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Fernand de La Tombelle (1854–1928): Monsieur le Baron

Jean-Emmanuel Filet

Jean-Emmanuel Filet, born in Périgueux, France, in 1986, studied harmony, counterpoint, composition, piano, organ, and chamber music at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux. He earned a doctorate in composition at the University of Montreal, Canada, and studied conducting of contemporary repertoire at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana da Lugano in Switzerland. The winner of several competitions in improvisation and composition, he has composed solo, chamber, and orchestral works, including an opera, H. P. L. Outsider, based on the life and work of American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. 

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The name of French composer Fernand de La Tombelle is nowadays somewhat forgotten, but this man was renowned during his lifetime, even outside of France. To give but one example, he composed a Fantaisie de concert for organ especially for the inauguration of Chicago’s Auditorium Theater instrument.1 Moreover, many of his organ compositions were dedicated to American organists, and some of these musicians were the first to perform La Tombelle’s music.2

Baron Fernand de La Tombelle was a composer, pianist, and organist, a pedagogue and lecturer, a poet and writer. He was well versed in folklore and photography and was a talented amateur painter. An excellent cyclist, he was also keen on astronomy and archaeology. 

As a composer, his great concern for form and the clarity of his musical ideas make him a fine example of French Romantic Classicism following his teachers and friends Alexandre Guilmant, Théodore Dubois, and Camille Saint-Saëns. Except for opera, La Tombelle tried his hand at almost every genre, and in abundance (one can estimate his works to nearly 500 opus numbers). Obviously, everything has not the same interest but many compositions have musical value. Among his masterpieces, chamber music has a special place (he was awarded the Grand Prix Chartier de l’Institut for his chamber music in 1896) and also his choral music. In France, during the Belle Epoque, La Tombelle was one of the most important composers of vocal works for male choirs (chœurs d’Orphéon). In the latter part of his life, he turned increasingly towards religious music, writing majestic oratorios and cantatas.3 Furthermore, as a way to democratize classical music and decentralize it from the almighty Parisian Milieu, he composed many hymns, motets, and Masses for a wide range of performers, both professionals and amateurs.4 Musical life in France had always been more or less ruled by people in Paris, but fortunately some regional masters tried to make music a vivid reality in other parts of the country.

Moreover, La Tombelle was a fine instrumentalist, first taught by his mother (a pupil of Thalberg and Liszt) and then by Guilmant. He was the official piano accompanist of the Trocadéro concerts, initiated by Alexandre Guilmant at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878. La Tombelle discovered the organ around 1870 at the Cathédrale Saint-Etienne de Toulouse through the local organist, Jules Leybach. His later studies with Guilmant confirmed his affinity for the instrument. He often substituted for Guilmant and Dubois, at La Trinité and at La Madeleine, where he was assistant organist from 1885 to 1898. He played inaugural concerts on several instruments5 and was a talented performer.

La Tombelle contributed to the foundation of the Schola Cantorum in 1896 along with Charles Bordes, Vincent d’Indy, and Alexandre Guilmant. There, he taught harmony for about ten years. He was sought after as a lecturer, as he could speak knowledgeably on a wide range of musical topics.

Fernand de La Tombelle composed texts as well as music, with poetry one of his favorite means of expression. Quite often he set his own texts to music. He wrote articles and books on music, theatrical fantaisies, and well-developed travelogues (as a member of the Automobile Club du Périgord he wrote about their excursions around France). More surprisingly, he wrote a small culinary work: Les pâtés de Périgueux!

Although born in Paris (on August 3, 1854), La Tombelle had family roots in the Périgord region through his mother. Périgord remained the region closest to his heart, which is why he spent the greater part of his life in his château of Fayrac (see photo above). A staunch supporter of local customs, he set many popular regional themes to music, as did Julien Tiersot, Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, Vincent D’Indy, Joseph Canteloube, and Maurice Emmanuel in other parts of France. 

 

Works for organ

For much of his life La Tombelle composed for his favorite instrument, the organ. (See list of his organ works, below.) Two previously unpublished works are now available in print. Epithalame for violin and piano (or organ) was composed around 1897 (Editions Delatour France DLT2479). (Epithalame refers to a nuptial lyrical poem sung for newlyweds in ancient Greece.) The opening measures of the manuscript are shown in Example 1. Jeanne d’Arc is a suite of symphonic episodes for organ (Editions Delatour France DLT2478). 

 

Jeanne d’Arc

Jeanne d’Arc occupies a very special place in La Tombelle’s œuvre. His largest work for organ, it is forty-five minutes in length. La Tombelle was offered the commission to compose this work in 1905 thanks to the bishop of Périgueux and Sarlat. This suite of nine movements narrating the life of Joan of Arc was first performed by the composer on the Merklin organ of Notre-Dame de Bergerac (in Périgord) on June 4, 1905. In France, the law establishing the separation of church and state was enacted in 1905, ending the Concordat, which established the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France. Thus, the subject of the composition was not trivial at all in such a period of turmoil. During this time of fracture between Catholics and exacerbated anticlericalists, Joan, a daughter of God and also a child of France, was considered a unifying and comforting figure for a country stricken with doubt over the Concordat. This “hagiographic symphony” is made up of five parts divided into nine movements. It gives a chronological account of the main events in Joan of Arc’s life: from her birthplace in Domrémy, to her death at the stake in Rouen and her subsequent glory. La Tombelle utilizes musical forms in vogue at that time (march, pastorale, cantilena, symphonic poem, and so on), cleverly working them into the narrative. 

We know very little about the genesis of the composition; nevertheless, a letter to Abbé Cyprien Boyer (composer and a professor at the seminary of Bergerac, pupil of Guilmant and close friend of La Tombelle) of March 1905 gives us some information:

 

My Dear Monsieur l’Abbé

Thank you for your kind letter. As it tarried a little to come, I wrote yesterday to Mr Bernachot, but my letter is now useless since you are telling me that everything will be done as I wish. So please let him know that he need not bother himself.

I have almost completed my work on the composition. I just have to write a Triumphal March for Reims. It is quite difficult because I want to avoid a march with big military effects, which would be of the worst taste (though pleasant for many people) and on the other hand, to compose a Triumphal March without bombard, it is a delicate problem to solve.

I recommend to you the beginning Pastorale, n°2, Apparition of St Michael, and n°8 (the voices in the jail). I think you will be pleased. This will be archaism inserted in the most exalted modernism! Palestrina and Debussy!!

With much friendship and see you on June the 4th!6

From an aesthetic point of view, the score is closer to Guilmant (the two last movements call to mind his famous Marche funèbre et Chant séraphique) and Saint-Saëns (La Tombelle’s Entrée triomphale reminds one of the Marche du synode from the opera Henri VIII) than to Palestrina and Debussy. The style, however, also reveals occasional colors of the Franckist movement. Besides, there are hints of the early works of Fauré in some mysterious melodic and harmonic progressions. Plainchant is used twice (the Te Deum and the introit Gaudeamus omnes in domino), for the two movements of the coronation of Charles VII. 

The unity of the piece is further ensured through the use of two main themes: one for Joan (Example 2) and one for the Archangel (Example 3). Running through the composition, they are linked together and superimposed using numerous rhythmic and melodic variations as the events unfold. Other recurring motifs also appear at significant times, all of them with a specific meaning.

The first part of the composition, divided into two movements, evokes the life of young Joan in her native countryside of Domrémy and is a true introduction to the whole work by presenting the two main musical ideas. The first piece is a Pastorale, mostly based on a modal theme using the characteristic triplet rhythm and played on the also typical sound of the oboe stop (Example 4). This first movement is also an excuse to introduce wo cyclical elements: the rhythmical pattern symbolizing Domrémy and the melodic theme of Joan (Example 5). 

The short second piece is Apparition de Saint Michel (Vision of St. Michael). The melodic theme of the Archangel is presented in the left hand, accompanied very softly in the high register of the instrument by an ostinato of triplets. This mélodie accompagnée evokes the voices that pushed Joan to leave her birthplace and go to help her country against the English invasion and to help her king to be officially crowned before God at Reims Cathedral (a city held by the Burgundians, allied to the king of England). (See Example 6.)

The second part of the composition, in one developed movement, is a very descriptive symphonic poem using all the cyclical themes or motives of the work. The title is Vers Chinon—Vers Orléans (Toward Chinon—toward Orléans). 

The music illustrates first, on the cyclical pattern representing the Ride, Joan’s journey from Domrémy to Château Chinon where she met the king. La Tombelle uses some bars of an old dance, the pavane, to depict the nonchalant and frivolous court of Charles VII. Then a dialogue is made between this dance and Joan’s theme, the latter each time more persuasive. At last, she convinced the king to action.

The second half of the symphonic poem is a well-prepared crescendo, increasingly stirring and heroic, on the Ride pattern and Joan’s theme. This is the battle to free the city of Orléans! Victory is expressed, at the end, with a fortissimo and by using the Archangel theme (Example 6) and Domrémy’s pattern. Now, the young country girl became the standard bearer of an army.

With the third part of La Tombelle’s work, we find ourselves at the king’s coronation in Reims Cathedral. Two movements describe this episode.

The first movement is a Triumphal March in ABA form, with its two specific musical themes (one for A, another for the “trio” part B). During part A, Domrémy’s pattern is inserted in the solemn procession and superimposed on the other melodic element. A short coda uses the Gregorian chant Te Deum. Everything is ready to start the royal ceremony.

The second piece, Action de Grâce (Blessing), is again a mélodie accompagnée. The right hand plays a cantilena on the trumpet stop. This musical phrase is inspired by the Gregorian chant Gaudeamus omnes in Domino and includes references to Joan’s and the Archangel’s themes. A neutral rhythm of triplets gives a soft background to this time of prayer.

Rouen, Normandy! In the short but expressive fourth part of the composition, Joan has been captured, abandoned by her king, and waits for her trial. The first piece evokes La Prison (the Jail). Thick and tortured sonorities, chromatic lines and harmonies give no comfort to her (Example 7). The dungeon is no place even for thought. Therefore, this movement is the only one where we cannot find any typical pattern or theme.

But after that, in an extreme sweetness, whisper Les Voix (the Voices) on the Vox Coelestis stop. This second movement is based on some fragments of the Archangel’s theme. Very cloudy harmonies gradually disappear in the sky.

The fifth and last part of La Tombelle’s musical epic is Le Bûcher—Le Ciel (the Stake—Heaven). In the first movement, Joan is condemned to death by fire for her heresy. For that reason, the composer employs a merciless Marche funèbre (funeral march) to describe the scene. The Ride pattern is the main element here, but modified, no longer for a run toward victory. Also present is Joan’s theme, diminished and tormented, but fighting to the end. Unfortunately, the scaffold and the flames are stronger than anything. After a great climax and a long diminuendo, one can hear the Archangel melody, amplified and broad. 

Apothéose (Apotheosis) concludes the whole work in the tenderness and peace of Heaven. Arpeggios on the Vox Humana stop surround the two main themes of the composition (Example 8). Afterwards, La Tombelle closes his cyclical masterpiece by quoting all the important elements (the Ride, Domrémy, the Voices, the Archangel, etc.). Of course, Joan’s theme, pure and ethereal, ends the musical tale, very slowly in the high register (Example 9). As a ray of hope, Jeanne d’Arc starts in A minor, seeks its way through nine musical episodes, each time with a different principal key signature, and, at the very end, finds its conclusion in a beautiful A-major sonority.

This short overview of Fernand de La Tombelle as organ music composer aimed to increase knowledge of his French romantic repertoire. Although La Tombelle was not a revolutionary genius, he was a talented and sincere musician, which is more than sufficient to pay him a tribute.

For information, excerpts, and scores for purchase, visit www.editions-delatour.com/fr/744_de-la-tombelle-fernand. ν

 

Notes

1. Organist Clarence Eddy (1851–1937) premiered this piece. For the same occasion, French composer Théodore Dubois (1837–1924) wrote Fantaisie triomphale for organ and orchestra.

2. For example, the Finale from the third organ sonata was dedicated to William C. Carl (1865–1936) who premiered it in 1896. In the same year, Clarence Eddy premiered the paraphrase Et vox angelorum respondet domino at the Trocadéro. Other pieces were also dedicated to American musicians such as Dudley Buck, Samuel P. Warren, Gerrit Smith, and Roland Diggle.

3. Among them, Crux (1904), Les Sept Paroles du Christ (1906), L’Abbaye (1913), or Cantate à Saint Joseph (1923) are to be mentioned for their qualities.

4. To be more comprehensive, we can add to this catalog many songs worthy of interest; piano, harmonium, organ pieces; and also music for band, orchestral suites, incidental music, and ballet music.

5. Mostly inaugurations of instruments in France and Spain: Schola Cantorum (1898), Azcoitia (Spain 1898), Laon Cathedral (1899, with Charles Tournemire), Albi Cathedral (1904, with Adolphe Marty), Saint Etienne de la Cité at Périgueux (1905, with Alexandre Guilmant), Tulle Cathedral (1912), Montauban Cathedral (1917, with Georges Debat-Ponsan), Sacré-Cœur de Toulouse (1924).

6. Fernand de La Tombelle, autographed signed letter to Cyprien Boyer, March 1905, Archives of Diocese de Périgueux and Sarlat.

 

Fernand de La Tombelle: 

Solo organ works 

1883—Offertoire pour le jour de Pâques (Lissarague) 

1883—Pastorale-Offertoire pour orgue (Lissarague)

1884—Six versets (Lissarague)

1885—Marche nuptiale (Lissarague) 

1888—Pièces d’orgue en six livraisons, op. 23 (Richault & Cie)

1ère : Prélude / Echo / Méditation

2e : Magnificat / Marche de procession 

3e : Allegretto cantando / Carillon  

4e : Première sonate en Mi mineur

5e : Prélude et fugue sur la prose de l’Ascension / Canzonetta

6e : 2 fantaisies sur des Noëls anciens/ Marche pontificale

1890—Aubade pour harmonium (Richault & Cie)

1890/91—Deuxième série de pièces d’orgue en six livraisons, op. 33 (Richault & Cie) 

1ère : Fantaisie de concert

2e: Deuxième sonate en Fa # mineur

3e: Variations sur un choral / Andantino

4e: Pastorale / Marche nuptiale

5e: 2 poèmes symphoniques : La Nativité, le Vendredi Saint / Épithalame

6e : Élégie / Marche solennelle

1894—Ad te domine, Abbé Hazé, Album d’auteurs modernes: pièces inédites pour orgue ou harmonium, volume 1 (Gounin-Ghidone)

1895—Sortie, “sur le thème Ite missa est du premier ton,” Abbé Hazé, Album d’auteurs modernes: pièces inédites pour orgue ou harmonium, volume 2 (Gounin-Ghidone)

1895—“Et vox angelorum respondet Domino, paraphrase pour grand orgue” (unpublished)

1896—“Finale d’une troisième sonate en Sol” (unpublished)

1899—Les Vespres du commun des saints (Schola Cantorum)

1900—Rapsodie béarnaise (Costallat & Cie)

1905—Jeanne d’Arc. Episodes symphoniques pour grand-orgue (Editions Delatour France DLT2478) 

1907—Fantaisie sur Deux Thèmes (Profane et Grégorien), “Chanson de Nougolhayro/Hymne de l’Avent,” (Schola Cantorum)

1910—Suite d’orgue sur des thèmes grégoriens (Fête du Saint Sacrement) (L.-J. Biton) 

1910—Cantilène pour grand orgue (L.-J. Biton)

1910—Vox angelorum pour grand orgue (ou harmonium) (L-.J. Biton)

1911—Méditation, Abbé Joseph Joubert: Les maîtres contemporains de l’orgue, volume 1 (M. Senart)

1911—Toccata, Abbé Joseph Joubert: Les maîtres contemporains de l’orgue, volume 1 (M. Senart)

1911—Suite d’orgue sur des thèmes grégoriens (Temps de Noël) (L.-J. Biton)

1911—Suite d’orgue sur des thèmes grégoriens (Temps de Pâques) (L.-J. Biton) 

1911—In Pace, “A la mémoire vénérée de mon cher maître et ami de 40 années Alexandre Guilmant” (Schola Cantorum)

1912—Dix pièces pour orgue sur thèmes grégoriens, populaires ou originaux, en deux cahiers (Janin Frères)

1913—Suite d’orgue sur des thèmes grégoriens (Temps de la Pentecôte) (L.-J. Biton)

1913—Préludes, fugues, chorals et toccatas, extraits de la Méthode d’harmonium (Librairie de l’art catholique)

1914—Andantino, Abbé Joseph Joubert: Les maîtres contemporains de l’orgue, volume 7 (M. Senart) 

1914—Pièce pour harmonium (Schola Cantorum)

1917—50 pièces pour harmonium (L.-J. Biton)

1918—Adagio (A. Ledent-Malay) 

1919—“Symphonie Dominicale” (Introibo, Orate fratres, Pater noster, Agnus Dei, Ite missa est) (unpublished)

1920—Meum ac vestrum sacrificium, offertoire pour orgue (Hérelle) 

1921—Dix pièces dans le style grégorien (L.-J. Biton)

1921—Symphonie Voces belli (Pro Patria, Pro Defunctis, Pro Vulneratis, Pro Lacrymantibus, Pro Deo), Abbé Joseph Joubert: Les Voix de la Douleur Chrétienne, volume 1, Aux Héros de la Grande Guerre (A. Ledent-Melay) 

1922—Offertoire (Schott Frères)

1923—Cinq versets de Magnificat en sol (ou antiennes) (Procure générale des missionnaires et du clergé)

1924—[Trois petites pièces] (Offertoire, Mélodie élévation, Pastorale communion), in Méthode d’harmonium par le chanoine Vincent Bado (Bureau de la Musique Sacrée)

1924—Symphonie Pascale (Entrée épiscopale, Offertoire et Sortie) sur O filii mélodie populaire du XVIIIe siècle et sur la séquence Victimae paschali, in Échos des cathédrales (Procure générale des missionnaires et du clergé)

1927—Requiescant (L.-J. Biton)

1927—Tre pezzi per organo (Introduzione, Offertorio, Finale) (Casa editrice “Musica Sacra”)

1928—Trois pièces (Petite entrée, Communion, Sortie), in Cantantibus organis, “recueil de 25 pièces pour harmonium ou orgue sans pédales” (Société anonyme d’éditions & de musique)

 

Undated, unpublished works:

—“Paraphrase [sur des motifs du chœur Le poème des heures]” 

—“Prélude, variations et finale sur un thème du Frère Albert des Anges”

“Suite Nuptiale” (Cortège–Entrée, Epithalame–Offertoire, Défilé–Sortie)

(Epithalame published separately: Editions Delatour France DLT2479.)

