Aloÿs Claussmann Organist and Composer (1850–1926): A re-estimation

Steven Young

Steven Young, DMA, serves as a professor of music at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in music theory and conducts the choral ensembles. As an organist, he has recorded selected works of Henry M. Dunham, a Boston-based composer. He has written several articles on the lesser-known organists-composers of France including Charles Quef, Pierre Kunc, and Aloys Claussmann. Young is minister of music/cantor at First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brockton, Massachusetts.

The name of Marthe Bracquemond is little known in the musical world, yet she was a pioneer as one of the first female organists to break with established expectations in musical training. Additionally, she was the busiest organ performer on the airwaves of France between 1931 and 1939. She appeared more regularly than any other organist, male or female, on the Transmission sans fil (TSF) broadcasts aired by Radio-Paris P. T. T. (a division of France’s Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones), performing numerous concerts (sometimes weekly) for several years, presenting a varied repertoire of works mainly written by French composers from every age. By her musical accomplishments and activities, she helped shatter the gender barrier for female performers, but especially female organists.

Personal history

Bracquemond’s musical career appears to have been unique among her contemporaries. While there were several well-known and established female organists during her early years, all had the benefit of a Paris Conservatoire pedigree where they garnered the première prix in organ performance, notably Marie Prestat (1862–1933), Genèvieve Mercier (1900–1934), and Joséphine Boulay (1869–1925). Bracquemond did not attend the Conservatoire or any other musical institution; all her musical training appears to have been through private study with some of the finest teachers in Paris, including composition with Charles-Marie Widor and Henri Büsser, piano with Louis Vierne, and organ under the tutelage France’s premiere organ pedagogue, Marcel Dupré.¹

While little information exists about her early or personal life, she descended from a line of artists who specialized in the fine arts, including painting and sculpting. From her birth in 1898, art and artists surely surrounded her. Her father, Pierre Bracquemond (1870–1926), was a sculptor and painter, renowned for his work throughout his life. Auguste Joseph “Felix” Bracquemond (1833–1914), her grandfather, was a renowned sculptor, painter, and lithographer, and her grandmother, Marie (1840–1916), was often considered as one of the finest women impressionist painters of her generation (alongside Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalès). Her grandmother may have served as an inspiration as she was one of the few successful female artists in Paris at the time whose training was equally non-traditional.

However, her musical talent and interests seem to have come from her mother’s side of the family. Renée Berbadette, about whom little information exists, was the daughter of the acclaimed musicologist and pianist Pierre Hippolyte Berbadette.² Hippolyte was an active musician in La Rochelle, where the family home remained for many years. Hippolyte was also an amateur composer. Coming of age in such an environment, it would seem that Marthe had little choice but to become an artist. Bracquemond first came to public attention as a composer, having had several works performed in various venues before she made her public performance debut; these compositions included the Trois pièces pour quatour à cordes and Trois Mélodies, her first published opus.

Bracquemond’s first documented performance mentions her as an accompanist to the aforementioned songs given at a concert of the Société Musical Indépendante, which took place in 1923. She again appeared as an accompanist in 1924 as part of a concert given by Marcel Dupré, where she played the organ. Her first solo organ performance was part of a program shared with Louis Vierne, where she performed works of Bach and Franck. The reviewer seems to have been more impressed by her gender (“ce qui plus rare . . . une organiste femme”), though he did comment on her remarkable playing.³ Early in 1925 she participated in a concert spirituel at l’Oratoire de la Louvre, where she collaborated with several other musicians.⁴

As she progressed musically, she developed an interest in early music, which in 1925 led her to become an active member of the Société Française de Musicologie. One result of her interest in musicology was the regular inclusion of early French organ compositions on her recital programs.⁵ This interest in early music was shared with the tenor Yves Tinayre, a frequent collaborator of Bracquemond’s. Their joint concerts often featured many works by Baroque composers. In 1927 Bracquemond was the only organist to appear on the cover of Le Courrier Musical, one of the leading musical periodicals of the time, as she gave her so-called “début” recital at the Salle Majestic on February 22, though she had performed previously in several other venues. Many of the musicians appearing on the cover were often new and upcoming talent. The event must have been a tour-de-force as the reviewer claimed it lasted for two hours and contained seventeen pieces. (She was scheduled to perform with tenor Yves Tinayre and some instrumentalists.)⁶ The program featured numerous Baroque works, including the first performance of a canzona by Domenico Zipoli. Additionally, the program included the premiere of three of the six pieces from the recently published Pièces de Fantaisie, Première suite, opus 51, by Louis Vierne.⁷ The reviewer described the program as “intelligently constructed” and having been presented with “a lovely artistry.”

Additionally, she was a member of an all-female orchestra under the direction of Jane Evrard that specialized in early music.⁸ In all probability, this likely contributed to her interest in and her organ performances of numerous early French and German composers.

She was twice married during her lifetime, and she did have at least one child from her first marriage. She served as organist at l’Eglise Reformée de la Passy on the rue Cortambert in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, one of the few Protestant churches in the city, for twenty-five years between 1937 and 1962.

She composed only two organ works, which were published by Editions musicales de la Schola Cantorum (1951) and Alphonse Leduc (1954), respectively; she was the only female composer on the Leduc organ publication roster during the 1950s. Additionally, she made two recordings, one of some noëls that she arranged for choir on which she performed as soloist and accompanist, and a second where she is part of the orchestre feminine under Evrard.⁹ She enjoyed a long career as a performer and collaborator with numerous other musicians, but it appears that most of her earliest performances were given as recitals on the radio.¹⁰

“Queen of the airwaves”

The history of these radio concerts is a rich one for the organ. As early as 1924, regularly scheduled broadcasts of organ recitals from the Salon Cavaillé-Coll were heard across France, featuring the organist Georges Jacob.¹¹ The first documentable radio broadcast given by Bracquemond took place on February 15, 1928, where she played the organ in a performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony on Paris P. T. T. Nearly every worthy organist played this work, seemingly a rite of passage granting entrance into the echelon of the solo performer. She was heard again on December 6, 1928, when she accompanied Lyse de Florane, a contralto, in numerous arias by French, Italian, and German composers. Bracquemond performed solo organ works including the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach, Sonata in A Major by Mendelssohn, an etude of Schumann, and two movements from the Première Symphonie, opus 14, of Vierne.¹² The program appears to be a repeat (or rebroadcast) of one performed a few days earlier at the Salle Majestic.¹³ The organ at the Majestic was constructed by Théodore Puget, a builder from Toulouse, which featured a tubular-pneumatic action, a rarity among the organs of Paris. The program began at 8:45 p.m. and would appear to have lasted well over an hour.

The first of the solo radio recitals took place on November 22, 1930, with Bracquemond performing a varied program featuring works by Bach, Buxtehude, Couperin, Schumann, Franck, Dupré, and Widor. Four weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she played two programs. The first featured music by Mendelssohn, Franck, Dupré, and Vierne; the second featured French noëls arranged by Alexandre Guilmant, Henri Büsser, and Louis-Claude d’Aquin, as well as regional tunes from Alsace and elsewhere. The Büsser selection, Deux Noëls, was dedicated to her.¹⁴ Shortly after that, she began to perform as a regularly featured artist, sharing the responsibility with Pierre Revel, a première prix winner in the Conservatory organ class of Guilmant.

When Georges Jacob retired from the regular “on air” performances, l’Association de les Amis de l’Orgue took control of the broadcasts and decided upon a rather rigid set of requirements for choosing performers. The first criterion was that each should have garnered a première prix from the Conservatoire. One would assume that would automatically rule out Bracquemond, as she had no conservatory training. But, it did not. In fact, Bracquemond was the most active performer on the musical roster, performing eighty-seven times over the five years (1934–1939) in which she began concertizing on these broadcasts. Her first two years seem to have been the busiest, performing twenty-seven radio concerts each year, in which she played many works by Franck, Bach, Widor, and Vierne, as well as works by Dupré and the young Maurice Duruflé, notably his recently published Prélude, Adagio, et Choral varié sur le thème du ‘Veni Creator,’ opus 4, winner of the composition competition sponsored by Les Amis de l’Orgue. Also during this season, she introduced French listeners to organ works by Swedish composers Waldemar Åhlén and Otto Olsson, among others.

