Composer. Regarded by many as the last heir of the great French school music which began with Claude Debussy. Born into a family of artists, Dutilleux studied harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the Conservatory of Douai. From 1933 until 1938, he studied at the Paris Conservatory where he was a pupil of Jean and Noël Gallon, Henri Busser and Maurice Emmanuel. In 1938, he won the Prix de Rome, a prestigious scholarship established by the French state for the most distinguished students in the Arts. He served in the French army as a nurse during World War II. Later, he returned to Paris where he worked as a pianist, arranger and music teacher. In 1942, he was the Choir Master at the Paris Opera. A few years later in 1944, he was appointed Head of Music Production of Radio France. He left this position in 1963 to devote himself entirely to composition. In 1961, he became Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Since 1970, he held the same post at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Dutilleux had several students who became acclaimed composers, including notably Gérard Grisey and Francis Bayer. In 1998, Clamart near Paris decided to pay homage to him by naming the conservatory of the city, "Conservatoire de Musique, Danse et Art Dramatique Henri Dutilleux". During his long artistic career, he received numerous international awards such as Grand Prix National de la Musique awarded in 1967 and Prix MIDEM Classique of Cannes in 1999. On 29 January 2005, he received Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Dutilleux was the third French composer after Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez to have received this award. Dutilleux often cited the names of Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust and the painter Vincent van Gogh for inspiration. Dutilleux was a composer who was an extreme perfectionist, with an acute sense of self-criticism who allowed only a relatively small part of his works to be published and never ceased to revise and adjust the works that were already published. He died of natural causes at the age of ninety-seven.