Related Content

Jacques Ibert's Choral for Organ

Wesley Roberts
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The influence of César Franck’s Trois Chorals on the works of early twentieth-century French composers was not significant. One of the few exceptions was the composer Jacques Ibert (1890–1962), the 125th anniversary of whose birth is being quietly celebrated in 2015. Born in Paris on August 15, 1890, Ibert studied at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 1910s with Émile Pessard, André Gédalge, and Paul Vidal and later served as director of the French Academy in Rome from 1937 to 1960.

Ibert’s experience at the Paris Conservatoire found him in classes where the teaching and attitudes of professors was inconsistent from one to another. Gédalge (1856–1926), who taught counterpoint and fugue, disliked the music of Franck and the counterpoint exercises adopted by the conservatory, choosing instead to teach Bach chorales rather than fugues as the basis for study. By contrast, Vidal (1863–1931) taught using the principles of Franck and Riemann, with a strong emphasis upon chromaticism and was undoubtedly pleased when a new society devoted to Franck was established in Paris in 1913. Caught between opposing points of view during conservatory study, Ibert’s compositional ideas became exploratory, and while he utilized a strong melodic line and pleasing harmonies, his style was eclectic, a trend which would extend throughout his life.

To earn a living while studying at the Conservatoire, Ibert gave piano lessons and improvised at the piano for silent films at the American Theater in Paris. He played on weekends and occasional weeknights, sometimes for up to twelve hours at a time, earning fourteen francs on the longest days. Many years later he would describe the experience as an art of deception, functioning as “pianist-composer-improviser-commentator” before the silent screen where “my fingers would try to terrorize or to charm according to the gist.”1 He was also occupied during the conservatory years helping his father’s import/export business, which had suffered from a disaster at sea and was in difficult economic straits.

Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ibert attempted to enlist in the armed forces, as did nearly all young French men. He was rejected for health reasons but was finally accepted into the Red Cross as a stretcher-bearer and hospital attendant. In the next two years he would serve in northern France near the front lines, assisting with the wounded and preparing soldiers for emergency surgery, including the administration of anesthesia. During this time he composed for piano and harp. Characteristic of these would be Le Vent dans le Ruins (1915), which one biographer called “an odd combination of Debussy’s Impressionism, Ravel’s clarity, Roussel’s ruggedness, and Liszt’s romanticism.”2 In early 1916 he contracted paratyphoid fever and was sent to southern France following a brief stay in Paris to recuperate during the spring. Upon recovery he returned to Paris and by September had composed the Pièce Romantique for piano, a work strongly influenced by late 19th-century chromaticism in a style reminiscent of Franck.

With his health now much stronger, Ibert was allowed to enlist in the navy in May 1917 and was appointed an officer based upon his skill in mathematics, in which he had excelled for his baccalaureate. He was first sent to Sète along the Mediterranean Sea and then to Dunkerque along the Atlantic, serving for eighteen months and participating in the destruction of numerous enemy positions. During his free time, Ibert visited churches in villages along the coastline and liked to play their organs. These experiences inspired him to write four short works for organ between 1917 and 1919. The first was a Musette in 1917, followed by a Fugue and Choral in 1918, and finally the Pièce Solennelle in 1919, the latter as a gift for his bride on their wedding day.

 

Genesis of the Choral

The Choral seems to have been written upon the suggestion of Abbé Joseph Joubert (1878–1963), organist at the Cathedral of Luçon from 1904 until 1935, and later from 1940–1946. Ibert probably met Joubert in Paris while the latter was a student at the Schola Cantorum from 1902–1904. Joubert did not complete his studies at the Schola Cantorum, having been called to the Cathedral of Luçon upon the premature death of the previous organist. A tireless worker, Joubert compiled an eight-volume collection of short organ pieces by over one hundred French and Belgian composers entitled Les Maîtres Contemporains de l’Orgue (Contemporary Masters of the Organ; 1912–1914)4. Toward the end of World War I, he embarked upon another large-scale project and began compiling a five-volume collection of organ music  (1921–24) dedicated “to the heroes of the Great War,” titling it Les Voix de la Douleur Chrétienne (The Voices of Christian Suffering). It was for this latter project that Ibert submitted his Choral for publication. 

The Choral is the longest of the four pieces for organ and was written in July 1918. Ibert was undoubtedly touched by Joubert’s dedicatory plan to honor soldiers for their sacrifices. He marked the cover page “In Piam gratamque memoriam” (In pious and grateful memory) and dedicated it to Abbé Joubert, adding a preface quote from the Apocrypha, “Justorum animæ in manu Dei sunt,” Sap. III.1 (The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, The Wisdom of Solomon III:1). This verse had inspired a Gregorian chant centuries earlier that was used as the offertory in certain Roman Catholic Masses honoring martyrs. Interestingly, Ibert’s manuscript contained the Roman numeral “I” before the title, suggesting that at least one, if not more, additional pieces were in the making. However, no other piece is known to have been composed for a collection.

In a letter a little more than a year later on October 15, 1919, Joubert informed Ibert that the proofs for the Choral were available, and commented that it is “needless to add that I always stay very grateful—and may be even proud—of your kind and artistic collaboration to Les Voix de la Douleur Chrétienne.” The Choral appeared in the first volume of the collection in 1921 along with Voces Belli by Fernand de la Tombelle, the Marche funèbre and Épitaphe by Henry Defosse, and In Memoriam, Quatre improvisations by Joseph Jongen. 

 

Style

Years later Ibert acknowledged that his organ works as a whole were influenced by Franck. He commented, “Franck, whom Gédalge detested, charmed me with a certain appeal through the mystical sensuality of his works.” The Choral was written for a three-manual organ and is nearly eight minutes in duration. Its grandeur approaches that of Franck’s  Trois Chorals but it is shorter and more compact. The melody appears to be original and not derived from an existing plainchant. Ibert’s Choral commences with a chordal passage marked “Andante religioso” in C-sharp minor (Example 1) and proceeds through a series of short homophonic passages, each interrupted by contrasting materials derived from the principal theme. Midway through two recitative-like phrases there is a series of interlocking five-note patterns, which soon climax at fortissimo through a winding set of melodic figures in both hands. A brief reprieve consisting of a four-note phrase repeated three times yields to a fugato on the principal theme in four voices (Example 2). The fugato increases in intensity without delay following the exposition and reaches its peak in a final fortissimo statement of the theme in the parallel major key of C-sharp (Example 3). 

The Choral slipped out of sight not long after publication by A. Ledent-Malay and was soon forgotten. Such seems to have been the fate of most works in Joubert’s massive collection. No information regarding the Choral’s first performance has survived. A performance of it was heard on May 29, 1952, at La Madeleine in Paris by organist Edouard Mignan and then no evidence of performance until the early 1990s, when this writer discovered the score at the Bibliothèque Nationale and began distributing copies to the Ibert family and various organists. With the encouragement of Jean-Claude Ibert, the composer’s son, Leduc republished it in 1999. It has since been recorded by John Scott Whiteley, Philippe Delacour, and John Kitchen. 

An effective piece with deep emotional feeling and grandeur, Ibert’s Choral recalls late nineteenth-century compositional techniques through short sectional passages. Its majestic coda brings the work to a triumphant close at fff in tribute to those whose lives had been lost defending their country.

 

Notes

1. «Mes doigts tentaient de terroriser ou de charmer selon l’action». In a letter from Jacques Ibert to José Bruyr, dated October 29, 1951. A copy of this letter is in the Ibert family archives.

2. Gérard Michel, liner notes, Jacques
Ibert: L’Œuvre pour Piano
, Françoise Gobet, piano (long-playing record, Metropole 2599 016, 1979).

3. The Musette, Fugue, and Pièce Solennelle were published as Trois Pièces by Heugel in 1920. See Kit Stout’s article “Jacques Ibert,” The American Organist vol. 14, no. 5 (May 1980), 38–39, for more details about these works.

4. The collection is available online at IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library, imslp.org.

5. «Inutile d’ajouter que je demeure toujours très reconnaissant—et plus fier encore si possible—de votre si aimable et artistique collaboration aux Voix de la Douleur Chrétienne.» The letter also contained a congratulation upon Ibert’s receipt of the Prix de Rome, bestowed upon him only four days earlier. The author is grateful to Jean-Claude Ibert for supplying this information from family archives in a letter to the writer on December 28, 1998.

6. Gérard Michel, Jacques Ibert (Paris: Éditions Segher, 1967), 28–29.

7. Mignan (1884–1969) was organist at La Madeleine from 1935 until 1962. In addition to Ibert’s Choral, Fauré’s Requiem plus a number of short works were performed. The concert was devoted to sacred music and included performances by the Lutheran Chorale and the Orchestre de la Cité.

8. Jacques Ibert, Choral pour Orgue (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1999).

9. Whiteley’s recording is on the Priory label (PRCD 619); Delacour’s on the Fugatto label (FUG 009); and Kitchen’s on the Priory label (PRCD 858).

Pierre Kunc at 150: Rediscovering a prize-winning composer

Steven Young
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The year 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Pierre Kunc (1865–1941), possibly one of the most award-winning organist/composers in France’s musical history. Yet, despite his regional renown, as evidenced by numerous performances and prizes, his fame remained mostly local and limited to his lifetime. It seems unusual that any composer would enjoy such success and eventually be consigned to obscurity. The principal reason for his lack of lasting fame may be the lack of published music, as the bulk of Kunc’s output never appeared in print. Few of his awards offered the opportunity for publication; instead, they featured performances. The published materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN) include several piano pieces, most of his organ works, numerous motets and Mass settings for voices, two transcriptions for organ, and his only two chamber works, the Sonate and Rapsodie, both for viola and piano. 

Not one of Kunc’s dozen or more orchestral works appears to have been published, nor are there any orchestral manuscripts listed in the BN catalogue. Certain works, such as Au pied des monts de Gavranie, suffered the typical fate of a new composition: they received their premieres and were almost instantly forgotten. But others, such as Été pastoral, enjoyed multiple performances throughout Kunc’s lifetime.1 It seems likely that several works survived the ravages of World War I in France, as several pieces were performed both prior to and following 1914, but one has to question whether or not these were manuscripts or published scores, and if they still exist. It would be a great boost to scholars to have access to these scores in order to more fully analyze the music and Kunc’s contribution to the field.2

Born in Toulouse, Kunc began his musical training at home with his father, Aloys Martin, who was maître de chapelle at the cathedral in Toulouse, and with his mother, Henriette Marie née Dargein, who had studied piano with Louise Farrenc and organ with César Franck at the Paris Conservatoire. Pierre’s education continued at a Jesuit school in Toulouse, and later he pursued further study at the Paris Conservatoire, where he had organ lessons with Eugène Gigout, a lifelong admirer of Franck, and composition study with Ernest Guiraud, a winner of the Prix de Rome as well as a founding member of the Société Nationale de Musique. While in Paris, Kunc frequented concerts of the Schola Cantorum and developed relationships with some of Paris’s greatest musicians, many of whom were devotees of Franck, whose music clearly illustrates the influence of the Germanic school of Liszt and Wagner. This sphere of influence, coupled with Kunc’s devout Catholicism, may have influenced his style. 

 Little is known about Kunc’s personal life. He married twice, both times to singers. His first wife, Jane Gillet, was a former student of Kunc’s who performed with some of Paris’s finest musicians. She premiered several melodies of Guy Ropartz for the Société Nationale and performed a wide array of repertoire, including songs by her husband and brother-in-law, Aymé. Jane died from pleurisy in 1912. Three years later, at the age of fifty, Kunc married Elisabeth Tournier. That marriage lasted over twenty years before Elisabeth passed away from an illness she developed in 1931, which took her life some four years later. Neither marriage produced any children. According to his nephew, it was at this time that Kunc devoted himself to writing mostly sacred music.3 Perhaps this second devastating personal loss gave Kunc a reason to renew his interest in sacred music, turning to the familiar during a low emotional period.4

A very early review (1890) praises Kunc as a composer with a bright future, and notes that Kunc’s compositional ability might make him a future candidate for the Prix de Rome.5 Many of Kunc’s earliest musical compositions received reviews citing his stylistic kinship with Wagner. In his review of Kunc’s Prelude d’Helene, critic André Gresse claimed that Kunc was a disciple of Wagner, calling the orchestral work with voices that of a “real talent (réel talent).”6 This attachment to Wagnerian style remained part of Kunc’s musical vocabulary throughout his career, resulting in conflicting comments from reviewers.7 The extreme differences among them reflect the two prevailing schools of thought in Paris during this time. Some preferred the more Germanic style of symphonic music while others hoped that young composers would help give France a new voice, one that avoided Germanic styles and references.8 A review of the premiere of Kunc’s Été pastoral provides an example of the negative opinion, asserting that Kunc might best be a composer of “charming ballets and excellent pantomimes” rather than of serious music.9 Another reviewer, upon hearing this same performance, wrote that it was regrettable that a new work had so little to offer with regard to originality.10 In contrast to those comments, several reviewers praised this same work for its clarity, color, and great candor, as well as claiming that Kunc possessed rare qualities “not smothered in tricks.”11 In an era where experimentation, creativity, and imagination were sought in new music, Kunc’s music may have seemed old-fashioned or outdated, so even the positive reviews were often lukewarm, such as this one from a concert of the Société nationale in 1906, assessing his vocal settings of some poetry by Camille Mauclair, pseudonym of Séverin Faust:

I am beginning to think that it (modern music) is a dirty trick, because the simple melody by Monsieur Pierre Kunc, titled “Complainte,” has given me great pleasure.  This musician appears to me to have chosen a poem quite suitable for music . . . I was less fond of the second piece, “Undergrowth,” but it does not lack originality.12 

However, in the same concert, Kunc’s performance of his Suite: Grand prière [sic] symphonique for organ was well received, though one reviewer did find the title questionable, as the work did not provide a prayer-like atmosphere.13

Kunc wrote in nearly every genre, composing works for voice, choir, organ, piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra. It would seem he never stopped composing, producing a substantial body of work, much of which remains unknown, unheard, and unpublished. Throughout his career, Kunc continued to develop and hone his craft, and he enjoyed notable success. In 1900, he won a prize in a competition sponsored by the Société des Compositeurs for his Symphonie-Fantaisie, which he had completed in 1898. Pianist Georges de Lausnay performed the premiere with the orchestra of the Concerts Victor Charpentier.14 This work enjoyed many performances during Kunc’s lifetime, most often with de Lausnay as the pianist.