In this series, she rarely repeated a single piece from her vast repertoire. In 1935 she performed her radio concerts from various venues in Paris, including the Salle Cavaillé-Coll, the Schola Cantorum, l’Église Saint-Sulpice, and chez Miramon Fitz-James (one of the presidents of l’Association de les Amis de l’orgue). It is during this season we find the first mention of her Variations sur un air d’Auvergne, which may be the same as the Variations sur un Noël,¹⁵ and her first performances of works by Olivier Messiaen.

In 1936 she made fourteen radio appearances. Those performances began in January with two concerts and resumed in April upon her return from her American concert tour.¹⁶ This tour seems to have been an extension of her radio work, as only three concert listings appear in any American periodicals of the time. However, Paris-midi reported upon her return that her “recitals and her sessions with National Broadcasting have earned her the greatest success,”¹⁷ so she may have performed more than is documentable.

The performances were aired on WJZ radio out of New York. The station had a large broadcast area as newspapers in Rochester, New York, Des Moines, Iowa, Chillicothe, Ohio, Saint Louis, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, all make mention of one or more of her performances.

Back in France, there were nine radio concerts in 1937, five in 1938 and 1939. The diminishing number of performances may have been a result of her position at l’Église reformée and the increasing number of concert organists. In 1939 with the onset of World War II, the series was terminated.

During World War II, Bracquemond seems to have been less active in the musical scene, possibly contributing to the war effort. There are no records of public performances, though on the rarest of occasions, some of her chamber music appeared on concert programs given during the war years (1939–1944). It appears that she rented a hall containing an organ, where she gave concerts. A newspaper announcement mentions concerts at the “salle d’orgue de Marthe Bracquemond.” She may have used this space for recitals, teaching, and/or practicing. This hall may have been used during the war, but it was certainly used following it. Two years after the war ended, she made a triumphant return to major concert venues, namely the Salle Pleyel and the Salle Gaveau. A review of a 1946 concert stated:

The return of Marthe Bracquemond into Parisian musical life must be noted. The day before yesterday, November 13, she gave a magnificent program at the Salle Pleyel, and on Wednesday November 27, at 6:30 p. m., she will continue her “Cycle of original recitals” in a magnificent program with major works of Mozart, Roger-Ducasse, Saint-Saëns, Louis Vierne,
and Widor.¹⁸

Bracquemond continued to give solo and shared recitals until 1950; she also performed regularly as part of the concerts at La Schola Cantorum, where she would play solo pieces between choral selections.¹⁹ These programs featured some of the finest pieces by French composers and others. Bracquemond, herself a composer, only performed one of her own compositions during this period; it was a work entitled La Fôret, an unpublished score that may not be extant. Marie-Louise Girod, former organist of l’Oratoire de la Louvre, considered it to be a formidable work, possibly Bracquemond’s most extensive composition for the instrument.²⁰ Her only other published organ piece, Ombres: Suite pour la Passion, has no documentable public performance by the composer.

Bracquemond’s unusual repertoire

Bracquemond’s repertoire included many of the celebrated works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Felix Mendelssohn, and a few other well-known early German composers as well as music of Scandinavia, but she focused on the music of France and Belgium. In addition to the music of Joseph Jongen, a well-respected Belgian organist/composer, Bracquemond performed the music of Père Jean-Marie Plum, a contemporary of hers (1899–1944), on at least seven different occasions. Plum’s music is little known and does not seem to have enjoyed wide acknowledgement in the organ community of France or Belgium, but it is of solid musical construction, worthy of performance. Plum’s post-Romantic aesthetic is often likened to that of Charles Tournemire and Maurice Duruflé because of his similar infusion of Gregorian themes into modern, chromatic harmony. Perhaps this style is what attracted Bracquemond to the music. In 1936 Bracquemond played Plum’s chant-based four-movement Symphonie Eucharistique, opus 115, composed in 1934.²¹

As mentioned above, Bracquemond performed some contemporary Scandinavian music, though many of the compositions are not listed. A reference to Variations sur un choral by Åhlén (1894–1982), a Swedish composer, appears in her repertoire list. In his list of works, there is one Koraalpartita; one might assume this to be the work she performed. She also performed music of Jean Sibelius and Oskar Merikanto, notably his 1918 Passacaglia.²² Other lesser-known composers featured in these concerts included Patrik Vretblad and David Wikander.

She was a fierce champion of contemporary French organ music, performing and premiering works by members of La Jeune France, formerly La Spirale, a group of composers that included Olivier Messiaen, André Jolivet, Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, and Georges Migot. In 1936 she performed Jolivet’s Prélude apocalyptique, a work dedicated to her, the year following its publication. The piece was reworked and later recast as Hymne a l’univers. Bracquemond also played Migot’s Le Tombeau de Nicolas de Grigny, which he dedicated to her.
Bracquemond’s affiliation with this group likely led to the performance of another unpublished work, Trois poèmes, given at a concert of La Spirale that showcased the compositions of women; the event was billed as a concert of musique féminine française in 1937.²³ Several years later, her colleague Léonce de Saint-Martin, then organist of Notre-Dame, dedicated his 1944 Toccata de la Libération to her, and she gave a performance of the work in 1946.²⁴

Bracquemond demonstrates what it truly means to be a collaborator. In addition to her “debut” concert, which she shared with a tenor, she frequently collaborated with other musicians in live performances and during her radio broadcasts. She performed with numerous singers, instrumentalists, and in 1935 with the renowned pianist Jean Doyen, performing Marcel Dupré’s Ballade pour piano et orgue, opus 30 (1932), a work Dupré himself often played with his daughter Marguerite during concert tours.

Compositional career

As a composer, Bracquemond produced several pieces, but published a very small body of her work.²⁵ The aforementioned La Fôret for organ, several mélodies, as well as a larger piece for orchestra are among those unpublished pieces. Her published works include Trois Mélodies, a string quartet, music for flute (and harp), some brief choral pieces, and two more substantial works for organ.

Her earliest published composition, Trois Mélodies, appeared in 1922 and is dedicated to Louis Vierne, her piano teacher of many years. A cursory examination of the work shows some of Vierne’s compositional influence evidenced in the use of ostinato rhythmic and harmonic patterns, frequently set in a tripartite form. Her poet choice may have reflected her upbringing in that she chose to promote the works of Judith Gauthier, French poet and historical novelist (1845–1917). The poems from Le livre de jade appeared in 1867—a volume of Chinese poetry loosely rendered into French.²⁶ One review of the premiere of these works by the Société Musicale Indépendante referred to them as delicate, possessing charm and musicality.²⁷

In the chamber and vocal music, the sparse textures and repetitive figures clearly demonstrate her affinity for the style espoused by many of her contemporaries, some of whom were members of La Spirale and La Jeune France. A published review of her Trois pièces pour quatour á cordes calls it a “unique” work and describes it as possessing both “musical and ideological continuity,”²⁸ while another reviewer commented on their freshness and amiability.²⁹

The two published organ works of Bracquemond pay homage to her teacher, Marcel Dupré. He composed his Variations sur un Noël on the well-known carol, Noël nouvelet, and a lengthy work, Le Chemin de la Croix, which began as a set of improvisations to accompany the reading of texts of Paul Claudel. As for Bracquemond’s musical style seen in her two published organ works, one finds a mixture of techniques, all set within the ever-changing musical scene of interwar France. In the Variations (1952), Bracquemond fuses an ancient tune whose origin is presently unknown with elements of whole-tone harmonies and modal scales, resulting in a style resembling a combination of her teachers’ influences as well as those of her contemporaries such as Duruflé. In contrast to those influences, one also notices the sparseness of the writing, reflecting Neo-Classical tendencies. “Variation I” is a melody accompanied by major triads mostly, recalling the chordal planing used by Debussy. “Variation II” makes use of a trio texture with the melodic line in the pedal. The third variation moves to the dark key of E-flat minor, where slowly undulating sixteenth notes accompany an altered version of the melody. “Variation IV” is a scherzo where the melodic line is rhythmically altered and placed within dissonant harmony. The final variation resembles a scaled-down French toccata associated with Vierne and Dupré, but this spare setting emphasizes Bracquemond’s simpler style drawing on Neo-Classical techniques.

