Vernon Duke

Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, was an American composer, poet, and memoirist. He is best known for popular American songs of the 1930s such as “April in Paris” (1932), “Autumn in New York” (1934), and “I Can’t Get Started” (1936), while also producing a substantial body of opera, ballet, symphonic, vocal-symphonic, and chamber music.

He was born in 1903 into the family of an engineer of West Russian, Belarusian noble origin. As he later wrote in his memoirs, his mother gave birth to him at a railway station in Minsk Governorate during a journey. In childhood he lived in the Urals and in Crimea, and after his father’s death in Kyiv. In the 1910s he studied at classes of the Kyiv Conservatory, learning piano with Boleslav Yavorsky and composition with Reinhold Glière. He was formally admitted to the conservatory in 1918, but at the end of 1919 his family left Kyiv, reached Constantinople in 1920, and moved to the United States in 1921.

In Constantinople he wrote his first independent musical compositions and, together with Boris Poplavsky, announced the re-creation of the Guild of Poets. In New York he continued writing both music and poetry in imitation of the Acmeists and Futurists. The overture to Nikolai Gumilev’s drama “Gondla” was performed at Carnegie Hall on 31 January 1923. He also began trying his hand at popular songs, and on George Gershwin’s advice he signed them with the creative heteronym, or pseudonym, “Vernon Duke,” which later became his official American name when he received United States citizenship on 7 January 1939.

In 1923, at the initiative of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, he completed the Piano Concerto he had begun in Kyiv and went to Paris in search of wider musical success. There his work won high praise from Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev. Diaghilev commissioned the ballet “Zephyr and Flora,” staged by Léonide Massine in 1925 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His First Symphony was premiered in Paris in 1928 under Serge Koussevitzky. During his years in France he also wrote music for English musical comedies, and in 1929 he returned to the United States.

From that time, two parallel artistic identities developed. Under the name Dukelsky he cultivated large-scale serious works, including the cantata “Epitaph” in memory of Diaghilev (1932) to words by Osip Mandelstam; the ballet “Jardin Public” (1934–1935), based on a subject by André Gide and staged by Massine in 1935; the epic oratorio “The End of St. Petersburg” (1931–1937), setting texts by Mikhail Lomonosov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Alexander Pushkin, Innokenty Annensky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, and Vladimir Mayakovsky; and “Dedications” for piano, soprano, and orchestra (1934–1937) to words by Guillaume Apollinaire.

As Vernon Duke, he became a successful creator of music for Broadway and Hollywood, drawing on the idiom of American jazz. His stage and screen projects included “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934,” written with Samuil Pokrass, “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936,” the musical comedy “Cabin in the Sky” (produced in 1940), and the film revue “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938), written with George Gershwin. His collaborators included lyricists Yip Harburg and Ira Gershwin, whose words shaped many of his song hits, and George Balanchine, who staged dance numbers for several of these productions.

In the early 1940s he returned to serious concert music, composing a Violin Concerto (1941) and a Cello Concerto (1942), the latter commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky. In 1948 he founded the Franco-American Society of Forgotten Music, intended to promote performance and audio recording of undervalued classical works. In 1950, already living in California, he wrote film music for “She Is Working Her Way Through College” and “April in Paris.” He remained in California for the rest of his life.

Duke was also active as a writer. His English-language memoir “Passport to Paris” appeared in 1955 and reflected on the split between Dukelsky and Duke. In 1957 he married the singer Kay McCracken, who officially took the surname Duke. His only opera, “The Squire’s Daughter,” based on Pushkin’s story and using his own Russian libretto, was staged in 1958. From 1962 onward he published books of poetry in Russian under the name Dukelsky, including “Messages,” “Picture Gallery” (1965), and “A Trip Somewhere” (1968), the later volumes containing many verse translations from English and ancient languages. In 1964 he published the English-language music essays “Listen Here!,” and in 1966 he recorded a large series of broadcasts on the history of the American musical for the Russian service of Radio Liberty.

He died in Santa Monica, California, in 1969 from cardiac arrest during a repeat operation for lung cancer. His widow later transferred his extensive musical and literary archive to the Library of Congress between 1980 and 1985. Critics described his serious music as harmonically and rhythmically complex and his commercial music as melodically rich and unusually sophisticated for its genre, while his prose was noted for its idiomatic range, vivid characterization, and abundant irony.