Four years later, Kunc survived the three competitive rounds of judging in the Concours de la Ville de Paris with his three-act tragedie lyrique, Canta.15 The work ultimately received a rather mixed review, one that referred to its energy as “snort[ing] with persistence,” and as being full of “clashing measures that sometimes compensate for emotion.”16 It should be noted that Kunc ultimately lost that competition to such notables as Charles Tournemire and Gabriel Pierné. In 1913, Kunc’s Symphony Pyrénéenne captured the Prix Antonin Marmontel from La Société des Compositeurs.17 Portions of this work received several performances over the next two decades, but it seems its first complete performance took place in Toulouse under the direction of Pierre’s brother Aymé in 1923, nearly a decade after its completion.18 Despite the ongoing war, or perhaps in honor of France’s accomplishments, Kunc’s Overture héroïque et triomphale premiered in Paris to favorable reviews at the Salle Gaveau in 1916, right in the middle of the global conflict.19

As late as 1929, Kunc, at sixty-four years old, was still entering his works in competitions and winning prizes, including the Prix Chartier given by the Académie des beaux-arts for a piece of chamber music.20 (The award announcement does not give the title of the work; it may have been the Rapsodie pour alto et piano.) Two years later, Kunc was awarded the Prix Trémont (for a second time) by the Académie des beaux-arts. (The first time he won this prize was in 1909, when he shared it with César-Abel Estyle.21) Finally, in 1940, the year before he died, he received the Prix Jacques Durand from the Académie des beaux-arts for his Rapsodie for viola and piano.

Kunc’s music received frequent performances at the concerts of the Société nationale, an organization devoted to performing chamber and vocal works of young and upcoming French composers; many of these works received critical praise.22 Despite these positive reviews, many of his pieces languished in his library for years, while other pieces enjoyed numerous hearings. For instance, his Prélude to Les Cosaques, a play by Leo Tolstoy, was not performed until fifteen years after it had been completed.23 By contrast, his piano piece, Rigaudon, which he subsequently arranged for piano and orchestra, received countless performances during his lifetime, and may have been among his best-known compositions. However, despite his local fame, numerous recognitions, and frequent performances, a great deal of Kunc’s output remains unpublished.24

Kunc’s limited renown may be due to having come from a musical family, where his father Aloys and younger brother Aymé were extremely well known, so possibly greater things may have been expected. A review of the Quinze motets (1856) by Pierre’s father begins with this glowing statement: “If Monsieur Kunc was not an excellent musician full of verve and originality, we would tell him: ‘You deserve these words of praise, it is charming, gracious, and sometimes even brilliant.’” 25

Aymé won second prize, along with Maurice Ravel, in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition of 1902, at the tender age of twenty-five. This honor catapulted him to great fame and well-deserved respect.

Although Pierre was a fine composer and musician, he suffered from being frequently confused with his brother. Two examples may provide a clearer picture of this awkward situation. A review in Le Ménestrel mentioned the pleasure of hearing the second movement of Pierre’s Symphonie Pyrénéenne, which was followed by a work of “his glorious brother, Aymé.”26 (Another critic went so far as to claim that Pierre had been taught his craft by Aymé, who was twelve years Pierre’s junior!) One such confusion with his brother arose in 1922, during a search for a new director of the Conservatory of Nantes. Among the listing of possible candidates was Pierre, winner of the Prix de Rome, though this was likely a reference to Aymé, then serving as director of the Toulouse Conservatory.27 Regardless of Pierre’s noteworthy abilities as a composer, he and his music remained in the shadow of his father and younger brother. In spite of these regrettable circumstances, Aymé appears to have been a strong supporter of his elder brother, conducting his music, including the aforementioned first complete performance of the Symphonie Pyrénéenne at concerts in Toulouse and Nancy.

 

Works for piano and organ

Since Kunc spent the bulk of his professional life as a teacher of piano and organ at the Ecole Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, it comes as no surprise that he composed a fair amount of music for both instruments.28 His piano music was performed by many of the greatest interpreters of the era, including Alfred Cortot, Edouard Risler, and Blanche Selva. Kunc’s organ works (twelve in all) also remain little known, despite their accumulated accolades. Although Kunc won several premières prix for his organ compositions, not one of these compositions appears in the current concert repertoire. (Music of the other prize winners, Henri Mulet and Joseph Jongen, still appear in the concert repertory.) With his Libera Me: Pièce funèbre and Communion, Kunc took first place in the 1911 competition sponsored by the Procure générale de musique religieuse. Libera Me: Pièce funèbre was dedicated to the memory of his father; it uses techniques found in the music of the era, including thematic combinations, a technique often associated with Franck and Vierne. The order in which the thematic material appears creates the sense of a tone poem or musical drama depicting the human experience at the end of life (death, regrets in life, the fear of judgment, and the promise of redemption), as noted in the publication’s preface. The use of Gregorian chant themes pays homage to Kunc’s father, who was founder and editor of Musica Sacra, a periodical devoted to the Catholic Church and its music. 

In 1921, Kunc commenced work on his only organ symphony. Completed in 1923, the Symphonie en Ré mineur was entered into yet another competition sponsored by the Procure générale de la musique religieuse, and, again, Kunc garnered the premier prix. The work was published by the Procure générale the following year, and received its premiere at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in March 1924, admirably performed by Georges Jacob, to whom the work is dedicated. (Jacob performed many of Kunc’s organ pieces.) The work enjoyed several more performances over the next few years, all given by Jacob. The last documented performance of the Symphonie en Ré mineur took place in 1927, at a concert sponsored by the Union des Maîtres de Chapelles, once again by Jacob. 

Reviews of this symphonie were extremely favorable. Georges Renard penned an extensive article, which analyzed the piece in great detail.29 Ultimately, it may have been this essay that aided in the disappearance of the work from the standard organ repertoire of the day, as Renard praised the work for its “Widorian concept of the orchestral symphony adapted to the organ.”30 By 1924, the symphonies of Widor, which were the first of their kind, had been surpassed by the brilliant work of his pupil, friend, and former assistant, Louis Vierne, organist of Notre-Dame, who, by 1924, had published four of his six organ symphonies. It may be that the reviewer sought to place the work within the ever-growing genre of the organ symphony, but the suite-like structure initially used by Widor was, by this time, outmoded. However, the Kunc work, while containing traditional elements, certainly contains newer ones as well, such as cyclic thematic material, chromatic tonal language, and tightly controlled tonal relationships between the movements of the symphony. 

One unique quality of the Symphonie en Ré mineur is the structure of its opening movement. Usually Vierne and Widor, the principal organ symphonists of their day, relied heavily on sonata-allegro form or some version of a binary form, but Kunc introduces four themes in the work’s first movement, Fantaisie. Throughout the movement, these themes intermingle and receive diverse treatments, including rhythmic augmentation and varied harmonization; they undergo fugal treatment and imitation as well as modal changes. According to Renard, there are many unexpected events, including the return of the final statement of the first theme in the original minor key despite its having been heard in the parallel major mode for some time. 

The only other organ work that received significant mention during Kunc’s career is the Grande pièce symphonique, which he dedicated to his teacher Eugène Gigout. The work seems to have been part of a larger suite for organ, but this scherzo is the only movement extant. The piece appeared in 1901 as part of the series L’Orgue moderne, arguably the premier publication of new organ music by young French composers in the early part of the twentieth century. The work was played by both Alexandre Guilmant and Georges Jacob.31 Kunc also seems to have been taken with the music of his contemporaries such as Léon Roques and Camille Saint-Saëns, as he arranged several works of these men for smaller forces, including the Adagio from the so-called “Organ” symphony by Saint-Saëns, which Kunc set for violin, violoncello, harp, and organ.32

Among the works for organ, some deserve special mention. The Grande pièce symphonique assumes the same name as the Franck work that is often credited as the composition that initiated the French symphonic organ school, but bears little resemblance to the earlier work. The Kunc work is in three large sections that together loosely resemble sonata form. The aggressive A theme is rhythmic and chromatic (Example 1). In contrast, the B section features sustained harmonies and limited chromaticism that abruptly becomes a fugato, whose subject uses the opening A material and then alternates with the B theme. A brief development section follows, which leads to a return of the A and B material, the A material in the tonic F# minor and the B material in the parallel major with just a few hints of the A theme
(Example 2).

Another noteworthy piece is the brief Adagietto in E Major from 1902, also found in L’Orgue moderne. This lyrical work utilizes some of the characteristic tone colors of the French symphonic organ, including the Cor de nuit and the Trompette harmonique. The closing section uses some rich and vivid harmonies, as seen in Example 3.

 

Choral works

Following the short-lived success of his Symphonie pour orgue, Kunc appears to have shifted his focus to chamber and choral music, though he did not cease writing works for large ensembles and even reworking music from earlier successes. (He extracted the Deux Danses hindoues from his Canta originally completed in 1900; this excerpt received glowing praise at its premiere some thirty years later.33) During this period, Kunc composed two Masses for choir and organ (dedicated to St. Bernadette and to des Saintes Reliques—“holy relics”), as well as the aforementioned Rapsodie for viola and piano or orchestra (published posthumously). For several years, he served as maître de chapelle at St. Sulpice in Paris, where Charles-Marie Widor was still serving as organiste titulaire. Happily for Kunc, he was able to perform choral works that his father had written, as well as some of his own sacred music, while fulfilling his duties. His choral music seems to have enjoyed some local success throughout several regions of France, as many newspapers mention his works in their listings of music performed at religious services. Early works in the choral genre include the Hodie Christus natus est and Regina coeli from 1901. Several years later he composed settings of O Salutaris, Tantum Ergo, O Sacrum Convivium, Cantique de Communion, and Tota pulchra es (1910). Kunc dedicated these works to various maîtres de chapelle in Toulouse (his birthplace) and Paris (his adopted home). Kunc appears to have been well respected as a choral conductor, as a review of some sacred music quotes Kunc and comments that he is a connoisseur and an excellent musician.34

 

In summary

Finally, Pierre Kunc proved himself to be a most well-rounded musician; not only did he compose and perform music, he wrote critically about it. He served as music critic for two journals, Le Guide musicale and La Nouvelle revue. He wrote at least three lengthy articles on various musical personalities, scores, and performances, including an insightful retrospective on the career of Charles Lamoureux, conductor and organizer of the Concerts-Lamoureux, and an extensive critique of a performance of Humperdinck’s Hansel et Gretel at the Opéra-Comique.35

As a whole, Kunc’s organ repertoire, though small, admirably displays his competency as a serious composer. His entire extant output for his preferred instrument follows, with asterisks indicating the prize-winning works.36

 

Grande pièce symphonique 

* Communion (in A-flat)

* Pièce funèbre

Douze pieces pour orgue ou harmonium sur des noëls français

Adagietto (L’Orgue moderne)

Sortie fuguée (L’Orgue moderne)

Marche religiuese

Entrée solennelle, Fughetta

Offertoire en fa majeur

Offertoire sur deux Noëls en si b majeur

* Symphonie en ré mineur 

Adoremus (et laudate)

Élévation

 

Kunc’s Symphonie en ré mineur is unlike many of its predecessors within the genre in its compactness—it has only three movements whereas a four- or five-movement design had been the standard. This brevity is intensified by Kunc’s use of a singular rhythmic idea, which supplies the momentum in each of the latter two movements. One might find such motoric patterns tiring on the ear, but the use of countermelodies and unusual harmonic progressions keeps the listener’s interest.37

Sadly, much of Kunc’s organ music remains unavailable, though a few pieces appear in online catalogues. Both Kunc’s record of prizes and awards and fresh analyses of this works indicate an output of considerable musical merit, worthy
of rediscovery.

 

Notes

1. Among the orchestral works, one finds the Prélude d’Helene (one tableau appears to be in print in a British Library), Canta, Symphonie fantaisie pour piano et orchestre, Prélude (pour Les Cosaques), Deux Danses hindoues, Symphonie Pyrénéenne, and Été pastoral (premiered in 1905 and performed as late as 1943), to name a few. 

2. According to a personal e-mail correspondence with Francois Pellecer, Kunc’s nephew, whatever scores Pellecer possessed have been given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, though they do not as yet appear in the catalogue. The BN collection has six manuscripts of Kunc, all but one for piano. 

3. Pellecer, Pierre Kunc. 

4. In December 1937, the cathedral of Nantes gave the premiere performance of the Messe de Sainte-Bernadette (L’Ouest-Éclair, December 27, 1937, p. 4). 

5. Revue des Pyrénées et de France méridionale, p. 874 (1890). Kunc was awarded two first prizes from l’Academie de musique in Toulouse; one for an overture for orchestra, and the other for his song, Extase. The judges cited his work as being of a “modern and alluring style” and of “great originality. ”

6. Le Journal (Paris), February 25, 1895, p. 4, in a review of the Concerts d’Harcourt. 

7. A review of Kunc’s Diptych Breton lamented the need for young composers to “compose La Morte de Isolde” over and over again, suggesting that this music has already been written (Revue musicale de Lyon, vol. 7, no. 25, 1910, pp. 750–753). However, another review called the music “very evocative.” It claimed that these “pages of music were not negligible.” (See Le Rappel, March 22, 1910.)

8. A reviewer of a performance of some songs of Kunc lamented that “Kunc’s sin” was a vain attempt to develop the work in a pseudo-Wagnerian vain. (See Le Mercure musical, May 15, 1906, p. 471). 

9. Le Mercure musical, December 15, 1905, p. 546. Interestingly, this work was awarded a prize from la Société des Compositeurs in 1903. A more gracious review appeared in Le Matin (October 30, 1905, p. 5) immediately following the October premiere, though it too claimed that the piece lacked originality, possibly due to the Wagnerian influences that dominated much of Kunc’s music. 

10. Le Ménestrel, vol. 71, no. 43, November 5, 1905, p. 357. 

11. Revue Illustré, vol. 40, no. 23, November 15, 1905, p. 1. 

12. “Je commence à trouver que c’est un villain tour, et ce porquoi la simple et franche mélodie de M. Pierre Kunc, qui a pour titre “Complainte,” m’a cause un vif plaisir. Ce musicien me semble avoir choisi une poème tout a fait “musicable” . . . J’ai moins aime la seconde mélodie, ”Sous bois” . . . mais elle manqué par trop d’originalité.” Le Mercure Musical, 1906, vol. 2, p. 471 features a review of the Société Nationale concert of
March 17, 1906. 

13. Kunc’s work is properly titled Grande pièce symphonique. It was published in 1901 by Alphonse Leduc. So, it would appear, that the critic either misread the title or there was a misprint in the program. 

14. Le Ménestrel, vol. 69, no. 2, January 11, 1903, p. 13. The work is entitled here as Suite pour piano et orchestre with Pierre Kunc conducting. 

15. There were thirty-one entries in that competition; only six received awards and performances. According to Kunc’s biography, Samuel Rousseau considered the work to be “a little too Wagnerian.” (Pellecer, François, Pierre Kunc. Self-published, 2001). 

16. Le Ménestrel, vol. 70, no. 21, May 22, 1904, p. 162. 

17. Le Ménestrel, March 14, 1914, p. 87. 

18. Comoedia, April 16, 1923, p. 3. The review mentions that fragments had been performed at several of the Concerts-Lamoureux, but it was finally performed in its entirety in Toulouse, the composer’s hometown. 

19. Le Gaulois, January 3, 1916, p. 4. The work originally premiered in Toulouse as the Overture to Salammbô (see Revue française de musique, November 15, 1912, p. 110.) Interestingly, the overture had three movements (sections): Gloria, Luctus, Victoria, possibly due to the storyline of the Flaubert text. 

20. Académie des beaux-arts [Annuaire], 1929, p. 20. 

21. Le Journal (Paris), May 17, 1909, p. 7. 

22. Le Ménestrel, vol. 82, no. 23, June 4, 1920, p. 234; Le Ménestrel, vol. 84, no. 5, February 3, 1922, p. 49. The reviewer mentions that the composer achieved a happy balance between the dramatic opening movement and the flowery exuberance of the third movement in the Sonata. 

23. The work, premiered at Concerts-Colonne, received a positive review in Paris-Soir, March 24, 1925, p. 6. 

24. Francois Pellecer, Music et Memoria, Pierre Kunc (2001), www.musimem.com/kunc_pierre.htm. According to Pellecer, as of the publication, numerous works are still in the family’s collection with hopes of being published posthumously. 

25. “M. Kunc n’était pas un excellent musician, un artiste plein verve et d’originalité, nous lui dirions: ‘Ce que vous avait fait mérite des éloges; c’est charmant, gracieuse et parfois même brilliant.’” Revue de musique ancienne et modern, 1856, p. 776. 