In Ombres, published in 1954, one finds similarities to Dupré’s Le Chemin de la Croix, written some twenty years earlier, in her use of contrapuntal techniques and the use of the interval of the fourth, an interval featured in the Dupré composition. (Bracquemond’s work is considerably shorter than that of Dupré.) The use of Biblical quotations at the outset of each movement recalls Messiaen’s organ suites, La Nativité du Seigneur and l’Ascension. Bracquemond creates a programmatic work that attempts to rival the sincerity and emotionalism found in Messiaen’s religious cycles. She makes frequent use of ostinato patterns evidenced in the music of Vierne, solid contrapuntal writing found in the music of Widor and Dupré, with more modern harmonies. The work makes use of cyclic techniques and a unifying leitmotif that hearken back to the music of Franck, Wagner, and others.

Radio performances did not receive critical reviews, but from the numerous performances she gave, it appears she was well received and respected. The critical reviews of her live concert performances make note of her scrupulous performance, her finesse and grace with attention to every detail, sometimes despite the instrument she is playing.³⁰ Other reviews have similar praise for her expertise as both organist and accompanist. Bracquemond was truly a musical force with which to be reckoned.³¹

 

Partial funding for the research for the article came from the Clarence and Ruth Mader Memorial Scholarship Fund, the Special Projects Advisory Committee of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and the Center for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at Bridgewater State University.

Notes

1. See Anne Bongrain, Le Conservatoire national de musique et déclamation 1900–1930: Documents historiques et administratifs. Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN 2012.

2. L’Echo rochelais, Nov. 27, 1929, pages 1–2. Barbedette authored numerous books on music of Classical-era composers including Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert, though his most celebrated work is his tome on Stephen Heller. Barbedette was honored by Heller as the dedicatee of his fourth piano sonata.

3. Le Temps, Dec. 17, 1924, page 4. 

4. La Liberté, April 18, 1925, page 5.

5. “Séances De La Société Française De Musicologie.” Revue De Musicologie 6, no. 14 (1925): pages 95–96. Accessed at jstor.org.libserv-prd.bridgew.edu/stable/925700.

6. Le Monde Musical, vol. 38, no. 3 (March 1927), page 118. According to this review, Yves Tinayre was ill and was replaced by Mme. Castellazzi.

7. La Semaine de Paris, February 18, 1927, pages 38–39.

8. “Musical Notes from Abroad.” The Musical Times 78, no. 1127 (1937): pages 76–78. doi:10.2307/920305. Jane Evrard was the pseudonym of Jeanne Chevallier Poulet, a well-respected violinist. 

9. Marthe Bracquemond, Noëls Percherons—Échange et Rencontres au Pays Percheron, SDRM (3)-697. See also: 1936, Orchestre Féminin de Paris, dir. J. Evrard, Groupe vocal Yvonne Gouverné, Marcelle de Lacour clavecin, Paul Derenne (tenor), Hugues Cuénod (ténor), accessed at france-orgue.fr/disque/index.php?zpg=dsq.fra.rch&org=Marthe.

10. Elsa Barraine’s organ music was composed and published between 1928 and 1930 (Durand). Jeanne Demessieux’s Six Études was published in 1946 (Durand), so music by women was not new, yet rarely performed.

11. Le Ménestrel, October 3, 1924, page 416, announced that Jacob had been tasked by the
T. S. F. with programming regularly scheduled organ recitals.

12. Le Matin, December 6, 1928, page 5.

13. Le Gaulois, December 2, 1928, page 5. 

14. Le Matin, December 24, 1930, page 6.

15. Also entitled Variations sur un air Auvergnat.

16. Her three radio appearances in the United States are as follows: February 16, 1936, “Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week,” The New York Times (1923-Current file): 1. February 16, 1936. ProQuest. Web. January 9, 2018. March 1, 1936—“Broadcast of an organ recital by Marthe Bracquemond,” WJZ (The New York Times, March 1, 1936, XXII) (“Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week,” The New York Times (1923-Current file): 1. March 1, 1936. ProQuest. Web. January 9, 2018.) March 8, 1936: “Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week.” The New York Times (1923-Current file): 1. March 8, 1936. ProQuest. Web. January 9, 2018.

17. Paris-midi, April 22, 1936, page 7.

18. E. Bleu, “Marthe Bracquemond aux grandes orgues de Pleyel,” Images Musicales, November 15, 1946, cited in Cartayrade, op. cit., pages 290–291. “La rentrée de Marthe Bracquemond dans l’activité de la vie musicale parisienne se doit d’être signalée. Avant hier 13 novembre elle donnait sur le magnifique instrument de la Salle Pleyel et le mercredi 27 novembre, à 18h30, elle poursuivra son “Cycle de récitals originaux” dans un magnifique programme où sont inscrites de grandes oeuvres caractéristiques de Mozart, Roger-Ducasse, Saint-Saëns, Louis Vierne, et Widor.”
Bracquemond performed works by Bach, Dupré, Alain, and Vierne.

19. Published interview with Georges Trouvé by Jean Claude Duval entitled “Georges Trouvé organiste et ‘grand serviteur d’eglise,’” April 23, 2001. 

20. oratoiredulouvre.fr/patrimoine/lorgue-et-le-protestantisme.

21. The earliest record of a performance comes from l’Intransegeant, February 7, 1934, page 9, announcing a concert of works by Plum given at the Royal Conservatoire de Bruxelles (performer not named).

22. Paris-midi, February 9, 1940, page 2.

23. L’Art musicale, February 19, 1937, page 490. The concert took place at the Schola Cantorum. She performed with a singer named Cernay. See: Nigel Simeone, “La Spirale and La Jeune France: Group Identities,” The Musical Times, vol. 143, no. 1880 (2002), page 29. These pieces do not appear to have been published.

24. Alain Cartayrade, “Le Concerts pour orgue au Palais de Chaillot de 1939 à 1972 et pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,“ Le Bulletin de l’Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, vol. 14 (2015), page 290. 

25. There is record of one piece for harp and flute that appears not to have been published. The Prélude Incantatoire-Pastorale-Conclusion on a Sonnet of Ronsard was dedicated to and premiered by Françoise Kempf and Jan Merry in 1932 (see Ardal Powell, The Flute, page 220).

26. Pauline Yu, “‘Your Alabaster in This Porcelain:’ Judith Gauthier’s ‘Le Livre De Jade.’” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): pages 464–482. Accessed at jstor.org/stable/25501716.

27. Le Courrier Musical, vol. 24, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1922), pages 11–12. The premiere took place on December 1, 1921. Blanche Croiza sang, accompanist not named.

28. Le Ménestrel, March 31, 1922, page 144.

29. Le Courrier Musical, vol. 24, no. 10 (May 15, 1922), page 173. 

30. Refer to a review in Le Ménestrel, December 17, 1926, page 538.

31. See Le Ménestrel, December 20, 1929, page 551. See also Ebrecht, Ronald, “Lenten Series at the American Cathedral in Paris, 1949 and 1950.” The Diapason, December 2002, pages 20–21. ProQuest. Web. February 17, 2018.

