Eight years passed after La Péri’s premiere before Dukas published new music. La Plainte, au loin, du faune… (‘The Cry, from Afar, of the Faun…’) was one of ten new pieces commissioned by the Revue musicale editor Henry Prunières to commemorate Debussy. These scores appeared in a special tombeau edition of the journal in 1920. ‘The death of poor Debussy is an atrocious thing, and coming at such a time! I am overcome with grief ‘, Dukas lamented in 1918, the pain of bereavement intensified by the ongoing horrors of la grande guerre .La Plainte moves beyond that raw emotion to register in the post-Debussy, post-war cultural stocktaking which came slightly later. In lieu of the obituaries that Dukas would write for departed friends such as Fauré and d’Indy, this was his public homage to his closest peer. As his penultimate published score – succeeded by Sonnet de Ronsard (1924) for voice and piano, then an Allegro for piano which was performed in 1925 but never published – La Plainte is sometimes heard as the composer’s curtain call. Indeed, his post-Péri professional narrative has become embalmed in tropes of death and decline. In this chapter, I aspire to present a more nuanced view by tracking Dukas’s activity throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Although he was often scathing in his judgement of the contemporary Parisian musical environment and railed against the values it inculcated in audiences, he never renounced composition. Admittedly, his sense of alienation from the avant-garde scene exacerbated the difficulties he experienced in trying to complete works. The drastically reduced output of his last fifteen years may also be attributed to his poor health and economic woes, which forced him to teach more than he would have liked. These matters monopolised his time and energy, as did the happier circumstances of a richer personal life, following his marriage to Suzanne Pereyra in 1916 and the birth of their daughter Adrienne in 1919.

La Plainte is a statement by a composer who intended to stay in the public eye. It marked a new departure: the promise of a late style, which never fully materialised. Debussy, by contrast, had developed a late style as a response both to the private ordeal of facing his own mortality as cancer ravaged him and to the external pressures of wartime circumstances.