26. Le Ménestrel, vol. 86, no. 23, June 6, 1924, p. 261. 

27. L’Ouest-Éclair, April 30, 1922 p. 4. 

28. Among his more popular works for solo piano is the Suite symphonie. The earliest documented performance took place at a concert of the Société national des beaux-arts in May 1906, performed by Jean Batalla (see Le Figaro, May 29, 1906, p. 5). 

29. Georges Renard, Revue Sainte-Cecile, 1927, pp. 103–104. 

30. “ . . . conception widorienne de la symphonie orchestrale adaptée à l’orgue.”

31. Le Mercure musical, January 1, 1906,
p. 317. 

32. Published by Durand et Cie. in 1924. Kunc also adapted Saint-Säens’ Laudate
Dominum
.

33. Le Journal, February 13, 1930, p. 6. See also La Semaine à Paris, February 21, 1930, p. 16, and Le Matin, February 10, 1930, p. 5. 

34. Paris Musical et Dramatique, May 1906, p. 4.

35. See La Feu follet, volume 20, tome XI, no. 1, pp. 152–155, and La Nouvelle revue, May–June 1900, pp. 624–630. 

36. Pellecer, op. cit. He mentions Vingt prières but there is no record of them in the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue or
elsewhere. 

37. The reader is referred to the previously cited article by Georges Renard for more details about the work. 

 

 

Michel Chapuis (1930–2017): A great organist, pioneer, and professor

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

A French-American organist and musicologist, Carolyn Shuster was organist at the American Cathedral in Paris. In 1989, she was appointed titular of the Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at the Trinité Church and founded their weekly concert series. She has performed over 500 concerts in Europe and in the United States. She has also contributed articles to Revue de musicologieLa Flûte HarmoniqueL’OrgueOrgues NouvellesThe American Organist, and The Diapason. Her recordings have been published by EMA, Ligia Digital, Schott, and Fugue State Films. In 2007, the French Cultural Minister awarded her the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters.

Default

On November 12, 2017, the liturgical and international concert organist Michel Chapuis died. Also an eminent professor, historian, and organ reformer impassioned by architecture, acoustics, and organbuilding, he immensely contributed to the renaissance, conservation, and restoration of early French organs. He delighted in supporting artistic beauty: his noble, graceful, and poetic interpretations vibrated with rhythmic pulsation, a natural flowing expression, and a spiritual elevation that was filled with mystery and joy.

 

His inspiration to become an
organist and initial training

Michel Chapuis was born January 15, 1930, in Dole, situated in the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region in eastern France. His father was a primary school teacher, and his mother worked as a telephone operator at the post office. In 1938, when his grandmother brought him to a Mass celebrating First Communion in Notre-Dame Collegiate Church,1 he was overwhelmed by its historic organ by Karl Joseph Riepp (1754)/François Callinet (1788)/Joseph Stiehr (1830, 1855, 1858).2 Its grandiose sonorities, which resonate beautifully in such marvelous acoustics, inspired him to become an organist. The organ possesses one of the finest examples of the French Grand Plein-Jeu. This characteristic combination of the Fourniture and Cymbale mixtures with the foundation stops is a full, brilliant, and noble sound that contains all its various inherent harmonics—with up to fifteen pipes that sound on a single note. For Michel Chapuis, this sonority symbolized God, eternity, and the entire color spectrum.

Noting their son was extremely talented, his parents purchased a piano for him at the music shop of Jacques Gardien, an ardent defender of the Dole organ.3 Michel Chapuis acquired a firm and supple piano technique with Miss Palluy, a disciple of Alfred Cortot. For six months, he took lessons with Father Barreau on the harmonium in the Collegiate Church and helped him accompany Masses there. He then began to study organ with Odette Vinard,4 who played at the Protestant Church in Dole, and continued with her professor, Émile Poillot,5 organist at the Dijon Cathedral.

In 1940, his family left Dole during the German occupation and went to Brive-Charensac, a village in the Haute-Loire, where he accompanied church services on the harmonium.6 When he returned to Dole in 1943, he accompanied vespers in the Dole Collegiate Church, even improvising verses between psalms. Delighted to discover a collection of Alexandre Guilmant’s Archives of Organ Masters in the personal library of the Marquis Bernard de Froissard7 in Azans, near Dole, he began to play the early French organ repertory, using registrations mentioned in these scores. His grandfather and the church janitor pumped the organ bellows for him! In 1945, he began to study organ with Jeanne Marguillard, organist at Saint-Louis Church in Monrapont, Besançon, where he accompanied two church services each Sunday for two years on a Jacquot-Lavergne organ.8

 

Musical training in Paris

After the Second World War, in 1946, Jeanne Marguillard came to Paris with Michel Chapuis, to introduce him to Édouard Souberbielle.9 At the age of sixteen, Chapuis began to study organ and improvisation with him at the César Franck School. This “true aristocrat of the organ” possessed a vast culture and an eminent spirituality that deeply influenced all his students. He encouraged them to expand their musical knowledge by listening to great classical works, and Chapuis appreciated his methodical spirit. This master enabled him to maintain a solid yet supple hand position and taught how to “touch” the organ by varying articulations, how to improvise fugues and trio sonatas, and used Marcel Dupré’s improvisation method books to prepare him to study at the Paris Conservatory. Michel Chapuis completed his solid musical formation there by taking piano lessons with Paule Piédelièvre,10 courses in harmony and counterpoint with Yves Margat,11 and fugue with René Malherbe.12 His fellow students there included Simone Michaud13 and her future husband, Jean-Albert Villard,14 Father Joseph Gelineau,15 and Denise Rouquette, who married Michel Chapuis in 1951.16 They lived on Clotaire Street, near the Panthéon.

To launch a career as an organist in France, it was indispensable to obtain a first prize organ in Marcel Dupré’s class at the Paris Conservatory. After auditioning with Dupré in 1950, playing J. S. Bach’s Sixth Trio Sonata and Louis Vierne’s Impromptu, thanks to his solid technique, Michel Chapuis enrolled in the Paris Conservatory the next October. Nine months later, in June 1951, he obtained his first prizes in organ and improvisation, as well as the Albert
Périlhou and Alexandre Guilmant prizes, awarded to the best student in the class.17 Gifted with mechanical ingenuity, he followed Gaston Litaize’s advice and apprenticed with the organbuilder Erwin Muller from 1952 to 1953, in Croisy, just west of Paris.18

 

First three church positions in Paris

From his youth, Michel Chapuis loved the ritual aspects of liturgical music. During his studies in Paris, he substituted for many organists. Highly respected for his fine accompaniments of congregational singing, his vast liturgical knowledge, and his repertory, he was appointed titular organist in several Parisian churches. From 1951 to 1953, he accompanied the liturgy on the Gutschenritter choir organ at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From 1953 to 1954, he played the 1771 Clicquot/1864 Merklin organ at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois Church, following in the footsteps of Alexandre Boëly.

In 1954, he succeeded Line Zilgien19  as titular of the 1777 Clicquot/1839 Daublaine & Callinet/1842 Ducroquet/1927 Gonzalez organ at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs and kept his title there until 1970. Nicolas Gigault played there from 1652 to 1707 and Louis Braille, the inventor of the language for the blind, served at the church from 1834 to 1839. This church, located near Arts and Métiers, was reconstructed in a flamboyant Gothic style in the twelfth century and attained its present form in the seventeenth century. Its historic Clicquot organ was the key that opened the doors to Michel Chapuis’ comprehension of the early French organ. He also learned a great deal there from two organbuilders, Claude Hermelin20 and Gabriel d’Alençon.21

In 1954, Michel Chapuis succeeded Jean Dattas as titular of the two-manual, seventeen-stop Merklin choir organ in Notre-Dame Cathedral, in the heart of Paris. There, he accompanied the
Maîtrise choir, directed by the quick-tempered Canon Louis Merret until 1959; then by a marvelous musician, Abbot Jean Revert, who allowed the congregation to sing during alternated verses at vespers. Michel Chapuis accompanied all the daily Masses and nearly all the canonical offices in Gregorian chant: prime (on feast days), tierce, the grand Mass, sext, none, vespers, and compline. One day, a priest sang too high and reproached Michel Chapuis for playing a pitch that was too high, when, in fact, he had mistaken a tourist boat whistle on the Seine for an organ note! In spite of the hordes of tourists that invaded this church, this position brought great joy to Chapuis for nine years: it enabled him to unite his capacities to resonate universal beauty in such a breath-taking setting, with its traditional liturgy and its fantastic acoustics that enhance any musical note. Michel Chapuis strongly believed that music ought to pacify, console, and comfort humanity. Above all, he hoped that his musical offerings would illuminate other people’s lives.22

Michel Chapuis collaborated closely with the two titulars of the grand organ: Pierre Cochereau23 and Pierre Moreau.24 Each Sunday the two organs dialogued, continuing a tradition established in 1402, when Frédéric Schaubantz installed the grand organ in its present location. This dialogue, issued from the Gallican ritual, had remained intact, except during the Revolution, from 1790 to 1798. A 1963 Philips record documented Pierre Cochereau playing his own Paraphrase de la Dédicace and Louis Vierne’s Triumphant March, with Michel Chapuis accompanying Jean Revert’s choir singing works by André Campra and Pierre Desvignes. In September 1984, when Pierre Cochereau decorated Michel Chapuis with the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, he recalled his improvisations at Notre-Dame and had wondered if J. S. Bach had composed a seventh trio sonata!

 

A pioneer in early French music
interpretation

Impassioned by early French Classical music, Michel Chapuis realized that most of the Parisian organs by such builders as Cavaillé-Coll, Merklin, and Gutschenritter were symphonic or neo-Classical in style, thus unsuitable for the early French repertory. While organists did regularly play the repertoire, however, they did not use notes inégales in their playing. For example, in 1956, when Michel Chapuis went to Marmoutier to meet the American Melville Smith, during his rehearsals for the first complete recording of Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’Orgue by Valois, he was surprised that he did not dare to use notes inégales there, even though he had been playing them for over thirty years, simply because he did not want to appear to be original (“Je ne veux pas paraître original”).25 Chapuis concluded that he was a bit timid, probably since the great master organists in Paris at that time had not used them. Nonetheless, Melville Smith’s landmark recording highlighted Muhleisen and Alfred Kern’s 1955 restoration of this historic 1710 Silbermann and received the Grand Prix du Disque.

Curious by nature, Michel Chapuis carried out extensive research to understand the performance practice of notes inégales. His departure point was Eugène Borrel’s book on the interpretation of French music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [The Interpretation of French Music (from Lully to the Revolution)].26 This book, well in advance of its time, remained the continual reference point that guided Chapuis’ interpretations. It emphasizes that to enchant auditors, one must play like a singer, with clear pronunciation, an appropriate emotion, expression, and character: serious, sad, happy, or
pleasant.

An organist in the seventeenth century knew how to bring out the main themes, such as plainchants, and could boldly improvise counterpoint on them. Like harpsichordists, they “touched” keyboards by holding their fingers as close to the keys as possible. They played vividly on the Positive Plein Jeu, interpreted Récits tenderly, and played Tierces en tailles with emotional melancholy. Their fingerings enabled them to play notes inégales naturally.

During his nine years at Notre-Dame, Michel Chapuis did not need much time to prepare his work there: this gave him lots of time to consult hundreds of early French organ and singing treatises and prefaces from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, beginning with Loys Bourgeois (1530), who had indicated that eighth notes should be sung in groups of two to render them more graceful. Thanks to his musical intuition, his solid supple technique, and his courageous spirit, he then incorporated notes inégales, appropriate ornaments, and registrations into his interpretations of early French music. Michel Chapuis acknowledged Jules Écorcheville’s research.27 In 1958, Chapuis gave a conference with Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume28 at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs Church, presenting musical illustrations of the application of notes inégales and dotted rhythms. The interpretation of the French national hymn, La Marseillaise, is an excellent example of the natural application of notes inégales: although notated with eighth notes, it is sung with dotted notes. Of course, when one uses early fingerings, one plays naturally with notes inégales. This landmark conference inspired organists such as Marie-Claire Alain29 and marked the beginning of a new era in early French music interpretation.

Michel Chapuis brought early French repertory to life, expressing past rhetoric naturally, with nobleness, simplicity, and good taste. Guided continually by Eugène Borrel, his playing was “elegant, distinguished, and animated without excessiveness” [“élégant, distingué, chaleureux sans outrances”].30 In fact, when he gave a concert on the Gonzalez organ at Saint-Merry Church in May 1963, interpreting works by Titelouze, D’Aquin, and Dandrieu Noëls, no one even noticed that he had played with notes inégales.31 Nicole Gravet’s book on registrations in French music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was a guide to him.32 His numerous recordings of early French music in the 1960s testify to his natural assimilation of notes inégales: Dandrieu, Guilain, and Raison on the Clicquot in Poitiers (by Lumen) and others by Harmonia Mundi: François Roberday at Manosque and Isle-sur-Sorgue, François Couperin’s two organ Masses on the Isnard at Saint-Maximin, François Couperin at Le Petit-Andely, Louis Marchand and Gaspard Corette on the Clicquot in Souvigny (Grand Prix), Nicolas Clérambault on the 1765 Bénigne Boillot at Saint-Jean de Losne, Gaspard Corette and D’Aquin in Marmoutier (the only restored organ),33 and his improvisations on the 1746 J. A. Silbermann at Saint-Quirin Lettenbach.

 

Installation near Dole

During his military service at Mont-Valérien (near Paris) from 1954 to 1955, Michel Chapuis met many of his lifelong acquaintances, notably Jacques Béraza (the future organist at Dole, 1955–1998), Jean Saint-Arroman34 (with whom he collaborated in future organ academies and publications of early French music), and the orchestra conductor Jean-Claude Malgloire. Shortly thereafter, he also met the ingenious organ visionary and voicer, Philippe Hartmann.35 From 1955 to 1958, Hartmann lived with Pierre Cochereau’s family, on Boulevard Berthier in Paris. He babysat for his children, Jean-Marc and Marie-Pierre, and enlarged his house organ to seventy stops.36 A few years later, when Michel Chapuis and Francis Chapelet came to visit Pierre Cochereau, they joyfully improvised a trio sonata on his organ, his Steinway piano, and his harpsichord, before savoring some champagne!37

During this period, Chapuis visited Dole regularly. His appointment as organ professor at the Strasburg Conservatory in 1956 assured him a solid income. At Jacques Béraza’s advice, in 1958, he purchased a historic seventeenth-century home in Jouhe, a village near Dole, where he installed his pianos, harmoniums, and his personal library. During this same period, Philippe Hartmann moved to Rainans, a nearby village. Together, their overflowing energy, encyclopedic knowledge, and extraordinary imagination influenced an entire generation of organbuilders who apprenticed there from 1958 to 1969, notably Alain Anselm, Bernard Aubertin, Louis Benoist, Jean Bougarel, Didier Chanon, Jean Deloye, Barthélémy Formentelli, Gérald Guillemin, Claude Jaccard, Dominique Lalmand, Denis Londe, Marie Londe-Réveillac, Jean-François Muno, Pascal Quoirin, Alain Sals, and Pierre Sarelot.38

 

From Saint-SОverin to the Royal Chapel in Versailles

In 1963, at the suggestion of Father Lucien Aumont,39 Michel Chapuis crossed the Seine River to the Latin Quarter to succeed Michel Lambert-Mouchague as titular of the grand organ at Saint-Séverin Church.40 Among some of the past organists who maintained a great classical tradition there were: Michel Forqueray (1681–1757), Nicolas Séjan (1783–1791), Albert Périlhou, composer and director of the Niedermeyer School (1889–1914), Camille Saint-Saëns, honorary organist (1897–1921), and Marcel-Samuel Rousseau (1919–1921).41 After his arrival, Michel Chapuis reinstated the classical system of rotating organists that existed before the Revolution in Parisian churches. Over the years, he shared this post with Jacques Marichal (1963–c. 1972)42 and Francis Chapelet (1964–1984),43 then with André Isoir (1967–1973), Jean Boyer (1975–1988), Michel Bouvard (1984–1994), François Espinasse (1988), Michel Alabau (1986–2016), Christophe Mantoux (1994); and two substitute organists: Jean-Louis Vieille-Girardet (1973–1994), and François-Henri Houbart (1974–1979). In 2002, Chapuis was named honorary organist and Nicolas Bucher succeeded him as titular until 2013, when he in turn was succeded by Véronique Le Guen.44

In 1963, the 1748 Claude Ferrard/1825 Pierre-François Dallery/1889 John Abbey45 organ was in poor shape. In 1963 and 1964, the Alsatian builder Alfred Kern reconstructed the organ according to the plans of Michel Chapuis and Philippe Hartmann,46 who decided upon the use of mechanical action. This exemplary reconstruction as a four-manual neo-Classical German-French organ with fifty-nine stops marked a turning point in French organ construction. It used all of the Abbey windchests and existing pipes, including Claude Ferrard’s Positif Cromorne, the Récit Hautbois, and several mutation stops, along with twenty-two new stops. The disposition of its newly constructed Plein-Jeu stops, with its Cymbale-Tierce stop, allowed the interpretation of both early French and German literature for the first time in Paris and enabled Michel Chapuis to accompany the congregational singing with vitality and variety. The third keyboard, Récit-Resonance, enabled him to couple the other two keyboards to it. The natural keys were made of ebony, and the sharps of white cow bone. The Positif de dos was placed mid-height in the church, enabling the organ to resonate fully. Chapuis inaugurated the instrument on March 8, 1964, with two different programs: the first consisting of works by Couperin, Buxtehude, and Bach; and the second, works by de Grigny, Marchand, Sweelinck, Böhm, and Bach.47 After initial work by Daniel Kern in 1982 and Dominique Lalmand in 1988, the organ was restored again in 2011 by Dominique Thomas, Quentin Blumenroeder, and Jean-Michel Tricoteaux, respecting Alfred Kern’s work.