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

A French American organist and musicologist living in Paris, Carolyn Shuster Fournier was organist at the American Cathedral in 1988 and 1989. After thirty-three years of faithful service at Église de la Sainte-Trinité, where she had directed a weekly noontime concert series, she was named honorary titular of their 1867 Cavaillé-Coll choir organ. A recitalist, she has made recordings and contributed articles to specialized reviews, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2007 the French Cultural Minister awarded her the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series appeared in the February 2024 issue, pages 10–16.

The repertoire of César Franck’s organ students

What organ repertoire did César Franck’s students play, and how did they play it? Many of them stated that he did not give them any indications concerning tempi, style, technique, and registrations.⁸⁷ Let us examine if this is true by beginning with their repertoire, which was founded on the works of the great master Johann Sebastian Bach, the absolute spiritual reference for these budding organists. Franck’s students played the following Bach works during their exams and competitions:⁸⁸

Played once: Well-Tempered Clavier, Part 1, “Fugue in C-sharp Minor,” BWV 849ii, and “Fugue in F Minor,” BWV 857ii; Well-Tempered Clavier, Part II, “Fugue in C Minor”, BWV 871ii; “Fugue in D Major,” BWV 874ii, “Fugue in D-sharp Minor,” BWV 877ii; “Fugue in E Major,” BWV 878ii; “Fugue in F Minor,” BWV 857ii or BWV 881ii; “Fugue in A-flat Major,” BWV 862ii or BWV 886ii; “Fugue in B-flat Minor,” BWV 891ii. Aria in F Major, BWV 587; fugue of the Passacaglia in C Minor, BWV 582; Canzona and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 588; Prelude in E Minor, BWV 555i; Fantasy in C Minor, BWV 562i; Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542; Pastorale in F Major, BWV 590; Prelude in E Minor, BWV 533i; and Prelude in G Major, BWV 568; Fugue in C Major, BWV 545ii, and either BWV 564iii or BWV 566; Fugue in C Minor (unspecified); Fugue in D Minor (unspecified); “Toccata” from Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564; “Allegro,” first movement of Sonata in E-flat Major, BWV 525.

Played twice: Well-Tempered Keyboard, Part I, “Fugue in B-Flat Minor,” BWV 867ii. Fugue in E Minor, BWV 555ii; Prelude and Fugue in G Major, BWV 557; Prelude and Fugue G Minor, BWV 558; Prelude and Fugue B-flat Major, BWV 560; Prelude in C Minor, BWV 546i; Prelude in C Minor; Prelude in D Major, BWV 532i; Prelude in G Major, BWV 541i; Prelude in B Minor, BWV 544i; Fugue in D Minor, BWV 539ii; Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548ii; Fugue in F Major, BWV 540ii; Fugue in F Minor, BWV 534ii; Fugue in G Minor, BWV 131a; Fugue in B Minor on a Theme by Corelli, BWV 579; Fugue in B Minor, BWV 544ii; Fantasy in G Minor, BWV 542ii; Passacaglia in C Minor, BWV 582; Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 533; Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565i; Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565; first movement of Concerto in A Minor after Vivaldi, BWV 593; O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 656; O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross, BWV 622.

Played three times: Prelude in E-flat Major, BWV 552i; Fugue in C Major, BWV 566ii; Fugue in C Minor on a Theme by Legrenzi, BWV 574; Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542ii; Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 566; Prelude and Fugue C Minor, BWV 546; Toccata in F Major, BWV 540i; last movement of Concerto in A Minor after Vivaldi, BWV 593.

Played four times: Concerto in G Major after Prince Johann Ernst, BWV 592; Fantasy in C Minor, BWV 537; Fugue in C Minor, BWV 546ii; Toccata in D Minor (“Dorian”), BWV 538i.

Played six times: Concerto in A Minor after Vivaldi, BWV 593; Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578.

Played eight times: Fugue in C Minor, BWV 537.

In 1887 Franck prepared five volumes with thirty-one Bach pieces in a Braille edition for the National Institute for the Blind in Paris. It used heels, heel and toe crossings, finger, foot, and hand substitutions, finger, foot, and thumb glissandi, which favored a complete legato.⁸⁹ All pieces included in this collection were performed by Franck’s students at the Paris Conservatory, except for the chorales An Wasserflüssen Babylon, BWV 653, and Wir glauben all an einen Gott, Vater, BWV 740. On the other hand, they had performed the following works that were not in Franck’s Braille edition of Bach’s organ works: selections from Well-Tempered Clavier, parts 1 and 2; Aria in F Major, BWV 587; Concerto in G Major after Prince Johann Ernst, BWV 592; Fugue in G Minor, BWV 131a; Pastorale in F Major, BWV 590; Toccata in D Minor (“Dorian”), BWV 538i; and the first movement (“Allegro”) of Sonata in E-flat, BWV 525.

Franck’s ten students who had previously studied at the Niedermeyer School and at the National Institute of Blind Youth had immediately played Bach’s virtuosic works: Fugue in D Major, BWV 532 (played by Albert Mahaut and Adolphe Marty); Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548 (played by Joséphine Boulay); Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542 (played by Mahaut). They won their first prizes rapidly, except for Henri Letocart. As at the Niedermeyer School, Franck’s students likely used the C. F. Peters edition of Bach’s organ works. Many of his long-term students had begun with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Eight Little Preludes and Fugues. Franck had inscribed in John Hinson’s copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier numerous “optional” pedal indications for the first twelve preludes and fugues in this collection.⁹⁰ Charles-Valentin Alkan’s performances of Bach chorales and trio sonatas in his Les Petits Concerts in the Salons Érard between 1873 and 1880⁹¹ certainly inspired Franck’s students to play the two chorales and a movement of a trio sonata.

Franck’s students thoroughly studied the construction of Bach’s fugues, more than his preludes—for example, the combination of themes in the Fugue in C Minor, BWV 574.⁹² This truly inspired his students’ improvisations and compositions as well as those of his own, as shown in his Prélude, Fugue et Variation, Grande Pièce Symphonique, and Trois Chorals.⁹³ Bach’s fugues were indeed “the model for all music.”⁹⁴ During the bicentenary of J. S. Bach’s birth in 1885, René de Récy had indicated the importance of the fugue in Bach’s works: “The fugue is . . . the first complete type of musical composition.”⁹⁵ Mel Bonis, who attended his class as an auditor around 1878, remembers having heard him say, “Bach is the oldest of the future musicians.”⁹⁶

In addition to their substantial Bach repertoire, Franck’s students played Handel’s Concerto in B-flat Major, a short piece by Lemmens, Schumann’s Canonic Study in A-flat Major, opus 56, number 4 (played twice), and movements from Felix Mendelssohn’s sonatas, notably Sonata VI, based on the Lutheran hymn, “Vater unser im Himmelreich,” played six times. Franck’s teaching, based on these German masters, was faithful to that of Alexis Chauvet, François Benoist, and Charles-Valentin Alkan, who had composed works based on Protestant chorales, such as his Impromptu sur le Choral de Luther (“Ein Feste Burg”), dedicated to François Benoist.

For Franck, improvisation was an “authentic compositional act.”⁹⁷ Vincent d’Indy and Charles Tournemire considered it to be “an infinitely precious advantage to work for two years in his organ class, a center of true studies in composition.”⁹⁸ According to his composition student, Charles Bordes (1863–1909), “Father Franck was formed by his students.”⁹⁹

Franck’s students became pioneers when they played their master’s works, which were relatively unknown then. When Georges Bizet heard a student play Franck’s Prélude, Fugue et Variation during an exam, he confided to Franck, “Your piece is exquisite. I did not know that you were a composer.”¹⁰⁰ Franck’s following fourteen students promoted and encouraged him by performing his works for their exams and their competitions:

Adèle Billaut: Prélude, Fugue et Variation (January 1875)

Marie Renaud: Prélude, Fugue et Variation (July 1876)

Georges Verschneider: Fantaisie in C (January 1874), ^Pastorale (January 1877), and ^Prière (June 1877)

Henri Dallier: Fantaisie in C (June 1878)101

Gabriel Pierné: Final (July 1882)

Henri Kaiser: Grande Pièce Symphonique (July 1884)

François Pinot: Fantaisie in A (June 1885)

Adolphe Marty: Fantaisie in C (June 1886)

Jean-Joseph Jemain: Cantabile (January 1887), the beginning of Grande Pièce Symphonique (June 1887)

Georges Aubry: Cantabile (June 1888)

Georges Bondon: Prière (July 1888), Grande Pièce Symphonique (July 1889)

Albert Mahaut: Prière (June 1889)

Marie Prestat: Prélude, Fugue et Variation (July 1889), Fantaisie in A (January 1890), and Prière (July 1890)

Henri Letocart: Pastorale (July 1890).

