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Vernon Duke (born Vladimir Dukelsky, October 10, 1903 in Parafjanava, Belarus (then part of Russian Empire) — January 16, 1969) was a Russian-American composer/songwriter. He is best known for "I Can't Get Started" with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, "April in Paris" with lyrics by E. Y. ("Yip") Harburg (1932), and "What Is There To Say" for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, also with Harburg. He wrote the words and music for "Autumn in New York" (1934).

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky was born on October 10, 1903 into a noble family of mixed Lithuanian-Georgian-Austrian-Spanish-Russian descent. The 1954 Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians referred to "one of his grandparents" (Princess Tumanishvili) as having been "directly descended from the kings of Georgia". His birthplace, however, was the small railroad station Parfianovo, in the government of Minsk. At that time his mother "happened to be traveling by train" (Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris [Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1955], p. 6). The Dukelskys resided in Kiev, and Vladimir's only visit to St. Petersburg and Moscow occurred in the summer of 1915. The impressions of that remarkable summer were later echoed in Dukelsky's most daring serious composition, the Russian oratorio The End of St. Petersburg (1931-1937).

At the age of 11, Dukelsky was admitted to the Kiev Conservatory where he studied composition with Reinhold Glière and musical theory with Boleslaw Jaworski. 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 to New York. It was in 1922 in New York that Dukelsky befriended George Gershwin. Gershwin (himself born Jacob Gershovitz) suggested to truncate and Americanize the composer's name to Vernon Duke. Vernon Duke's first songs were conceived that year, but Vladimir Dukelsky continued to write serious music and Russian poetry under his given name until the end of his life.

In 1924, the restless young man left hospitable America for the Old World. In Paris, he received a commission from Serge Diaghilev to compose a ballet. Dukelsky's first theatrical production, Zephyr and Flora, was staged in the 1925 season of Ballets Russes, with choreography by Leonide Massine and scenography by Georges Braque, and to a much critical acclaim. In a review of musical novelties of the season, Prokofiev described it as full of "superior melodies, very well designed, harmonically beautiful and not too 'modernist'." Prokofiev was as impressed with a young talent as Diaghilev did, and soon both composers became close friends. They frequently saw each other until the end of the 1930s and corresponded until 1946, when the attacks of Soviet officialdom on Prokofiev (who returned to Russia in 1936) made the further exchange of letters too dangerous for Prokofiev. Dukelsky's First Symphony was premièred by Serge Koussevitzky and his orchestra in 1928 in Paris on the same bill as the excerpts from Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. Some of Dukelsky's and Prokofiev's compositions of the 1930s bear evidence of the sustaining musical dialogue.

In the late 1920s, Dukelsky shared his time between Paris, where his serious music was performed, and London where he composed numbers for musical comedies under the pen name of Vernon Duke. In 1929, he returned to the United States with an intention of settling in the country permanently. He composed and published a lot of serious music, but devoted even greater efforts to establishing himself on Broadway. Duke's songs "April in Paris" (1932), "Autumn in New York" (1934), "I Like the Likes of You" (1934), "Water Under the Bridge" (1934), "I Can't Get Started" (1936) were among the hits of the 1930s.

The support and devotion of Serge Koussevitzky, who published Dukelsky's chamber music and played his orchestral scores, helped him with more serious pursuits. Dukelsky's concerto for piano, orchestra and soprano obligato Dédicaces (1935-1937) was premièred by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January 1939 in New York. His oratorio, The End of St. Petersburg, was premièred a year earlier by Schola Cantorum and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra under Hugh Ross. In 1937, the composer was asked to complete Gershwin's last score, a soundtrack to a Technicolor extravaganza The Goldwyn Follies, for which he contributed two parodic ballets, choreographed by George Balanchine, and a song "Spring Again". In 1939, Dukelsky became an American citizen and took Vernon Duke as his legal name. Duke's greatest success came a year later, with the Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky (1940), choreographed by George Balanchine and performed by an all-black cast at the Martin Beck Theater in New York.