Michel Chapuis had arrived at Saint-Séverin during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This parish’s ecumenical approach mirrored that of the Community in Taizé. With that in mind, Michel Chapuis adapted Bach chorales to the Catholic liturgy with French texts. The organists collaborated with priests to prepare the liturgy in accordance with the texts and the different colors of the liturgical year. Instead of beginning the Mass with Asperges me and an appropriate Gregorian Introit, the chorale “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland” served as the opening hymn during the four Sundays in Advent. Before each Mass, Michel Chapuis softly accompanied a rehearsal of the liturgy. After improvising a prelude to the opening hymn on the Positif Plein-Jeu, he accompanied the congregation on the Grand Orgue Plein-Jeu. Father Alain Ponsard requested Michel Chapuis to compose a Sanctus, known as the Saint-Séverin Sanctus, sung throughout France. Later, his former student and substitute organist, François-Henri Houbart, composed a partita based on this Sanctus.48

Two recordings by Cantoral49 attest to Michel Chapuis’ fine accompaniments. Harmonia Mundi recorded his interpretations of Jehan Titelouze’s hymns and Magnificat at Saint-Séverin. His other recordings in the 1960s and 1970s echoed the repertory he played there: works by Louis Couperin (Deutsche Grammophon), Nicolas de Grigny (Astrée), French Noëls by Balbastre, Dandrieu, and D’Aquin, and the complete works of Nicolas Bruhns, Vincent Lübeck, J. S. Bach, and Dieterich Buxtehude (Valois).50 Recording the complete organ works of Bach was extremely difficult: after learning all the scores, he recorded alone at night, set up the magnetic tapes, pushed the “record” button, and went up to the organ loft to play; if there was a noise or the slightest error, he started all over, until it was perfect.

In 1966, Édouard Souberbielle gave a concert at Saint-Séverin. In 1968 and 1969, Chapuis organized a concert series entitled “Renaissance of the Organ,” for the Association for the Protection of Early Organs, on the first Wednesday of each month at 9:00 p.m.: on October 9, Michel Chapuis opened this series with a Bach concert; on November 6, Marie-Claire Alain played Bach and early German masters; on December 4, Pierre Cochereau performed Bach, Mozart, Liszt, and improvised; on January 8, 1969, André Isoir gave an eclectic concert for the Christmas season; on February 5, Francis Chapelet played selections of Art of the Fugue and the Toccata in C Major by Bach; on March 5, Helmuth Walcha was scheduled to play Bach’s Clavierübung III, but, unable to perform, was replaced by Marie-Claire Alain; on May 7, Xavier Darasse performed Messiaen, Bach, and Ligeti; and on June 6, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini performed Frescobaldi, Muffat, and Bach. In the fall of 1969, concerts were given by Michel Chapuis, Heinz Wunderlich, Anton Heiller, and Helmut Walcha. From October 1970 to June 1971, Michel Chapuis performed the complete works of J. S. Bach there.

In 1995, Michel Chapuis was appointed titular of the prestigious historic Robert Clicquot organ,51 rebuilt by Jean-Loup Boisseau and Bertrand Cattiaux, at the Royal Chapel in Versailles. On November 18 and 19, 1995, he inaugurated this organ and was named honorary organist there in 2010. This position was the crowning summit of his concert career.52 At this exquisite historic royal palace, he was truly an ambassador for French culture, receiving artists from the entire world.

 

A. F. S. O. A.: The Association for the Protection of Early Organs

On December 21, 1967, a group of organists, organ historians, and builders, as well as amateur organ admirers, joined forces to protest against abusive transformations of historic French organs and founded the Association for the Protection of Early Organs
[A. F. S. O. A., Association pour la sauvegarde de l’orgue ancien]. Their first general meeting took place on March 1, 1968. Jean Fonteneau, a substitute organist at Saint-Séverin, was president for the first year; the organ historian Pierre Hardouin, its primary editor; Michel Bernstein, editorial secretary; and Michel Chapuis, artistic advisor. Among its honorary members were Jean-Albert Villard and Helmut Winter. Other members included Father Lucien Aumont, Michel Bernstein, Bernard Baërd, Dominique Chailley, Jacques Chailley, Francis Chapelet, Pierre Chéron, Pierre Cochereau, René Delosme, Christian Dutheuil, Robert Gronier (a future president), André Isoir, Henri Legros, Émile Leipp, the architect Alain Lequeux, the astronomer James Lequeux, Charles-Walter Lindow, Pierre-Paul Lacas, Dominique Proust, Jean Saint-Arroman, Gino Sandri, Marc Schaefer, Jean-Christophe Tosi (a future president), and Jean Ver Hasselt. They struggled to renew interest in the unforgotten historic early French organ and its music. In 1969,
A. F. S. O. A. organized an international François Couperin competition for organ and harpsichord at Saint-Séverin and on the François-Henri Clicquot organ (1772), restored by Alfred Kern, at the Royal Chapel in Fontainebleau. It also organized visits to organs, such as the Clicquot at the Poitiers Cathedral, and organs in Alsace.

A. F. S. O. A. ardently defended a respectable restoration of the 1748 Dom Bédos organ in Bordeaux and protested against Gonzalez’s restoration of the historic Couperin organ at Saint-Gervais Church in Paris.54 In 1954, this firm, under Norbert Dufourcq’s direction, had already considerably transformed Jean de Joyeuse’s 1694 Baroque 16 organ in Auch Cathedral: out of the 3,060 pipes there, 620 were considerably altered and 2,240 had disappeared, notably the Grand Plein-Jeu.55 Michel Chapuis felt that Victor Gonzalez’s neo-classical Plein-Jeu, although pitched too high, was remarkably well-voiced and suitable for a small instrument installed in a studio or a home, but not for a large organ in a church. When Norbert Dufourcq went to visit the historic eighteenth century Jean-Baptiste Micot organ in Saint-Pons-des-Thomières (in the Hérault), the organist, Jean Ribot, hid the keys so that he could not enter the organ loft to look at the organ.56

Michel Chapuis strongly supported research on the French Classical organ Plein-Jeu, notably by his friends Jean Fellot57 and Léon Souberbielle.58 Thankfully, in 1954, Pierre Chéron and Rochas saved the splendid Grand Plein-Jeu in the 1774 Isnard organ at Sainte Marie-Madeleine Basilica in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.59 In 1957, Robert Boisseau voiced a Roethinger organ in the French Classic style that included a Plein-Jeu as described by Dom Bédos, in Saint Louis du Temple Benedictine Abbey in Limon-Vauhallan (in the Essonne south of Paris). It was designed by Édouard and Léon Souberbielle. On November 7, 1959, Claude Philbée made a private recording of Michel Chapuis improvising to demonstrate the organ’s stops.60

In 1967, Michel Chapuis pleaded with André Malraux, the minister for cultural affairs since 1959, for new policies concerning the restoration of early organs. He explained that past massacres of historic organs had given a bad name to organbuilding in France. He estimated that around seventy historic organs remained intact in France: thirty large instruments and forty smaller instruments. He suggested that, as in Austria or the Netherlands, a group of experts be appointed to form a new national commission of historic organs in addition to regional commissions. Before dismantling each organ for restoration, it should be completely evaluated and inventoried, with precise measurements, photos, and recordings. However, advocating for drastic changes in the French administration was not an easy task!

As A. F. S. O. A. encouraged, restorations were carried out that respected the past. As a member of the Commission for Historical Monuments, Michel Chapuis travelled in his Citroën van to visit organs and photographed them with his Rolleflex box camera. Here are some of the organs beautifully restored between 1968 and 1998: Perthuis, Malaucène, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Saint-Lizier, Forcalquier, and Sète by Alain Sals; Houdan by Robert and Jean-Loup Boisseau; three cuneiform bellows to activate the wind in the Clicquot in Souvigny by Philippe Hartmann;
Ebersmunster by Alfred Kern; Albi and Carcassonne by Barthélemy Formentelli;
Villiers-le-Bel, Juvigny, and the Dom Bédos in Bordeaux by Pascal Quoirin; Semur-en-Auxois by Jean Deloye with Philippe Hartmann; Seurre in Bourgogne, Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville in Normandy, and Saint-Antoine-L’Abbaye by Bernard Aubertin; the 1790
Clicquot in Poitiers by Boisseau-Cattiaux Society;61 Bolbec by Bertrand Cattiaux; and the reconstruction of the Jean de Joyeuse in Auch by Jean-François Muno. Between 1994 and 1997, the builders Claude Jaccard and Reinalt Klein built a replica of the Houdan organ (except the case) in the Kreuzekirche Church in Stapelmoor, Germany (in the North of Ostfriesland): Organeum Records recorded Michel Chapuis playing works by Böhm, Boyvin, Dandrieu, and Jullien on this organ on September 17, 1998.62

In the 1980s, Michel Chapuis supported the Cavaillé-Coll Association, which advocated for quality restorations of Romantic organs. He kindly advised this author’s research on Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s secular organs. Among the Cavaillé-Coll organs restored between 1985 and 1997: the grand organs in Sacré-Coeur Basilica and in Saint-Sulpice in Paris, by Jean Renaud; Charles-Marie Widor’s 1893 house organ in Selongey, Côte d’Or (1986), and Édouard André’s 1874 house organ in Decize, by Claude Jaccard; the grand organ in Poligny, by Dominique Lalmand and Claude Jaccard, the grand organ in Saint-Sernin Basilica in Toulouse, by Boisseau-Cattiaux.

 

Organ professor

An eminent professor, Michel Chapuis acknowledged that the best way to learn music is to teach it. He loved to transmit his musical heritage and his practical knowledge. His intuition and his astute sense of observation and analysis enabled him to transmit elements of interpretation that cannot always be explained. He taught organ at the Strasburg Conservatory from 1956 to 1979, at the Schola Cantorum in Paris from 1977 to 1979, at the Besançon Conservatory from 1979 to 1986, and then succeeded Rolande Falcinelli at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Paris, from 1986 to 1995. He also gave masterclasses in numerous academies in France: early French music on the historic Isnard organ at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume Academy, founded in 1962; German and French early music on the 1752 Riepp/1833 Callinet organ in Semur-en-Auxois (in the Côte-d’Or) in the mid-1970s;63 in the Pierrefonds Academy (in the Oise) with Jean Saint-Arroman in the 1980s; and in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges64 (in the Haute-Garonne) from 1976 to 2008, notably with André Stricker and Jean Saint-Arroman. He also gave masterclasses in Stapelmoor, Germany (with André Stricker and Pierre Vidal), as well as in the United States and Japan.

At the Strasbourg Conservatory, Michel Chapuis taught in the Catholic organ class, alongside André Stricker,65 who was in charge of the Protestant organ class. As the organ department grew, two more professors were added to balance the department: in 1962, Marc Schaefer,66 a Protestant, and, in 1963, Pierre Vidal,67  a Catholic. In June 1964, Helmut Walcha inaugurated the Kurt Schwenkedel organ (III/64) in the conservatory concert hall. Michel Chapuis helped to determine its stoplist, which he described as being both “classical and personal.”68 Of note, the organ case included horizontal Montre pipes.

In 1986, when Michel Chapuis began to teach at the Paris Conservatory, it was still located on Madrid Street, before its transfer to la Villette in 1991. Instead of giving lessons on the dusty 1951 Jacquot-Lavergne organ there, he preferred to teach on beautiful church organs: at Saint-Séverin, in Dole, and in Poligny. Open-minded, he never imposed any particular interpretation on his students69 but used his immense knowledge, his fantastic imagination, his humanistic approach, and his witty humor to guide them from the visible text to the invisible spirit of the music. He emphasized the importance of a calm, supple body, notably in hands and wrists, to give great lightness and liberty to fingers, which remain in contact with the keys. With his soft, sweet voice, he calmly encouraged students to go beyond the notes, to recreate the composer’s musical conception in a harmonious and sober manner. He abhorred inadequate and superficial ornaments and inappropriate expression. He enabled his students to understand the inherent marvels in each score, its underlying harmonies, rhythmic structures, and melodic expression, and helped them to incorporate these elements into their interpretations with an appropriate style, with spontaneity, good taste, and excellent registrations.

How fortunate I was to study with Michel Chapuis and Jean Saint-Arroman at the Academy in Pierrefonds in 1983 and 1984. Eugène Borrel’s book on the interpretation of early French music was truly indispensable to interpreting early French music expression in a well-balanced harmonious manner, with natural fluidity and ease. We accompanied singers to understand the underlying nature of a musical text, its pronunciation, its appropriate expression and style, its inherent harmonies. We studied the early French organ and its music: figured basses, dance rhythms, registrations, tempi, temperaments, ornamentations, and learned how to appropriately express and embellish the musical line. Its sweet, gentle expression70 finds its summit in the Tierce taille and numerous Récits.

We presented recitals at Saint-Séverin and Saint-Gervais churches. While studying on early historic instruments does not guarantee a beautiful performance, it enables an interpreter to play ornaments, registrations, phrasing, etc., with greater ease. As Jean Saint-Arroman pointed out, it is impossible for early music to be heard as in former centuries because “life and sensibility have changed too much, and, at least for the listeners, the music which was ‘modern’ has become ‘ancient’” [“la vie et la sensibilité ont trop chargé, et, au moins pour les auditeurs, la musique qui était ‘moderne’ est devenue ‘ancienne’”].71

Michel Chapuis inspired an entire generation of organists, among them: Scott Ross (at Saint-Maximin); Robert Pfrimmer, Étienne Baillot, Antoine Bender, Lucien Braun, Henri Delorme, Alain Langré, François-Henri Houbart, Jean-Louis Vieille-Girardet, Hélène Hébrard, Chieko Mayazaki and Henri Paget (at Strasbourg Conservatory); Régis Allard, Michel Bouvard,72 Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, Makiko Hayashima, Hisaé Hosokawa (at the Schola Cantorum); Marc Baumann, Sylvain Ciaravolo, Pierre Gerthoffer, Luc Bocquet, Éric Brottier, Bernard Coudurier, Roland Servais, Véronique Rougier, Vinciane Rouvroy, Marie-Christine Vermorel (at the Besançon Conservatory); Valéry Aubertin, Valérie Aujard-Catot, Franck Barbut, Philippe Brandeis, Yves
Castagnet, Slava Chevliakov, Denis Comtet, Françoise Dornier, Thierry Escaich, Pierre Farago, Jean-François Frémont, Mathieu Freyburger, Christophe Henry, Emmanuel Hocdé, Jean-Marc Leblanc, Marie-Ange Laurent-Lebrun, Éric Lebrun, Véronique Le Guen, Erwan Le Prado, Gabriel Marghieri, Pierre Mea, Nicolas Reboul-Salze, Marina Tchébourkina,73 Vincent Warnier (at the National Superior Conservatory of Music), and Frédéric Munoz (in numerous academies).

 

International concert artist

Michel Chapuis was a great artist who consecrated his entire life to enriching other people’s lives with beautiful music. Although he often said that he never took vacations, in all truth, he worked too much, giving generously to others: as a teacher, as a member of the national organ commission for cultural affairs, as a church musician, and as a concert artist. He delighted in sharing his passions with others: photography, tramways, historic books, and architecture, among others. Fascinated with movement, he often invited visitors to his home to take a ride in his old train wagons, which he pushed on the train tracks he had installed in his yard: an unexpected experience! His listeners sensed such sparkling joy when listening to his captivating interpretations, from its kindling intense, fiery warmth to its gentle gracious sweetness. Conscious of the acoustical resonance of each room, he knew how to let silences speak fully, thus clarifying the musical narration and providing it with spiritual depth and elevation.