For Tournemire, his master’s “Prière,” the most remarkable of his Six Pièces, is an uninterrupted large fresco. Its “Andante sostenuto” theme is played at the tempo of 55 to the quarter note. Its animated central melismatic recitative sections, played with great liberty and at a livelier tempo, at 76 to the quarter note, “provide the necessary calm to express the initial theme when it returns with more ardent intensity. One must interpret its conclusion with fantasy.”¹⁰² Jean Langlais regretted that he never heard Albert Mahaut play it. Mahaut revered it so much that he had stopped playing it when he was seventy-five years old.¹⁰³ Dedicated to François Benoist, it was played four times, which duly rendered homage to Franck’s predecessor.

Charles Tournemire’s indications in his book César Franck prove that Franck did indeed deal with expressive interpretational matters. In accordance with his master’s approach, he analyzes the basic form and structure of each piece, its musical expression, its tempos, and its mystical meaning. The exquisite Prélude, Fugue et Variation, a sweet Bach-like cantilena, was dedicated to Camille Saint-Saëns. The “Andantino” should be played without rigor at the tempo of 60 to the quarter note, the “Fugue” at 88, and the “Variation” without haste, very clearly, “at the tip of your fingertips.”¹⁰⁴ In the Grande Pièce Symphonique, the first Romantic sonata conceived for the organ, dedicated to Charles-Valentin Alkan, Tournemire provides the following tempi: “Andante serioso” with the quarter note at 69, “Allegro non troppo e maestoso” with a half note at 80; quarter notes in the “Andante” at 60; in the “Scherzo-Allegro” quarter notes at 96; in the final grand choeur quarter notes at 80; and the final fugue with a half note at 60; after the final subject in the pedal, one should broaden the tempo until the end. In the pure Fantaisie in C, dedicated to Alexis Chauvet, the “Quasi lento” is “a small, calm intense poem;”¹⁰⁵ the quarter notes in its “Poco Lento” can be played at 66 without dragging, and its pastorale-like “Allegretto cantando” around 76, with great suppleness. Its calm, contemplative final “Adagio” rejects any metronomic movement. In the charming Pastorale, the quarter notes of the “Andantino” are at 58; in the “Quasi Allegretto,” the quarter notes are at 100, and slightly less rapidly during the exposition of the fugue. In the Fantaisie in A, the quarter note of “Andantino” is at 88, and the movement should fluctuate with much liberty; after “Très largement,” at measure 214, one returns to the initial tempo with “a feeling of infinite calm”¹⁰⁶ until its delicate ending. In the remarkable Cantabile, with the general movement of a quarter note at 69, each interpreter should “follow his own interiority!”¹⁰⁷

Charles Tournemire’s disciple Maurice Duruflé indicated Tournemire’s advice in brackets in his own edition of Franck’s works, published in Paris by Bornemann. He wrote the following concerning the general interpretations of this music: “It is certain that one must bring to it a wide-awake sensitivity, but a sensitivity the measure of which must be ceaselessly controlled. Even though, it is delicate and even dangerous to give too precise indications in this realm, which remains personal. . . .”¹⁰⁸ One must always remain faithful to César Franck’s musical intentions, which means that one may need to change the registrations and even rewrite the score. When Marie Prestat played Franck’s Pièce héroïque on the studio organ at the conservatory, since it had no 16′ stops in the manuals, she had to play the piece’s theme in octaves in the manuals, leaving out a low B that did not exist.¹⁰⁹ As Rollin Smith indicated, according to Franck’s private student, R. Huntington Woodman, Franck did deal with details such as touch because he insisted that in measure 27 of this piece, the eighth notes should be played with “a crisp, short, staccato” (Example 3).¹¹⁰

Organists must adapt the tempo of his Prélude, Fugue et Variation, originally written for piano and harmonium, to the acoustics in churches and concert halls. André Marchal (1894–1980), who had studied with Adolphe Marty and Albert Mahaut at the Institute for Blind Youth from 1909 until 1911, played Franck’s works in a very supple and expressive manner. A true artist never plays music in the same manner, but continually evolves and adapts each of his interpretations to each particular situation, to each organ, and to the building’s acoustics. This is shown in Tournemire’s annotated scores.

Like their master, Franck’s students certainly played his works in accordance with their own personalities, each organ, and acoustic, but always very musically. Vital musical expression cannot be acquired by imitating others, but by understanding and expressing music freely and with conviction. According to Tournemire, Franck admonished his students “not to imitate him, but to search within oneself.”¹¹² During his lessons, his only criteria, “I love it” and “I don’t love it,” made his students understand that music is a science of producing and hearing pleasant, enchanting sounds that deeply touch and transform humanity.

Each student’s repertoire is very interesting. To give one example, Georges Verschneider had earned no organ prizes because he had difficulty improvising, and his whitlow illness had prevented him playing his exam on June 24, 1878. Nonetheless, Franck found him to be a very interesting student and really appreciated his hard work, his distinctive interpretations, and his innovative repertoire. During his six years in Franck’s class (1873–1879), in addition to the above mentioned three Franck pieces, he played the following works during his exams: Bach’s Fugue in C Minor, BWV 546, the virtuosic Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and his Prelude and Fugue in B Minor, BWV 544 (each of these four pieces in separate exams), as well as the flamboyant Toccata in F Major, BWV 540. An Alsatian, he was Franck’s first student to play the first movement of Sonata in E-flat, BWV 525, the chorale, O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 656, and Mendelssohn’s Sonata III and Sonata VI.

In order to play this repertoire, Franck’s students had already acquired an excellent piano technique when they had entered his class, but they absolutely needed to acquire an excellent pedal technique as well. Since the Paris Conservatory had no practice instruments and they could not rehearse in churches, they were obliged to practice on pianos equipped with pedalboards. Pierre Érard began to rent them out in 1873.¹¹³ Louis Vierne’s aunt Colin had purchased a Pleyel pedalboard for him in 1889, the year he had begun to attend Franck’s class.¹¹⁴ In addition, Franck’s students could practice in piano and organ manufacturing firms.¹¹⁵

According to Henri Büsser, “To tell the truth, Franck neglected to teach technique, notably that of the pedalboard.” (À dire vrai, l’enseignement technique était assez négligé, notamment l’étude du pédalier.)¹¹⁶ Was this true? While no written technical organ method by Franck is known, his approach to acquiring an excellent pedal technique is nonetheless revealed in Adolphe Marty’s L’art de la pédale du grand orgue (Art of the Pedal for the Great Organ), published in 1891 and dedicated “To my Master, Monsieur César Franck, Organ Professor at the National Conservatory in Paris.”¹¹⁷ In its preface Marty explains that,

without the pedal, the sound of the Grand Organ is lacking in roundness and a full sonority, also because the more one is a walking virtuoso, the more one can achieve the true style of the organ, thus being able to play together all of its harmonic voices, because after all the execution of modern compositions especially requires a deep knowledge of manipulating this part of the organ.¹¹⁸

Divided into four series, the first series presents twenty-five exercises destined to give suppleness and technique to the pedal lines played by both feet, learning glissandi and substitutions. The second series deals with the technique of the toes, in order to play large intervals with the same foot, then presents the chromatic scale, the trill, and arpeggios. Highly musical, a manual accompaniment is added to each exercise that enables students to think harmonically. It was expected that each should be transposed into all major and minor keys (see Example 4).