Between 1942-1944, he was drafted into the Navy and, while in the military service, conceived some of his finest serious music, including a Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky) and a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.

His pensive Third Symphony (1946) was dedicated to the memory of Koussevitzky's wife, Natalie. With years, both Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, Dukelsky's devoted supporters, became a sort of surrogate family to him, increasingly so when in 1942 Dukelsky's mother passed away. The composer took the conductor's refusal to officially commission this work with great bitterness. Dedication was revoked and the relationship soured. In 1946, Duke left United States for France where he continued his double career of being a serious composer and a songwriter (now setting to music the texts of French lyricists). By 1948, the composer was back in America. He moved from New York to California where he spent his last decades, writing songs, film and theater scores, chamber music, poetry in Russian and polemical articles and memoirs in English. In 1957, he married singer Kay McCracken. Duke died in Santa Monica, California on January 16, 1969 during a lung cancer operation.

As a serious composer, Dukelsky used the same musical language as his modernist contemporaries Prokofiev, Arthur Lourié, and, to a lesser extent, Igor Stravinsky. His harmonies, however, were highly original and his subtle melodic gift peerless. As a songwriter and author of theatrical and film music, he was close to George Gershwin and Harold Arlen, but developed an idiosyncratically sophisticated voice of his own, thus contributing considerably to the advances of the twentieth-century American song. As a Russian poet, Dukelsky could also be proud of himself. His first and best collection, Epistles (Poslaniia, 1962), demonstrated a sure mastery of classical Russian verse and a gift for remarkable self-irony; his translations from American modernist poets are among the best ever done into Russian. He also was a passionate polemicist (he published about 100 articles in English and a dozen or so in Russian), a remarkable memoirist and an amusing correspondent.

His numerous papers -- musical and literary manuscripts and correspondence in English, French, and Russian -- are stored in the Musical Division of the Library of Congress.

• 1932 - Walk a Little Faster (lyrics by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg)
  • "April in Paris"
  • "A Penny for Your Thoughts"
  • "Off Again, On Again"
  • "Speaking of Love"
  • "Where Have We Met Before?"
• 1934 "Autumn in New York"
• 1936 I Can't Get Started (lyrics by Ira Gershwin
• 1940 - Cabin in the Sky (lyrics by John La Touche)
  • "Taking a Chance on Love"
  • "Cabin in the Sky"
  • "Honey in the Honeycomb"
  • "Love Me Tomorrow"
• 1941 - "Banjo Eyes" (lyrics by John La Touche and Harold Adamson)
  • "We're Having a Baby"
  • "Who Started the Rhumba?"
  • "A Nickel to My Name"
• 1942 - "The Lady Comes Across" (lyrics by John La Touche)
  • "Summer Is A-Commin' In"
  • "You Took Me By Surprise"
  • "This Is Where I Came In"
  • "Lady"
• 1944 - "Jackpot" (lyrics by Howard Dietz)
  • "What Happened"
  • "Sugarfoot"
  • "I've Got a One-Track Mind"
  • "I Kissed My Girl Goodbye"
• 1944 - "Sadie Thompson" (lyrics by Howard Dietz)
  • "The Love I Long For"
  • "Poor as a Church Mouse"
  • "When You Live on an Island"
• 1952 - "Two's Company" (lyrics by Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn)
  • "It Just Occurred to Me"
  • "Roundabout"
  • "Out of the Clear Blue Sky"
  • "Haunted Hot Spot"
  • "Just Like a Man"
• 1956 - "The Littlest Revue" (music also by others - Duke lyrics by Ogden Nash)
  • "I Want to Fly Now (and Pay Later)"
  • "Summer Is A-Comin' In"
  • "Good Little Girls"
  • "Love Is Still in Town"
  • "You're Far from Wonderful"
  • "Madly in Love"
• 1963 - Zenda (lyrics by Lenny Adelson, Sid Kuller, and Martin Charnin)