When I met Michel Chapuis in Saint-Séverin in 1984, I admired his noble yet gentle manner of playing. Although his hands were robust and gnarled, as if he had labored as an eighteenth-century tanner along the canals in Dole, once he began to play, they floated just above the keyboards, but his fingers were deeply enrooted in the keys,74 like those of J. S. Bach! His vivid imagination and fantasy excelled in the interpretation of
Dieterich Buxtehude’s works. I remember the numerous interesting discussions in the church reception hall after Mass with artists from all over the world.

Michel Chapuis considered himself to be Catholic in the universal sense of the term.75 On May 7–8, 1979, during the inauguration of Alfred Kern’s restoration of the 1741 Jean-André Silbermann organ at Saint-Thomas Lutheran Church in Strasburg, he illustrated the mission of the organ in the church by improvising in the French Classical style on themes from the old Parisian Ritual. Like the great humanist Albert Schweitzer, who had preached in this church, he believed that when music is felt deeply, either sacred or secular, it resonates in spiritual spheres where art and religion may meet.

Michel Chapuis played concerts in Europe, the United States, Russia, and Japan. He came to the United States at least on three occasions. On November 26 and 27, 1968, he gave a recital and masterclass at Northwestern University School of Music, Evanston, Illinois, and returned to play at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, University of Chicago, in 1978. During this same year, he inaugurated the Yves Koenig organ at Saint-Sulpice Church in Pierrefonds, performing Nicolas de Grigny’s entire Organ Mass. In Japan, he gave his first organ recital in the NKH Hall in Tokyo in 1976. He inaugurated three Aubertin organs there: his opus 48 (III/48), in the French Classical style at Shirane-Cho/Minami-Alps in 1993, where he returned at least ten times to give academies, concerts, and masterclasses, recorded by Plenum Vox in 1999; opus 13 (II/13) in the Lutheran Church in Tokyo in 1999; and opus 22 (II/22) in a home in Karuizawa in 2003. He gave concerts and masterclasses many times in Russia, notably on the Charles Mutin organ at the Tchaikovky Conservatory in Moscow beginning in 1993.

Throughout his entire career, Michel Chapuis collaborated with singers, choirs, and orchestras, as illustrated in several recordings: the 1967 Harmonia Mundi record of François Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres with Alfred
Deller, countertenor; Philip Todd, tenor; and Raphael Perulli, viola da gamba, at Augustins Chapel in Brignolles
(Var); in 1997: Quantin CD of four Handel concertos, opus 4, with the Marais Chamber Orchestra directed by Pascal Vigneron; and an Astrée CD of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Port Royal Mass in Houdan, directed by Emmanuel Mandrin; a 1998 CD of his inauguration of Laurent Plet’s restoration of the 1847 Callinet organ at Saint-Pierre Church in Liverdun captured his accompaniments of three local choirs, with works by Scheidt, Rinck, Boëly, Mendelssohn, Ritter, Herbeck, and Berthier.76 In 1999, Glossa Records recorded his improvised verses in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Monsieur de Mauroy at Saint-Michel-en-Thiérache with Hervé Niquet’s Le Concert spirituel. In 2000, Plenum Vox recorded his inauguration of Bernard Hurvy’s twenty-six-stop early nineteenth century transitional-style organ in Charbonnières-les-Bains (near Lyon), with the Saint-Roch Choir directed by J. M. Blanchon, with works by Bach, Buxtehude, Mendelssohn, Guilmant, Bruckner, and improvisations on Salve Regina. Ekaterina Fedorova, soprano, the founder of Plenum Vox Records, gave many concerts and recorded with him: Magnificats by Guilain, Dandrieu, Beauvarlet-Charpentier, and improvisations on the Dom Bédos organ at Saint-Croix Abbey Church in Bordeaux in 2002, and Burgundian Christmas carols, vocal works by Clérambault, and improvisations on the 1768 Bénigne Boillot organ in Saint-Jean-de-Losne in 2003.

At the end of each concert, Michel Chapuis improvised in a style that valorized the organ with a wide variety of registrations. In 2004, when he improvised at the end of his concert on Jean-François Muno’s exemplary reconstruction (1992–1998) of the 1694 Jean de Joyeuse organ at Auch Cathedral, he received a standing ovation that lasted for over ten minutes! During the last ten years of his life, even as his vision deteriorated, his luminous and graceful improvisations continued to enlighten his audiences. Many of them were recorded live by Plenum Vox: a 2003 DVD in the Royal Chapel in Versailles and in Souvigny, a 2004 CD in the Romantic style on the Cavaillé-Coll organs at Saint-Ouen and Poligny, and a 2005 DVD in the German Baroque style on Bernard Aubertin’s organ at Saint-Louis-en-l’Île Church in Paris. He had assimilated the early French repertory so well that he was capable of improvising in the style of each composer and each period. He knew how to discern the tonalities that resonated well on each organ: for example, C Major and D Major in Dole, and G Major at Saint-Séverin.

Michel Chapuis’ 2001 Plenum Vox recordings in Dole remind us that this organ remained the star that inspired him throughout his entire career. These three CDs illustrate his eclectic repertory on this versatile instrument with three faces: the German face (Buxtehude, Kellner, Rinck, with improvisations), the French face (Boyvin, Tapray, d’Aquin, Balbastre and improvisations on Ave Maris Stella), and the Romantic face (Mendelssohn, Czerny, Guilmant, Brosig, Boëllmann, and Franck).

In addition to being a pioneer who revolutionized the French organ world in the second half of the twentieth century, this great concert and liturgical organist and professor generously shared his time, knowledge, and documents with his colleagues, students, and friends. His conception of French good taste goes beyond time and space: it encourages us to memorialize the past, far beyond an idea of comfort and superficial rapidity, by embracing beauty with simplicity, constant research, meditation, and spiritual depth. In addition to his beautiful music, his humanistic and fraternal approach to life, his conviviality, his humble simplicity, as well as his liberty of spirit, will continue to inspire us.

 

A French-American organist and musicologist, Carolyn Shuster was organist at the American Cathedral in Paris. In 1989, she was appointed titular of the Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at the Trinité Church and founded their weekly concert series. She has performed over 500 concerts in Europe and in the United States. She has also contributed articles to Revue de musicologie, La Flûte Harmonique, L’Orgue, Orgues Nouvelles, The American Organist, and The Diapason. Her recordings have been published by EMA, Ligia Digital, Schott, and Fugue State Films. In 2007, the French Cultural Minister awarded her the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters. 

 

Notes

1. Cf. Marc Baumann, “Interview with Michel Chapuis in Marienthal,” transcribed by Hubert Heller, February, 2003, and in www.union-sainte-cecile.org.

2. Cf. Pierre M. Guéritey, Karl Joseph
Riepp et l’Orgue de Dole
, 2 vol. (Lyon, FERREOL, 1985).

3. Cf. Jacques Gardien, “Les Grandes Orgues de la Collégiale de Dole,” L’Orgue, no. 25, March 1936, pp. 6–14.

4. Odette Goulon, her married name, was appointed organist at Temple du Luxembourg in Paris in 1991. The dates of organists in this article are mostly those found in Pierre Guillot, Dictionnaire des organistes français des XIXe et XXe siècles, Sprimont, Belgium, 2003.

5. Émile Poillot (1886–1948) was organist of Saint-Bénigne Cathedral, Dijon, 1912–1948.

6. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, Plein Jeu, Interviews with Michel Chapuis (Vendôme: Le Centurion, 1979), p. 34. The Germans occupied Dole from June 17, 1940, to September 9, 1944.

7. Marquis Bernard de Froissard (1884–1962) was an administrator of Société Cavaillé-Coll, Mutin, Convers, & Cie. 

8. Jeanne Marguillard was organist at Sainte-Madeleine Church, Besançon, 1947–1993.

9. Édouard Souberbielle (1899–1989) also taught at Schola Cantorum and at Institut Grégorien.

10. Paule Piédelièvre (1902–1964) studied piano with Blanche Selva and was organist at Étrangers Church.

11. Yves Margat contributed articles to Guide du Concert

12. René Malherbe (1898–1969) was organist and choir director at Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou Church.

13. Simone Villard (b. 1927) was appointed organist at Sainte-Radegonde Church in Poitiers in 1952.

14. Jean-Albert Villard (1920–2000) was organist at Poitiers Cathedral, 1949–2000.

15. Joseph Gélineau, SJ (1920–2000), was a Jesuit priest, composer, and French liturgist. 

16. Denise Chapuis (b. 1928). They had seven children: Jean-Marie (†), Claude (†), Bruno, Laurent (who worked with the harpsichord builder Anselm and the organbuilder Alain Sals), François, Claire (†) Christophe, ten grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

17. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 58.

18. Jean-Marc Cicchero, Hommage à une Passion, Éd. O. V., 2018, p. 126. Erwin Muller had apprenticed with Schwenkedel, then as a voicer with Gonzalez. His shop was active in Croissy from 1950–1986.

19. Line Zilgien (1906–1954), organist there from 1940–1954, was close to Claire Delbos, Olivier Messiaen’s wife.

20. Claude Hermelin (1901–1986), began to study voicing in 1923 with Charles Mutin (cf. J.-M. Cicchero, op. cit., p. 64) and wrote articles under the alias Jean Mas.

21. Gabriel d’Alençon (1881–1956) restored the 17th-century organ in Rozay-en-Brie and was interested in temperaments. From 1936 to 1939, Claude Hermelin collaborated with him in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, and they gave courses in organbuilding at Schola Cantorum, Paris.

22. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., pp. 212–213.

23. Pierre Cochereau (1924–1984) was titular of the grand organ at Notre-Dame Cathedral, 1955–1984.

24. Pierre Moreau (1907–1991) played there, 1946–1986. Michel Chapuis wrote the preface to his Livre d’Orgue (Europart Music, 1990).

25. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 96.

26. Eugène Borrel (1876–1962), violinist and musicologist, L’Interprétation de la musique française (de Lully à la Révolution), Paris, Librairie Félix Alcan, 1934, p. 150.

27. Jules Écorcheville (1872–1915), musicologist, wrote De Lulli à Rameau—L’esthétique musicale (Paris, 1906). 

28. Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume (1905–2000), Les secrets de la musique ancienne, recherches sur l’interprétation (Fasquelle, 1964).

29. Cf. Jesse Eschbach, “Marie-Claire Alain, pédagogue internationale,” Marie-Claire Alain, L’Orgue, Cahiers et Mémoires, no. 56, 1996—II, p. 59. She mentions that this concert took place in 1958, but this date needs to be verified.

30. Eugène Borrel, op cit., p. 150. 

31. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 98.

32. Nicole Gravet, L’orgue et l’art de la registration en France du XVIe siècle au début du XIXe siècle, originally published in 1960, it was reedited with a preface by Michel Chapuis, Chatenay Malabry, Ars Musicae, 1996.

33. In 1996, the European Organ Center in Marmoutier reedited Michel Chapuis’ interpretations of Böhm, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach, de Grigny, and Dandrieu on this organ.

34. Cf. his publications on French Classical music, 1661–1789: Dictionnaire d’interprétation (Initiation), (Honoré Champion, 1983) and L’Interprétation de la musique pour orgue (Honoré Champion, 1988); his early music facsimiles are edited by Anne Fuzeau. He teaches in the early music department at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Paris.

35. Philippe Hartmann (1928–2014) had apprenticed with Gutschenritter, worked three months for Gonzalez, for Émile Bourdon in Dijon, eight years for Pierre Chéron, collaborated with Georges Lhôte, with Jean Deloye from 1969–1975, worked independently at Le Havre in 1982, and as a voicer for Haerpfer.

36. In 1993, Daniel Birouste incorporated it into the organ at the Saint-Vincent Church in Roquevaire (Bouches-du-Rhône).

37. Cf. Yvette Carbou, Pierre Cochereau Témoignages (Zurfluh, 1999), p. 38.

38. Cf. Jean-Marc Cicchero, op. cit., pp. 104–105.

39. Father Lucien Aumont (1920–2014) lived in a tower of Saint-Séverin Church. From 1947 until 1987, he recorded concerts there and broadcast them in programs at Radio-France-INA.

40. He had been organist there from 1921 until 1960.

41. Cf. Félix Raugel, Les Grandes Orgues des Églises de Paris et du Département de la Seine, Paris, Fischbacher, pp. 100–102.

42. Jacques Marichal (1934–1987) was also choir organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral from 1964 to 1987.

43. Francis Chapelet (1934), a well-known specialist in Spanish organ music, is honorary organist at Saint-Séverin. 

44. The three actual titulars at Saint-Séverin are François Espinasse, Christophe Mantoux, and Véronique Le Guen.

45. John Abbey II (1843–1930).

46. In 1966, Philippe Hartmann built a choir organ (I/7) for Saint-Séverin. Roger Chapelet, Francis Chapelet’s father, painted its organ case.

47. L’Orgue, no. 112, Oct.–Dec.1964, p. 110.

48. François-Henri Houbart, Partita sur un choral dit Sanctus de Saint-Séverin (Delatour France, 2010).

49. Cantoral: UD 30 1299 and 5, UD 30 1385.

50. For a complete list of Michel Chapuis’ recordings, cf. Alain Cartayrade, www.france-orgue.fr/disque.

51. Cf. M. Tchebourkina. L’orgue de la Chapelle royale de Versailles: À la recherche d’une composition perdue // L’Orgue. Lyon, 2007. 2007–IV no. 280. She was organist at the Royal Chapel in Versailles 1996–2010.

52. Plenum Vox (PV 004) recorded a CD of Nivers, Lebègue, Couperin, Dandrieu, Marchand, and Lully there in 1999 and a DVD in 2003.

53. Bärenreiter published the first eight issues of their periodical, Renaissance de L’Orgue, from 1968 to 1970, followed by Connoissance de l’orgue, until 2000. At the end of the 1960s, Jean Fonteneau taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in the Boston area, he promoted A. F. S. O. A. by organizing concerts and lectures at Saint Thomas in New York City and at Harvard University.

54. In May and June 1967, several articles appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde and L’Art Sacré. This restoration by Gonzalez was highly supervised by the A. F. S. O. A.
55. Cf. Michel Chapuis, notes in the Plenum Vox CD of the complete works of Jacques Boyvin in Auch, PV 011, 2004.

56. XCP Montpellier, recorded Michel Chapuis’ concert there on September 5, 1993: cf. www.france-orgue.fr/disque.

57. Jean Fellot (1905–1967) wrote À la recherche de l’orgue classique (reedited by Édisud in 1993).

58. This book was written by hand and printed by the author at Montoire-sur-le-Loir in 1977.

59. Cf. Pierre Chéron’s inventory in L’Orgue de Jean-Esprit et Joseph Isnard à la Basilique de la Madeleine à Saint-Maximin, 1774, prefaced by Michel Chapuis (Réalisation Art et Culture des Alpes-Maritimes, Nice, 1991).

60. According to Sister Marie-Emmanuelle, this organ had 31 manual stops and its pedal stops were borrowed. Curiously, its action was electro-pneumatic. One can hear Michel Chapuis’ improvisations on https://youtu.be/5u-0eR3BYko. This organ was integrated into a new 42-stop neo-classical organ by Olivier Chevron, inaugurated in the Abbey at Celles-sur-Belle (Charente-Maritime) on May 5, 2018.

61. Cf. Cathédral de Poitiers, 1787 à 1790, L’Orgue de François-Henri Clicquot (Direction of Cultural Affaires in Poitou-Charentes, 1994).

62. This CD also includes Harald Vogel in the Georgskirche.

63. He taught in Semur-en-Auxois with Odile Bayeux (organ), Blandine Verlet (harpsichord), Alain Anselm (harpsichord building), Philippe Hartmann (organbuilding) and Jean Saint-Arroman (French performance practice).

64. This festival was founded by Pierre Lacroix in 1974 under the musical direction of Jean-Patrice Brosse.

65. André Stricker (1931–2003) taught there, 1954–1996. He had studied with Helmut Walcha.

66. Marc Schaefer (b. 1934), a former André Stricker student, taught there until 2000.

67. Pierre Vidal (1927–2010), composer and musicographer, remained there until 1991.

68. Cf. Jean-Louis Coignet, “L’Orgue du Conservatoire de Strasbourg,” L’Orgue, no. 117, January–March 1966, p. 39.

69. Cf. Éric Lebrun article blog SNAPE: www.snape.fr/index.php/2017/11/13.

70. Cf. Eugène Borrel, op. cit., p. 148. 

71. Jean Saint-Arroman, “Authenticity,” in Dictionnaire d’interprétation (Initiation), Paris, Honoré Champion, 1983, p. 13.