In the third series, one learns how to play octaves. The fourth series deals with the independence of the two feet, glissandi, and substitutions, as well as scales and arpeggios, which should be practiced in fragments. Above all, this method was not based on plainchant and was not applied to the harmonium, as in École d’orgue of Lemmens, but was closer in spirit to Alkan’s highly virtuosic Douze Études pour les Pieds Seulement (Twelve Etudes for the Feet Alone, published by Richault, ca. 1866), which were dedicated to Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély, as was Franck’s Final with its long pedal solos. The two brief excerpts, Examples 5 and 6, illustrate the polyrhythms found in the pedal studies by Alkan and by Marty.

Franck’s students possibly practiced on Charles-Valentin Alkan’s grand concert piano equipped with a pedalboard in Pierre Érard’s workshop at 11–13, rue du Mail, located near Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church. According to Albert Mahaud, they attended a performance of Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue for piano there.¹²² In 1818 the Érard piano builders erected a concert hall on the ground floor of their mansion, now located on the right side of 13, rue du Mail. On January 10, 1839, Franck performed a traditional piano concert there, and in 1843 his Trio in F-sharp Minor, dedicated to S. M. le Roi des Belges (His Majesty, the King of Belgium). In November 1845 his Ruth was performed there.

In 1860 a second prestigious concert hall with 300 seats was built at the far end of this building. In 1877 Charles Garnier restored its ceiling and enlarged it to 572 seats. Both halls had excellent acoustics. On March 31, 1883, a concert given by the National Society of Music conducted by Édouard Colonne premiered two orchestral symphonic poems: César Franck’s Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman) and Viviane, opus 5, by his student Ernest Chausson. In 1894 when Louis Vierne assisted Widor’s organ class, he gave lessons on Alkan’s piano, which had remained there after his death in 1888.¹²³ Immediately following Alkan’s death, Franck expressed his immense gratitude to him by arranging ten of his keyboard pieces for organ, which were published in Paris by Richault in 1889: seven excerpts, numbers 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11, of his 13 Prières, opus 64, for piano with a pedalboard, dedicated to Pierre Érard (Richault, 1866); two (numbers 3 and 7) of his 11 Grands Préludes, opus 66, for piano with a pedalboard, dedicated to C. A. Franck (Richault, published in 1866); as well number 3 of his 11 Pièces dans le style religieux, opus 72, for harmonium, dedicated to Simon Richault (Richault, published in 1867).

How did César Franck’s teaching differ from that of Charles-Marie Widor? Widor had warned Louis Vierne about the attacks by Franck’s former pupils against his reforms of their organ technique and confided to him: “Concerning improvisation, I have nothing to change from what Franck taught you: he was the greatest improviser of his time . . . only some details in the forms, nothing in the procedures.”¹²⁴ For Vierne, while Franck was more severe in his requirements for the fugue than Widor, his interest in detailed melodic invention, harmonic discoveries, and subtle modulations all promoted the musical expression.

For Widor, being a musician was not enough: one must be a virtuoso as well. In June 1891, before Jules Bouval played his exam, Widor mentioned that unfortunately he had not acquired a good organ technique. However, in January 1892 he observed that he had gained the virtuosity that he had lacked during the preceding year. Henri Libert, who played mechanically, became an intelligent musician and an excellent virtuoso, performing Bach’s Toccata in F Major in January 1892. In 1894 he won a first prize in organ, the same year as Louis Vierne.

In addition, Widor had encouraged his students to compete for the Grand Prix de Rome: Paul Ternisien, Jules Bouval, and Henri Büsser, who won it in 1893. However, none of them won an organ prize at the Paris Conservatory. In January 1892 Ternisien was extremely nervous and lost control of himself during his exam as he played Franck’s Cantabile. Bouval was so upset that he did not compete in June 1894. Büsser, although he was very intelligent and a good musician, had difficulty improvising. Contrary to Widor, who was to become the Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Institut de France in July 1914, Franck had discouraged some of his students from attempting to go to Rome. In 1884, while Claude Debussy had won the Grand Prix de Rome, Franck’s organ student, Henri Kaiser, had only received his first prize in organ. Only two of his “true” organ students, Samuel Rousseau and Gabriel Pierné, obtained the Grand Prix de Rome, in 1878 and 1882.¹²⁵ Tournemire later expressed his gratitude to Franck for having discouraged him to follow this path:

The most beautiful nature that I ever met, during my long career, was naturally that of Franck. I owe him my direction and how much I bless him each day for having advised me, when I began, to not dream of the Prix de Rome. . . . Since then, I have had the time to reflect. . . . I wonder what I would have become if I had had the disrespect to not follow his advice. . . . I would have undoubtedly made conventional music, false theater, and I would have been lost . . . irremediably.¹²⁶

César Franck’s artistic legacy

Many of Franck’s organ students at the Paris Conservatory composed works in various genres. The following exhaustive list will illustrate this.

Organ works: Alfred Bachelet, Édouard Bopp, Joséphine Boulay, Jules Bouval, Henri Büsser, Auguste Chapuis, Hedwige Chrétien (even though she was not a liturgical organist), Henri Dallier, Georges Deslandres, Vincent d’Indy, Dynam-Victor Fumet, Louis Ganne, Georges Guiraud, Georges Hüe, Henri Letocart, Henri Libert, Adolphe Marty, Gabriel Pierné, Marie Prestat, Paul Rougnon, Marcel Rouher, Samuel Rousseau, Francis Thomé, Charles Tournemire, Paul Vidal, Louis Vierne, and Paul Wachs.

Religious vocal music: Joséphine Boulay, Georges Guiraud, Henri Letocart, Albert Pillard, Marcel Rouher, Achille Runner, Arnal de Serres, and Théophile Sourilas.

Vocal works: Hedwige Chrétien.

Piano works: Bazile Benoît, Hedwige Chrétien, Aimé Féry, Louis Frémaux, Georges Guiraud, and Carlos Mesquita.

Works for harmonium and piano: Marie Prestat and Théophile Sourilas.

Chamber music: Auguste Chapuis, Hedwige Chrétien, Jean-Joseph Jemain, and Marie Prestat.

Melodies: Amédée Dutacq, Georges Guiraud, Jean-Joseph Jemain, Henri Letocart, Carlos Mesquita, Albert Pillard, Marcel Rouher, Achille Runner, Arnal de Serres, Paul Ternisien, and Paul Wachs.

Light music: Émile Fournier.

Lyrical works: Alfred Bachelet, Émile Fournier, Louis Frémaux, Jean-Joseph Jemain, and Marie Prestat.

Operettas: Louis Frémaux and Louis Ganne.

Symphonic works: Hedwige Chrétien, Jean-Joseph Jemain, Henri Letocart, and Paul Wachs.

Music for all genres: Camille Benoît, Pierre de Bréville, Henri Büsser, Auguste Chapuis, Henri Dallier, Vincent d’Indy, Cesarino Galeotti, Lucien Grandjany, Georges Hüe, Henri Kaiser, Adolphe Marty, Gabriel Pierné, Marie Renaud, Paul Rougnon, Samuel Rousseau, Jean-Ferdinand Schneider, Théophile Sourilas, Francis Thomé, Charles Tournemire, and Louis Vierne.

Editions of early music: Auguste Chapuis and Vincent d’Indy (Rameau), Jean-Joseph Jemain (Baroque works), and Henri Letocart (Jean-Baptiste Lully).

Transcriptions: Henri Büsser, Charles Tournemire, Louis Vierne, and Paul Wachs.

