[4][1][5] His family was of the small gentry class; the 1954 Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians referred to his paternal grandmother, née Princess Tumanishvili, as having been "directly descended from the kings of Georgia".

At the age of eleven, Dukelsky was admitted to the Kiev Conservatory,[1] where he studied composition with Reinhold Glière and musical theory with Boleslav Yavorsky.

[1] Dukelsky's first theatrical production, Zephyr and Flora, was staged in the 1925 season of Ballets Russes, with choreography by Léonide Massine and scenography by Georges Braque, to great critical acclaim.

[citation needed] In the late 1920s, Dukelsky divided his time between Paris, where his more classical works were performed, and London, where he composed numbers for musical comedies under his pen name Vernon Duke.

[1] The support and devotion of Serge Koussevitzky, who published Dukelsky's chamber music and conducted his orchestral scores, helped him develop his classical works.

In 1937, the composer was asked to complete Gershwin's last score, a soundtrack to a Technicolor extravaganza The Goldwyn Follies, to which he contributed two parody ballets choreographed by George Balanchine, and the song "Spring Again".

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.

In 1946, Duke left the United States for France, where he continued his double career of being a classical composer and a songwriter (now setting to music the texts of French lyricists).

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.

His final appearance on Broadway came less than two weeks later with the two songs and incidental music he wrote for the Helen Hayes show, Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered (1940) (French title: Léocadia) which ran for 247 performances.

As a classical composer, Dukelsky used the same musical language as his modernist contemporaries Sergei Prokofiev, Arthur Lourié, and, to a lesser extent, Igor Stravinsky.