72. Michel Bouvard was an auditor and studied with Chapuis at Saint-Séverin.

73. In 1999, Natives recorded the organ works of Claude Balbastre interpreted by Michel Chapuis and his student Marina Tchebourkina on the historic grand organ at Saint-Roch Church, Paris.

74. Cf. Roland Servais, “Ses mains étaient comme des racines,” Chronique des Moniales, Abbaye Notre-Dame du Pesquié, March 2018, pp. 25–27.

75. Cf. Pastor Claude Rémy Muess, “L’église luthérienne Saint-Thomas de Strasbourg retrouve son orgue Silbermann,” L’Orgue, no. 173, January–March 1980, pp. 5–11. 

76. Available at: Association Amis de l’orgue de Liverdun, 1, place des Armes, 54460 Liverdun, France.

Performing notes inégales: Evidence from cantates françoises

Gregory Hand
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The performance of notes inégales (the primarily French convention of performing equally notated melodies in an unequal fashion by alternating short and long notes) is often a major impediment to keyboardists unfamiliar with 17th- and 18th-century French music. Although there is a wealth of primary and secondary literature devoted to the topic of notes inégales,1 this literature is usually focused on when notes inégales are to be used, and the differential ratio between the short and long notes. However, almost no literature exists that describes how notes inégales actually sounded. In this article, I will present new evidence on how notes inégales were performed in the eighteenth century, and how this knowledge can illuminate keyboard pedagogy and performance of notes inégales.

The very first challenge when playing French baroque music is to know exactly when notes inégales ought to be used. The treatises tend to be somewhat circumspect on the subject, occasionally just leaving it to a matter of taste. Here are but two examples of this maddening vagueness.

Nivers in 1665 states that “This style [notes inégales] is applied by personal discretion as are many other things which must be governed by the ear and by wisdom.”

Saint-Lambert in 1702 instructs: “When using this inequality of eighth notes or quarter notes, taste must decide if they ought to be altered a little or greatly. There are some pieces in which it works well to alter them greatly, and others where they require less. Taste judges this as it does tempo.”3

However, there is a body of repertoire that can shed light on this issue: the cantate françoise.4 This genre flourished in the first half of the 18th century, and arias in this genre predominantly feature an “instrumental anticipation,” a relatively new compositional device for French baroque vocal music. The instrumental anticipation is simply a short preview of the singer’s part, played by an instrumentalist as an introduction. 

Comparing the instrumental anticipation to the upcoming vocal part yields special insight into French baroque performance practice, and can sometimes prove that the vocal part ought to be performed with notes inégales. For example, in Figures 1 and 2 (both from the first air of Montéclair’s Le Triomphe de l’Amour), the two parts have the exact same melody. The instrumental part is dotted, but the vocal part is not. The vocal part is therefore an example of notes inégales: it is notated equally, but meant to be performed unequally.

Having isolated this melody as unambiguously using notes inégales, we can examine the text underlay to better understand how notes inégales should sound. Notice how naturally the text lends itself to inequality, with a slight lengthening of “ha-” and “des”, and a correspondingly shorter “-bi-” and “re-.” It is also clear that the text is set across the beat. That is, the momentum of the text carries us into the strong beat. I have illustrated this by adding arrows to Figure 2 to show the momentum of the text.

Figures 3 and 4, from Clérambault, Apollon et Doris (Book 4), First Air, contain another example of an unequally notated instrumental anticipation, followed by an equally notated vocal part. The vocal part must therefore also be an example of notes inégales. Here again we see that the text is naturally unequal, and that the momentum of the text is across the beat.

Figures 5 and 6, from Clérambault’s Clitie (Book 5), Second Air, are particularly interesting, since the composer explicitly asks for the eighth notes to be played inégales in the instrumental part. And once again, we see that the text underlay is set across the beat.

At first, it may seem puzzling that composers used a different notation for the same melody. In the first two examples above, the instrumental part was dotted, but the vocal part was not. In the third example, a performance directive asked for notes inégales, and this directive is missing from the vocal part. The central question is: why is the vocal part notated equally?

 The answer seems to be that dotting the vocal part was redundant, since the singer had the text underlay for reference. Since the French language is naturally unequal, there was no reason to waste engraving time to express a subtle rhythm that was obvious to the singer. If you know some French, try saying (or singing) “Pourquoy cher auteur de mes peines” without any inequality… it’s almost impossible! On the other hand, the instrumental part has no text, so there is no signal to the player when or where to use notes inégales. This forced the composer to write out the inequality using dotted rhythms.

This is fundamental to understanding notes inégales: it is a vocal phenomenon. As keyboardists, when we use notes inégales, we are imitating French song.

But what does it mean to imitate French song at the keyboard? Simply put, our performance needs to sound like it has a French text. This precludes a seamless legato: texts have consonants that break up the sound. At the keyboard, armed with a good and sensitive action, we use subtle articulations to project our “text.”

Of course, if we are playing a melody with lots of leaps, or long virtuosic passages, the music is probably instrumentally conceived rather than vocally conceived, and the use of notes inégales would be inappropriate. But primarily stepwise melodies, with clear phrases (like sentences and clauses), will be best projected with notes inégales.

Fingering is an important aspect of playing notes inégales at the keyboard. We must devise a fingering that allows us to easily transfer the momentum across the beat. This is not a new idea: in 1716 François Couperin, in L’art de toucher le claveçin (p. 29), prescribed the right-hand scale fingering shown in Figure 7.

(Note that the passage starts on the second eighth note of the measure. Since the passage ends on an “orphan” eighth note, the engraver didn’t include the first eighth note rest, in order to make the total time values in the two measures add up correctly.)

This fingering aligns perfectly with across-the-beat notes inégales performance. For example, in the ascending scale, the given fingering naturally transfers the momentum from each short 3 to the following longer 4.

It is also important to note that these fingerings are totally unlike North German and English early fingerings. The fingerings of those schools stress within-the-beat performance, and in my opinion, this is simply because those languages are not spoken or sung as unequally as French.

To train ourselves to play the keyboard with a French accent, it can be helpful to add a text when we practice. As an example, I have selected the “Petit Fugue sur la Chromhorne” from François Couperin’s Messe pour les Couvents. For this piece, I engraved an edition myself from a facsimile of the original print, and added a text (see Figure 8). I chose to add the text from the Clérambault aria above (Figures 5 and 6), since it has the same rhythm and meter as the Couperin. Keeping this text in mind while practicing will make the notes inégales sound effortless, and will allow each “au-” to transfer its momentum across the beat to the following “-teur.”

It is vitally important to ignore the instrumental-style beaming, which is a difficult task for performers. When two eighth notes are beamed together (like “cher” and “au-”), we often feel obligated to somehow bind those two notes together. But this impulse will destroy our French accent. When playing French baroque keyboard music, we need to have our beam-cutting scissors close at hand. In fact, the vocal parts from the cantates cited in Figures 2, 5, and 8 are completely unbeamed!

Another impulse to avoid is putting an artificial break at the bar line. For many musicians, this is an ingrained habit. But it is absolutely contrary to a good French accent at the keyboard.

Obviously we cannot conclusively generalize about how a language is
sung from only three examples. I strongly encourage keyboardists to investigate the rich and dramatic music contained in the cantates françoises.
As we get used to singing them, it becomes easy to transfer this singing style to French baroque keyboard music. And when we reach that point, we no longer worry about ratios,
articulation, or fingering. We simply project the imagined text, like an
orator.5 We need only to remember to “play it like you say it!”

 

Notes

1. A review of the literature regarding notes inégales is summarized in Stephen E. Hefling, Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music: Notes Inégales and Overdotting (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 3–61.

2. Guillaume Gabriel Nivers, Livre d’orgue contenant cent Pieces de tous les Tons de l’Eglise. par le Sr. Nivers Me. compositeur en musique et organiste de l’Eglise St. Sulpice de Paris (Paris: chez l’Autheur proche S. Sulpice et R. Ballard seul Imp. du Roy pr. la musique, 1665), Preface. Cited and translated in Judith Caswell, “Rhythmic Inequality and Tempo in French Music Between 1650 and 1740” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1973), 105.

3. Michel de Saint-Lambert, Les Principes du Clavecin Contenant une Explication exacte de tout ce qui concerne la Tablature & le Clavier (Paris: Chez Christophe Ballard, 1702), pp. 25-26. Cited and translated in Caswell, “Rhythmic Inequality,” 141.

4. The history of this repertoire can be found in David Tunley, The Eighteenth Century French Cantata (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Many of the cantates are available in facsimile.

5. Those interested in the art of French baroque musical oration will find Patricia Ranum’s book, The Harmonic Orator, to be an invaluable and inspiring guide.

 

Bibliography

Clérambault, Louis-Nicolas. Cantates Françoises Mellées de Simphonies; Dediées a Monseigneur le Maréchal de Villeroy. Composées par Mr. Clérambault, Livre IVe. Paris: L’Auteur, 1720. Facsimile, with an introduction by David Tunley (The eighteenth century French cantata, 10). New York: Garland, 1990.

———. Cantates Françoises Mellées de Simphonies; Dediées a la Reine. Composées par Mr. Clérambault, Livre Ve. Paris: L’Auteur, 1726. Facsimile, with an introduction by David Tunley (The eighteenth century French cantata, 10). New York: Garland, 1990.

Couperin, François. L’art de toucher le clavecin. Paris: l’Auteur, 1716. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb38808175z (accessed May 3, 2015).

———. Pièces d’orgue II. Messe propre pour les couvents de religieux et religieuses. Paris: Chéz l’autheur, 1690. Facsimile. Courlay, France: Editions J. M. Fuzeau, 1986.

Helfling, Stephen E. Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Music: Notes Inégales and Overdotting. New York: Schirmer Books, 1993. 

Montéclair, Michel Pignolet de. Cantates: à Une et à Deux Voix et avec Sinfonie. Composées par Mr. Montèclair. Second Livre, qui contient six Cantates Françoises et une Cantate Italiène. Paris: L’Auteur, Foucault, [s.d.]. Facsimile, with an introduction by David Tunley (The eighteenth century French cantata, 12). New York: Garland, 1990.

Ranum, Patricia M. The Harmonic Orator. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press, 2001.

Tunley, David. The Eighteenth Century French Cantata. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

 

Transcribing for organ: A historical overview

Yves Rechsteiner

Yves Rechsteiner studied organ and harpsichord in Geneva and specialized in fortepiano and basso continuo at the Schola Cantorum of Basel. A prizewinner in several international competitions, including Geneva, Prague, and Bruges, he was appointed basso continuo teacher and head of the early music department at the Conservatoire Supérieur of Lyon in 1995. He has recorded various projects involving a transcription process: Bach on pedal harpsichord in 2002, Rameau in 2010 (awarded “Diapason d’or”) and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique on the Puget organ of la Dalbade in Toulouse in 2013. Rechsteiner has founded a duo with percussionist H. C. Caget and developed further arrangement of Frank Zappa’s music to rock progressive music including an organ version of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. He is the artistic director of the Festival Toulouse les Orgues, France.

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Since the Renaissance, keyboard repertoire has included pieces originally written for other instruments. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the transcription became a genre of its own. Arrangements for organ have been popular since the nineteenth century, and they belonged to the virtuoso’s repertoire. From Edwin Lemare to Cameron Carpenter, arrangements range from spectacular showpieces to well-known tunes, treated so as to make use of the most up-to-date instruments.

Adapting pieces originally for other instruments to the organ (or another instrument) was not limited to the nineteenth century. Bach played his sonatas and partitas for violin on the clavichord. Earlier, Jean-Henri D’Anglebert made beautiful harpsichord pieces out of Jean Baptiste Lully’s best-known tunes. In the other direction, Jean-Philippe Rameau converted some of his harpsichord pieces into dances, airs, and choruses in his operas; these same pieces were played later by his pupil Claude Balbastre on the concert organ for Le Concert Spirituel in Paris. Haydn’s music was already arranged for organ in his lifetime, and from Liszt onwards, organ transcription became a strong tradition.

My interest in this transformative art form—whether called transcription, arrangement, or adaptation—has led me to focus on J. S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin, Jean-Philippe Rameau and the French Classic organists, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This essay will describes some features of these period transcriptions, especially the surprising liberties that were sometimes taken with the original musical text, and will give a few examples of my own attempts at transcription.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach’s arrangements for organ or harpsichord are well known. In his youth he arranged several of Vivaldi’s concerti grossi for organ, and others for harpsichord. Much later he edited what are known as the Schübler Chorales, which are in fact movements from his church cantatas. But the most fascinating examples are the keyboard versions of part of his Three Sonatas and Three Partitas for Violin, BWV 1001–1006, because of the richness of the new parts added in the transcription. Examples 1–3 show various techniques. Reducing an orchestral texture for an organ implies other techniques than expanding a violin texture on the keyboard. Transferring a trio for voice, oboe, and continuo on the organ requires nearly no effort, since each part can simply be played by one hand or foot. 

Let us examine Bach’s way of playing Vivaldi on a baroque German organ. One approach Bach used was “interpreting” the original writing with little changes. Example 1 shows Vivaldi beginning his concerto (RV 565) with a duo of two solo violins. In Example 2, Bach takes the repeated bottom D notes and makes a continuous new “cello” part with it. He does not really change the notes, but reorganizes them slightly.

Another technique involved changing notes, adding ornaments or embellishments. Example 3 shows a short passage from a Vivaldi continuo part, with Bach’s version shown in Example 4. Examples 5 and 6 show again how Bach ornaments Vivaldi’s line and how he does not hesitate to add new material, if the musical logic suggests it. Analyzing Bach’s version, we find that he:

­• frequently plays a motive one or two octaves higher or lower than written

changes notes in order to fit into a compass limit

does not respect all of Vivaldi’s tutti/solo indications. 

The same liberties can be found in Bach’s keyboard version of his sonatas for violin. Bach’s transcriptions can reveal a “hidden polyphony.” This can be seen in Examples 7 and 8. An original violin part is shown in Example 7; its keyboard version is shown in Example 8

Changing of notes and adding ornamentation can be seen in comparing Examples 9 and 10. In the latter, Bach does not only embellish a cadence, a common practice in the Italian Corellian style, but he also adds entirely new figuration in place of plain notes. Bach would also add new parts, voices, or accompaniments. The original violin opening of the Sonata in C Major for violin, BWV 1005 (Example 11), becomes under Bach’s hand the passage shown in Example 12. Clearly “Bach the transcriber” makes no attempt to respect the characteristics of an original piece. On the contrary, in each transcription one is astonished by the creative hand of “Bach the composer” and “Bach the organist.”

Johann Friedrich Agricola gives this wonderful testimony: “Bach would often play them (the violin sonatas) on the clavichord, adding as many harmonies as he found necessary. Thus he recognized the need for a harmony of sound which he could not fully attain in that composition.”1 

 

Rameau, Daquin, and Balbastre

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) began his career as an organist in central France. He was employed in several cities, including Avignon, Dijon, Lyon, Clermont, and Paris.

He published harpsichord pieces with some success and later gained respect for his complex and rich theoretical writings. His impressive Traité de l’harmonie [Treatise on Harmony] was published in Paris in 1722. But it was only at the age of fifty that he begun his career as an opera composer!

Rameau left no music for organ, but his pupil Claude Balbastre (1724–1799) was already playing airs from the composer’s operas in 1757 on the organ in the Tuileries Palace, used for the Concert Spirituel, one of the first public concert series. This institution, which had been created in Paris by Anne Danican Philidor in 1725, housed the first French concert organ. Audiences appreciated the organ in its secular role, moreover, to the point that some listeners, though used to the virtuosic feats of other instruments, were literally “lifted out of their seats” by what they heard. 

Thanks to detailed programs, we know precisely what Balbastre played for his public. Apart from his own organ concertos, his favorite pieces were by Rameau—the overtures to Pygmalion and Les Sauvages. A couple of other overtures are mentioned among other pieces by Rameau, Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, and Pancrace Royer. Since no music is preserved, one can only guess how Balbastre treated Rameau’s melodies. In order to get some ideas, one must understand how the classical French organist used to play. The great names from that time include Louis-Claude Daquin (1694–1772) and Balbastre, both mainly known today for their Noëls, tunes that were traditionally played around Christmas by organists. Publications of Noëls appear regularly through the entire eighteenth century.