Louis Vierne had transcribed for organ five of Franck’s Pieces for Harmonium (Pérégally et Parvy, 1901/Leduc, 1905); Charles Tournemire transcribed his “March” and “Prelude” of the Second Act of Ghiselle, as well as the Chanson de l’Hermine d’Hulda (Choudens, 1927).

Many of Franck’s students, in addition to Adolphe Marty and Charles Tournemire, were authors of pedagogical music methods, and others were administrators in conservatories. Some of Franck’s students wrote books on harmony (André-Paul Burgat) or solfège manuals (Marie Renaud, Paul Rougnon). Paul Wachs wrote a manual on organ improvisation, “in homage to his Master Monsieur César Franck, Organ Professor at the Paris Conservatory,” as well as a treatise on plainchant, written for organists who accompany the liturgy.¹²⁷ Some were members of the Institut de France: Georges Hüe, Officier d’Académie; André Paul Burgat; Louis Ganne, president of Société des auteurs, compositeurs, et éditeurs de musique. Auguste Chapuis was a music inspector. Jean-Joseph Jemain and Camille Benoît were music critics. Lucien Grandjany, Georges Guiraud, Georges Marty, Samuel Rousseau, and Vincent d’Indy were choir directors. Louis Ganne, Jean-Joseph Jemain, Georges Marty, Gabriel Pierné, and Vincent d’Indy were orchestral conductors. Alfred Bachelet succeeded Guy Ropartz as director of the Nancy Conservatory, who had been there from 1894 until 1919 before directing the Strasbourg Conservatory from 1919 until 1929. Some became inspectors of music in the city of Paris, such as Auguste Chapuis (1895–1928).

Some of Franck’s other students became music professors. Georges Guiraud taught harmony at the Toulouse Conservatory from 1912 until 1928. Bruno Maurel taught music in Marseille. Jean-Joseph Jemain was a piano professor at the Lyon Conservatory from 1888 to 1901. In Parisian schools Paul Jeannin taught music and Césarino Galeotti taught piano. Henri Dallier taught organ at the Niedermeyer School beginning in 1905. Henri Libert taught organ there as well as at the American Conservatory in 1937.

At the Paris Conservatory, Paul Rougnon taught solfège; Marie Renaud (1876–1893), Lucien Grandjany (1883), Paul Vidal (1884), Hedwige Chrétien (in the class for women, 1890–1892), Henri Kaiser (1891), and Georges Bondon (1898) taught there. Louis Vierne assisted both Charles-Marie Widor and Alexandre Guilmant’s organ classes (1894–1911). Paul Vidal taught accompaniment at the piano (1886) and composition (1910) there. Georges Marty taught the vocal ensemble class (1892) and harmony (1904). Both Auguste Chapuis (1894) and Henri Dallier (1908–1928) taught harmony to women: their student, Nadia Boulanger, then trained musicians from all over the world at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. Henri Büsser was a professor of vocal ensembles (1904–1930) and composition (1930–1948) there; his student, Gaston Litaize, highly appreciated his remarkable teaching. Like César Franck, Büsser recommended his students to “work, work, always work.”¹²⁸ Charles Tournemire taught chamber music there (1928–1935). In 1935 he wrote in a rather severe manner to his private organ student from Liège, Pierre Froidebise, as his own master César Franck had corrected him:

I read your music with interest. You have ideas, many ideas. You are only missing the art of presenting them with more subtlety. . . . 
I am returning your works with several corrections. . . . Accept them!! Don’t get tense!! When for the first time, César Franck corrected my works at the beginning, I found that odious!!? Because he dared to alter my harmonies. . . . And since, I have acknowledged the soundness of his remarks! This may be learned. You have what may not be learned. Thank God. . . .¹²⁹
 

From 1891–1899, Arthur Coquard, Franck’s former composition student,¹³⁰ directed the National Institute for Blind Youth, where three of César Franck’s students also perpetuated his legacy: Adolphe Marty, Albert Mahaut, and Joséphine Boulay. When Adolphe Marty was organ professor there (1888–1930), he opened up new horizons to an entire generation of blind organists, teaching them counterpoint and fugue, improvisation, and interpretation of the works of J. S. Bach. According to Louis Vierne, his open-minded and enthusiastic manner of teaching illustrated that of his master, César Franck: “I found joy with my professors. Marty, always very affectionate, treated me like a friend, not like a student. He continued to largely make me profit from his experience as a student at the Conservatory and predicted a likely success in this establishment.”¹³¹

Albert Mahaut, who taught harmony there (1889–1924), wrote the following just after Franck was buried at the Grand-Montrouge Cemetery on November 10, 1890: “We had encircled a tomb, it is true, but this tomb ought to be glorious. . . . We gathered courage to work, each in our sphere, to the triumph of the master who, unknown during his lifetime, ought to be soon the object of enthusiastic acclamations.”¹³²

Eight years after Franck’s death, Albert Mahaut was the first to perform Franck’s entire twelve organ pieces at the Trocadéro on April 28, 1898, and again in 1899. He also played them at Saint-Léon Church in Nancy on March 24 and 27, 1905, the year he wrote his book, César Franck, and continued to perform them throughout his life. During his fifty-three years of volunteer social work for the Valentin Haüy Association for the Blind (1890–1943),¹³³ he developed the musical notation in Braille and encouraged young blind organists throughout France to study in Paris. Josephine Boulay taught harmony and piano there from 1888 to 1925. This institution produced hundreds of other future church musicians, music professors, and piano tuners. André Marchal, Augustin Barié, Gaston Litaize, and Jean Langlais faithfully transmitted the teaching principles of Adolphe Marty and Albert Mahaud to an entire generation of blind organists, among them: Xavier Dufresse, Jean-Pierre Leguay, Antoine Reboulot, Georges Robert, and Louis Thiry. These then transmitted their knowledge to their own students. The organ professor there since 2002, Dominique Levacque, had studied in Rouen with Louis Thiry. Gaston Litaize later taught at the conservatory in Saint-Maur (1974–1990), where he was succeeded by his organ student, Olivier Latry, who, in 1985, became the youngest titular organist at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and, in 1995, was appointed organ professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. Litaize’s student, Éric Lebrun, succeeded Olivier Latry at the Saint-Maur Conservatory.

In 1894 Charles Bordes, with the collaboration of Vincent d’Indy and Alexandre Guilmant, founded the Schola Cantorum and taught choral direction there. Vincent d’Indy directed it from 1900 to 1931. Pierre de Bréville taught counterpoint from 1898 to 1902. Jean-Joseph Jemain was a piano professor beginning in 1901. Marie Prestat taught organ in 1901 and 1902 and also piano from 1901 until 1922. Louis Vierne taught organ there (1911–ca. 1925). Opposed to the academic programs at the Paris Conservatory and known for its high artistic morals, the Schola Cantorum’s monthly review, La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, published articles on religious music, as had the Niedermeyer School. After d’Indy’s death in 1931, four of Franck’s composition students who were artistic advisers there—Gabriel Pierné, Paul Dukas, Guy Ropartz, and Pierre de Bréville—along with Albert Roussel, resigned and founded the École César Franck on January 7, 1935. Louis d’Arnal de Serres directed it until 1942 according to the spirit of Franck, with strictness and musicality. Among Édouard Souberbielle’s organ students there, Michel Chapuis became organ professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris from 1986 to 1995.

Finally, in accordance with an 1870 modification of Article 29 at the Paris Conservatory, which had stipulated that the organ should be taught both technically and liturgically,¹³⁴ Franck had inspired and trained an entire generation of church musicians in Paris; several indications concerning his private students are provided in brackets:¹³⁵

Choirmasters and organists at:

La Madeleine: Achille Runner (1904–1938);

Sainte-Anne-de-la-Maison-Blanche: Dynam-Victor Fumet (1914 or 1917–1948);

Saint-Denis-de-la-Chapelle: Joseph Humblot (c. 1873–1903).

