, he married singer Kay McCracken. In 1962, he published a volume of his Russian poetry, and in 1963, he published a book about music called Listen Here! A Critical –Essay on Music Depreciation.
Duke was also the founder and President of the Society for Forgotten Music, an organization dedicated to reviving interest in neglected classical composers and compositions.
In the end, according to his widow, Kay Ingalls, Duke conceded that he had perhaps endured some bad luck but said he had refused to surrender to it. He continued, until his death from cancer in 1969 at the age of 65, to write constantly: a terrific memoir (''Passport to Paris''), poetry (four published volumes in Russian), letters (a particular passion), classical music pieces and, of course, American popular songs.
Vladimir Dukelsky was one of the most successful American songwriters of sophisticated popular songs. He was among the most popular composers of the Depression era, scoring a series of hits including the standards "April in Paris," "Autumn in New York," and "I Can't Get Started." Moreover, alongside his prodigious Broadway output, from the 1920's into the 1960's, Duke enjoyed a parallel career as a classical composer. Under his given Russian name, Vladimir Dukelsky, he turned out ballet scores, concertos, sonatas, art-song cycles and at least three symphonies for the world's most celebrated orchestras and conductors.
Duke was the founder and President of the Society for Forgotten Music, an organization dedicated to reviving interest in neglected classical composers and compositions.
Society for Forgotten Music
,
United States
Personality
There is something so improbably consoling about the sadness at the heart of the best Vernon Duke melodies. This redemptive afterglow could be a consequence of sheer melodic sophistication. Duke knew how to construct a song, elegantly, with surpassing craft and harmonic flair. Yet the earned wisdom behind the sadness in his music transcends flair and craft and goes beyond sophistication.
It's not that the songs are even inherently unhappy. ''Autumn in New York,'' ''April in Paris'' and ''I Can't Get Started'' - to name Duke's most identifiable trio - inhabit an emotional realm uncommon in the American popular song canon, that of dry-eyed ballads of unusual poignancy. The melancholy induced by these songs, while hauntingly seductive, is never glum.
Nor was Duke remotely a sad kind of guy. An aristocratic White Russian emigre turned Broadway songwriter, he seems to have had a rather good time of it all, dressing with notorious dash and, in a polyglot of languages, charming chorus girls and theatrical producers alike. Duke knew everybody, from his dearest friend, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, to Picasso and Chanel, Balanchine and Jean Cocteau, and even an antic young serviceman whom Duke discovered during World War II, Sid Caesar.
Quotes from others about the person
It had been George Gershwin who, back in 1924, Americanized the name Vladimir Dukelsky, coining the moniker Vernon Duke. ''Don't be scared about going low brow,'' Gershwin insisted then. ''It will open you up.''
Composed at the instigation of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein in 1922, Duke's concerto was, in his words, ''a one-movement, pianistically grateful, not too cerebral'' piece. Rubinstein, upon hearing the finished work in New York, suggested that the 20-year-old Dukelsky take his concerto and ''go to Paris,'' where a premiere would be easier for Rubinstein to mount. Dukelsky took this suggestion to heart; Rubinstein did not. The concerto was never performed.