Interestingly, Daquin’s Noëls for organ look very similar to Rameau’s variations on “Les Niais de Sologne,” an air found later in the opera Dardanus. Both composers develop variations, called “double,” every time in a shorter note value. Examples 13 through 15 by Daquin show the theme, the first double, and the second double. Daquin also utilizes the various divisions and registrations of the organ to achieve dynamic effects, including interesting use of the French Grand Jeu, Petit Jeu, Cornet, and Echo. Compare them with the similar technique used by Rameau in Examples 16 through 18.

Regarding the lively dances like gigues, gavottes, or the pastoral musettes, one remembers Charles Burney’s testimony about Balbastre’s playing all these dances during Mass at Notre-Dame.2 Luckily Dom Bedos de Celle helps us in giving detailed registrations for these typical pieces, recording again a regular playing of dance movement on the organ.3

Balbastre’s own descriptive pieces of battle, with clusters, rapid scales, and quickly repeated chords, anticipates the fashion of orage one or two generations later. It is therefore not too difficult to play a similar effect with some of the orchestral orages (storms) already present in Rameau’s operas. Examples 19 through 21 show the author’s version for organ of the “Air for the African slaves” from Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, realized in the same spirit: simple two-voice writing at the beginning, then a double, and finally a new harmonization.

Finally, if one looks into Rameau’s own way of transcribing his harpsichord pieces into orchestral movements, one is struck by the importance of melody. The Air is the only musical element that remains unchanged. Rameau seems to like composing new basses, changing arbitrarily the harmonies, and adding new counterparts when he needs it—using a simple melody successively as a solo aria, then in duo form, before becoming a quartet and a chorus! Again, “Rameau the transcriber” cannot be detached from “Rameau the composer.”

 

Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt

It seems rather provocative to play Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique on the organ. This music was very innovative in its refined and rich orchestration, but Berlioz is known to have had no interest for the organ. The impossibility to swell the sound was considered by Berlioz to be barbaric, and he considered the mixtures to be a series of parallel fifths and octaves. . . .4 

It must be remembered that most of the French organs at the time of Berlioz’s composition of the Symphonie Fantastique (1830) had no swell boxes, and that the (de)crescendo possibilities were very limited. Departing from that evidence, it seemed necessary to imagine Berlioz on a later instrument equipped at least with a swell box and some appel d’anches. (See Examples 24–26.)

Let us examine some period transcriptions for organ, in order to again have some models. In France, Edouard Baptiste played a lot of arranged pieces (especially Beethoven) on the monumental organ at Saint-Eustache in Paris, but despite precise and inventive registrations, his organ transcriptions remain surprisingly similar to piano reductions. Obviously Liszt, a close friend to Berlioz, is a better model. Not only was he the first transcriber of the Symphony Fantastique on the piano, but he left an organ version of his own Orpheus, showing directly how he would proceed. Example 22 shows a passage from the orchestral version of Orpheus, while Example 23 shows Liszt’s organ transcription.

Like Bach, Liszt takes numerous liberties, which would not be prescribed today:

no attempt to respect the orchestration through similar colors on the organ

playing the melody an octave lower as soon as the limits of the keyboard are reached, without making further effort of registration to keep it entirely at its proper place

modifying entire accompanying patterns. Some complex arpeggios on the violin and the harp are replaced by one slower arpeggio taken in the left hand. This new compositional element can even be used longer than in the orchestral version, in a measure where the orchestra pauses under the soloist

abandoning secondary musical elements

adding new measures in order to get a better crescendo

composing entirely new passages when the orchestral version seems to be too difficult to reduce.

 

Conclusion

In all historical examples, we see a rather creative approach in the transcription process. During the Baroque period, few details had to be abandoned from the orchestral score; but sometimes, to enliven this keyboard version, various ornaments, embellishments, or new parts needed to be added. Obviously these additions were made in the style and according to the character of the piece.

In any case, when the complexity of the orchestral writing did not allow exact transposing on the keyboard, one chose carefully the parts to be kept, according to their musical importance. A subtle hierarchy existed between the main melody, important counterparts, the bass, and some accompanying material. These secondary parts, like broken chords and florid fast notes, were likely to be radically transformed in order to sound better on the keyboard instrument. It was also a way to make a passage more comfortable to play and avoid any useless difficulty due to its origin on a foreign instrument.

In this process, the transcription is no longer a reduced version of an original piece, but it becomes literally a new organ or harpsichord work, using the same idioms, techniques, and musical possibilities as the best pieces written explicitly for the organ. Bach’s versions of Vivaldi’s concerti grossi show that, on one hand, Bach loses some of the sound qualities of the concerto grosso for strings, without mentioning the stiff sound of the organ compared to the violins. But on the other hand, Bach introduces sufficiently new elements that enrich his keyboard version and make a proper organ piece of it.

This approach seems to be still alive at Liszt’s time, but the increasing development of transcription in the nineteenth century also created a rejection of it. The defense of the proper organ repertoire became until recently the rule; the transcription was despised because it would only be some virtuoso’s amusement and not suited to the character of the organ.

The above examples show that, on the contrary, a good transcription fits the nature of the instrument by using the right means, playing techniques, and registrations according to the style of music.

Notes

1. Johann Friedrich Agricola, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, Berlin, 1755.

2. Charles Burney, Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy, Paris, 1770, quoted in Preface to Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, Pièces de Clavecin d’Orgue et de Forte Piano, ed. A. Curtis, Huegel, 1973, p. viii.

3. Dom Bedos de Celle, L’art du facteur d’orgue, Paris, 1766, pp. 523–536.

4. Hector Berlioz, Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration, Paris, 1844, see chapters “Organ” and “Harmonium.”

 

In the Wind. . . .

John Bishop
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Music in terrible times

 

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

—Leonard Bernstein

 

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia under the code name Operation Barbarossa, a plan that led to the Siege of Leningrad, the horrific isolation of a city of three million people. After systematically closing access routes to the city during the summer, the German army closed the last road into Leningrad on September 8, and during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Leningrad (then known as St. Petersburg) in 1906 and established himself as an outspoken, provocative artist. In 1936, Joseph Stalin stormed out of the Bolshoi Theater after the third act of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The next morning, the state newspaper, Pravda, wrote that Shostakovich was “playing a game” that “may end very badly.”1

Shostakovich wrote the first two movements of his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as the siege began. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia in October 1941, after all roads were closed, during a period when 650,000 civilians were evacuated, mostly by boat across Lake Ladoga or by ice road across the lake as winter set in. There, he completed the symphony on December 27, 1941, dedicating it to the city of Leningrad. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater in Kuibyshev performed the premiere on March 5, 1942. Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere in a radio broadcast on July 19.

The people of Leningrad first heard “their” symphony on August 9, 1942. The score and parts were flown into the city by a pilot, skimming above the surface of Lake Ladoga to avoid detection. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, and there were only 15 players remaining in the orchestra of the city’s radio station, so the ensemble was filled out by musicians who were serving as active soldiers in the Russian army, released by their commanders for the occasion. 

I hadn’t thought much about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony until last week when Wendy and I heard it performed in Carnegie Hall by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Six minutes into the opening Allegretto, when the muffled snare drum started a relentless ostinato and pizzicato violins introduced the seductive melody, I was on the edge of my seat. The oboe repeated the melody, echoed phrase by phrase by the clarinet, and the haunting tune repeated with ever increasing orchestration, ever more complex harmonizations, and ever expanding, even maniacal intensity until the orchestra reached a towering climax with all the thundering guns of the percussion section, and an astonishing closing statement of the theme by the bass brass, as powerful in that mighty orchestra as all the diaphonic fog horns the Coast Guard could muster from Maine to North Carolina.

We were dressed for a night at the symphony and seated on red velvet chairs in a box in the first balcony. The heat was on, the hall was comfortable, the lighting was perfect, and the legendary acoustics of Carnegie Hall brought every nuance of the complex score to every ear in the house. Each musician on the stage was playing a first-class instrument in perfect condition, and each was supported by a comfortable salary and pension plan. You could just tell that they had all practiced earlier in the day. And by the way, that was the first time I heard the BSO’s new conductor, Andris Nelsons. Wow! They should keep him.

It takes about 75 minutes to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The program book listed a huge orchestra, with a phalanx of percussion, and almost as a footnote, “additional brass group (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones).” Those bad boys and girls were seated in a long row, stage right, with the traditional brass section (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba) seated stage left.

That first performance in Leningrad must have been a very different experience. If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

The performance was broadcast by radio, and over loudspeakers in public places. I bet that not one member of that audience was sitting on red velvet. I wonder if there’s a Syrian refugee at work on the score of the Aleppo Symphony.

 

A cathedral in ruins

On November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) dropped more than 36,000 bombs on the city of Coventry in Great Britain, killing more than 1,400 people. Hundreds of structures were destroyed, including St. Michael’s Cathedral. Besides the human loss and suffering, think of the cultural and historical loss. How many works of art, how many rare books, how many pipe organs were destroyed during that attack?

I was seven days old when Queen Elizabeth II laid the cornerstone for the new Coventry Cathedral on March 23, 1956, and the controversial contemporary structure was consecrated on May 25, 1962. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a choral work for that occasion, with freedom to choose topic and content. Britten’s War Requiem comprises a combination of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems of the British poet, Wilfred Owen, who at the age of 25 was killed in action in the British army during World War I, seven days before the Armistice of 1918.

War Requiem is dedicated to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerly, David Gill, and Michael Halliday, all close friends of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who were killed during World War II. Like Shostakovich’s Seventh, War Requiem is scored for a huge force of musicians, including full orchestra, chamber orchestra, four-part chorus, soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, a boy choir (at a distance) accompanied by a chamber organ or harmonium, and grand organ. It’s about five minutes longer than Shostakovich’s Seventh, and it rings with the deepest emotions.

Wilfred Owen became well known as a war poet posthumously. He was commander of a rifle brigade, and the poems that Britten chose to include in War Requiem were written in the field. Imagine the young man on a bedroll in a military camp, writing Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action:

 

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great Gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;

Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse

Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!

Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse.

Spend our resentment, cannon, yea disperse

Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison

Must wither innocent of enmity,

Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,

Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.

But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul.

I had to look up some of the words. In English, there are many words for curse.

 

He plays like a German.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) is one of the towering figures of the pipe organ. He was born into a family of organbuilders in Lyon, France, and his earliest studies were with his father François-Charles, a church organist. The great French organbuilder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, a friend of the Widor family, encouraged young Charles-Marie to go to Belgium to study with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens at the Royal Brussels Conservatoire.

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–1869) was a prominent French organist, known for his many compositions in “popular” style. I have enjoyed playing his music, especially programming the famous Sorties as rollicking larks, foils to more serious, meaty music. Cavaillé-Coll advocated Lefébure-Wély, arranging for him to play the dedication recitals of many of his prominent organs. It’s no accident that he was installed as organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in 1863, home to Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental magnum opus completed in 1860. But by that time, the young Widor was in Cavaillé-Coll’s sights as a young genius who represented the future of serious organ playing and composition, and Cavaillé-Coll apparently grew tired of Lefébure-Wély’s shallower antics, feeling that his huge and sophisticated organ was deserving of a more serious musician. Legend has it that Cavaillé-Coll made life miserable for Lefébure-Wély, even hinting that contributed to his death.

In the late 1860s, Paris was in a state of political tension as Prussia was on a tear toward German unification, and the French Empire of Napoleon III anticipated and feared that if the Prussians succeeded, the balance of power in Europe would be upset. Sure enough, on July 16, 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and three days later, the Germans invaded France.

With that political climate as background, Cavaillé-Coll championed the 26-year-old Widor to the rector at Saint-Sulpice, but Parisian organists, many of whom must have wanted a crack at the plum position, protested that Widor “plays like a German.”2 That explains why the rector offered Widor a temporary position, feeling the weight of Cavaillé-Coll’s recommendation, but not making a full commitment. Widor started his legendary tenure in a France occupied by Germany. Marcel Dupré, in his memoir Recollections, shares Widor’s telling of presenting himself at the rectory when the year was up, hoping for an upgrade in his status. The rector simply wished him “Happy New Year,” so Widor assumed he should just keep playing—64 years as temporary organist!

Marcel Dupré succeeded Widor as organist at Saint-Sulpice in 1934. German troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, starting the occupation that lasted until 1944. In his memoir, Dupré wrote that as the occupation began, while many Parisians were fleeing the city, he and his wife Jeanne stayed at their home in Meudon, about 6½ miles from Paris. The city was deserted and transportation was stopped. For the first two Sundays, Marcel and Jeanne Dupré walked together back and forth to Saint-Sulpice: “Our fatigue was nothing compared to the joy we felt when we reached the organ, and I know that the parishioners still remaining in Paris found comfort when they heard it.”

A few days into the occupation, German officers visited Dupré’s home in Meudon, where there was a clear view of the entire city. The Germans intended to install anti-aircraft guns on the roof of Dupré’s salle d’orgue. When they saw the hall’s interior, they thought it was a chapel, but Jeanne Dupré told them that a musician worked in that room. The Germans reconsidered, and occupied the roof of the house next door, evicting the woman who lived there.3

 

A cold night at Stalag VIIIA

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a soldier in the French army during the German invasion of 1940 when he was captured and taken to a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, near the modern border between Germany and Poland. Fellow prisoners included the clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier, which explains the unusual instrumentation of Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which Messiaen wrote after his arrival at Stalag VIIIA. Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic guard, provided Messiaen with paper and pencil.

The premiere of the quartet was presented on January 15, 1941, in an unheated space in Barracks 27, using instruments that Brüll helped procure. The performance was announced with a flyer bearing an official stamp, “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft” (approved). There was an audience of about 400 prisoners, with German officers sitting in the front row.4

Messiaen’s deep Catholic faith was at the heart of the composition. In the preface to the score, he quoted from the Book of Revelations, Chapter 10:

 

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire . . . and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth. . . . And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. . . .

 

The opening movement is titled Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). In the preface, Messiaen described the movement:

 

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane, and you have the harmonious silence of heaven.

Imagine the mix of emotions of prisoners of war, playing that new music on beat-up instruments in a frigid prison room, with their captors in the audience shivering among the other prisoners, the throng listening to music expressing the sadness, the rage, the pathos of war.

 

Just another gig

Have you ever felt that a gig was a nuisance? “Do I really have to play that wedding on Saturday or grind out another Sunday in the heart of Pentecost?” Is your phone sitting on the console on “silent” while you’re playing a service? Have you ever sent a text from the bench during a sermon? When I receive a text from an organist at 10:42 on a Sunday morning, letting me know that the swell shutters are squeaking, I know that his eyes are not on the road, and that his heart is not in church. 

I keep two artifacts in the top drawer of my bureau in our bedroom in Maine. One is a note I received 25 years ago from a soon-to-be bride. I had met with her and her fiancé a few evenings earlier to help them choose the music for their wedding. It’s a simple drugstore thank-you card, and the handwriting is childish (the transcription is verbatim):

 

Mr. Bishop, we wanted to thank you for such a nice night, we had picking out our music. You were so very nice, the way you helped us, pick out what we wanted. I’am sure our wedding day will sound beautiful, thank you again for you kindness. Steve and Ruth.

Maybe Steve and Ruth’s wedding was another go-round of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Did I think it was just another gig I had to finish? Doesn’t matter. It was important to them.

Music matters. Music is important. A bride and groom and a war-torn city have something in common. They can express themselves through music. If you think you’re a vendor providing music, standing in line for a check with limo drivers, florists, and caterers, you’re missing something. Anyone can wrap bacon around a scallop. You know how to play the organ. You’re providing a sacred art. It matters to people. You’re their voice.

So pretty

The second artifact in that bureau drawer is my draft card, dated April 15, 1974. The draft had ended in 1973, but the Selective Service issued numbers to all American men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended. I had to report to Local Board No. 108 in the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (There’s a McDonald’s in that storefront now.)

In 1968, while war was raging in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Leonard Bernstein wrote the song, So Pretty, with lyrics by Comden and Green for a fundraiser for Broadway for Peace, where it was premiered by Barbra Streisand, with Bernstein at the piano. A child is learning in school about a far-away place, wondering why the pretty people are dying. The teacher replies, “. . . they must die for peace. . . .”5 ν

Notes

1. Book review: “Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,” The Washington Post, Peter Finn, October 3, 2014, quoting from the book by Brian Moynahan.

2. That story was told to me by Daniel Roth, current organist at St. Sulpice, as we walked together up Park Avenue in New York after he played a recital at the Church of the Resurrection. 

3. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, page 107, Belwin-Mills, 1972.

4. Alex Ross, “Revelations: The Story behind Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time,’” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.

5. You can read the lyrics of So Pretty here: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=7245&lang=en, and hear Deborah Voight singing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYlwwRmv8c.

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