Choirmasters at:

Notre-Dame d’Auteuil: Stéphane Gaurion;

Sainte-Clotilde: Stéphane Gaurion (1869?–1875),¹³⁶ Samuel Rousseau (1882–1904)¹³⁷;

Saint-Esprit Reformed Protestant Church: Jean-Joseph Jemain (beginning in 1901);

Saint-Gervais: Charles Bordes (1890–1902), where he founded the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais in 1892;

Saint-Roch: Louis Landry (beginning in 1897)¹³⁸;

Saint-Vincent-de-Paul: Marcel Rouher (1890–1900).

Choir accompanists:

Sainte-Clotilde: Stéphane Gaurion (1863?–1869), Samuel Rousseau (1870–1878, 1881–1882); Georges Verschneider (1882?–ca. 1891); Dynam-Victor Fumet (1884, in the Chapelle de Jésus-Enfant, also known as the Catechism Chapel);

Saint-Eugène: Albert Pillard (1900);

Sainte-Marie des Batignolles: Georges Deslandres (ca. 1870);

Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois: Marcel Rouher (1882–1910);

Saint-Philippe-du-Roule: Georges Bondon (in 1900);

Saint-Vincent-de-Paul: François Pinot (1887–1891, succeeding Léon Boëllmann), Lucien Grandjany (1891–1892), and Henri Letocart (1892–1900).

Titular organists at:

La Madeleine: Henri Dallier (1905–1934), for whom Achille Runner substituted;

Notre-Dame Cathedral: Louis Vierne (1900–1937);

Notre-Dame-des-Champs: Auguste Chapuis (1884–1888);

Sainte-Clotilde: Gabriel Pierné (1890–1898); Charles Tournemire (1898–1939;

Sainte-Trinité: Marie Prestat substituted for Alexandre Guilmant on August 30, 1896;

Saint-Eustache: Henri Dallier (1878–1905);

Saint-François Xavier: Albert Renaud (1879–1891), Adolphe Marty (1891–1941);

Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois: Marcel Rouher (1910–1913);

Saint-Jean-Saint-François: Georges Guiraud (1889–1896) [Camille Rage (1906–1919?)];

Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Grenelle: Albert Pillard (1929);

Saint-Joseph’s English-speaking Catholic Church: Louis de Serres;

Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles: Camille Rage (1901–1906);

Saint-Louis-en-l’Île: François Pinot;

Saint-Mérri: Paul Wachs (1874–1896);

Saint-Philippe-du-Roule: Cesarino Galeotti;

Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot: Jules Bouval (1900–1914);

Saint-Roch: Auguste Chapuis (1888–1906);

Saint-Sulpice: Louis Vierne substituted for Charles-Marie Widor (1892–1890);

Saint-Vincent-de-Paul: Albert Mahaut (1897–1899), succeeded Léon Boëllmann.

Some played in Parisian suburbs at:

Charenton-le-Pont: Georges Guiraud;

in Nogent-sur-Marne: Charles Bordes, organist and choirmaster (1887–1890);

Saint-Clodoald in Saint-Cloud: Henri Büsser (1892–1906) [Bruno Maurel substituted for him (1893–1895)];

Saint-Nicolas in Issy-les-Moulineaux: Louis Ganne (in 1882);

in Meudon: Albert Mahaut (1888);

in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt: Vincent d’Indy (1874);

Saint-Pierre in Montrouge: Albert Mahaut (1892–1897);

Saint-Pierre in Neuilly: Henri Letocart (1900–1944), organist and choirmaster; director of the chorale society, Amis des Cathédrale [Friends of the Cathedral];

Saint-Denis Basilica: Henri Libert (1896–1937).

Some of his students were active as organists in provincial cities, at:

Saint-Pierre in Dreux: Henri Huvey (1887–1944); succeeded by his daughter Anne-Marie Huvey (1944–2005);

Saint-Paul in Orléans: Adolphe Marty (1887–1891);

Saint-Germain in Rennes: Charles-Auguste Collin;

Saint-Pierre in Rennes: Albert Renaud (1873–1878);

Saint-Germain in Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Albert Renaud (1891–1924), who had succeeded Saint-René Taillandier;

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence: Saint-René Taillandier (1891–1931?);

Basilica in Saint-Quentin: Henri Rougnon (until 1934);

Saint-Pierre in Toulouse: Georges Guiraud (1896–1912);

Saint-Sernin in Toulouse: Georges Guiraud (1912–1928);

His private organ student, Raymond Huntington Woodman, was organist and choirmaster at First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York (1880–1941).

Among Franck’s disciples who played at Sainte-Clotilde Basilica in Paris, Samuel Rousseau possibly accompanied the choir before he was appointed choir organist in 1877. He then left for Rome after winning the Grand Prix de Rome. On February 20, 1888, Georges Verschneider, Franck, Dubois, and Rousseau inaugurated the new Merklin choir organ.¹³⁹ Rousseau’s Libera me, premiered in 1885, was played during Franck’s funeral. His Fantaisie, opus 73 (1889, published in 1894), which closely resembles Franck’s Trois Chorals, was dedicated “to the memory of his dear Master, César Franck.”¹⁴⁰ After César’s death, his son Georges Franck entrusted him with the orchestration of the third act of Ghiselle and the revision of Hulda. In 1884 Franck had turned over the accompaniments in the Catechism Chapel of Sainte-Clotilde to Dynam-Victor Fumet.¹⁴¹ Surnamed “Dynam” due to his “dynamite playing,” he was appreciated by Franck for his original spirit, and this had encouraged him: “I was still in César Franck’s organ class . . . when I sought to make known a very rich music; also, I invented music with one beat time so that each beat rested on a rich harmony. The purpose of art . . . is to humanize the universal life, that is to say, to render it proportional to mankind’s fallen kingdom.”¹⁴² Gabriel Pierné began to substitute for Franck in 1882 and became his successor (1890–1898).

Charles Tournemire, a true dignified disciple of Franck, succeeded Gabriel Pierné (1898–1939). In 1910 he dedicated his Triple Choral (Sancta Trinitas), opus 41, “to the memory of my venerable Master César Franck.” In 1930 and 1931 he became the first organist to record at Sainte-Clotilde Basilica for Polydor some of Franck’s works (Cantabile, Chant de la Creuse, Noël angevin, and Choral in A Minor) as well as five of his own improvisations (Petite Rapsodie improvisée, Cantilène improvisé, Improvisation sur le Te Deum, Fantaisie-improvisation sur l’Ave Maris Stella, and Choral-Improvisation sur le Victimae Paschali), proving that interpretation and improvisation are inseparable.¹⁴³ Tournemire also prepared an edition of Franck’s L’Organiste and Pièces Posthumes with his own fingerings, metronome markings, and annotations (Enoch, 1933: volume 2, and 1934: volume 1). Maurice Emmanuel, Franck’s disciple who had not been his student, was choirmaster at Sainte-Clotilde from 1904 to 1907, thus described Tournemire’s dignified succession to his master César Franck:

After the service had ended, the parishioners fled the church during the “postludes,” which were true treasures that César Franck played for them. Have times changed? Do the parishioners hear the artist who today [1926], through a close bond between the liturgy and art, and equally respecting the religious and musical functions, edified them on the themes taken from the service of the day, as noble, as disciplined in their structure as those by César Franck, of whom he was one of his last students? His master bequeathed to him the gifts of these contemplative and impassioned improvisations, sometimes calm, sometimes tumultuous, and which are like mystical dramas conceived in the secret recesses of the soul. The successor of the Master of the Béatitudes also retreats to the contemplation of labor, and comes out of his reserve only to give flight to the thousand voices of his organ, in a lyrical exhilaration, with which the congregation seems to associate little. . . .¹⁴⁴

During the inauguration of a monument in homage to César Franck in the small garden placed in front of Sainte-Clotilde Church on October 22, 1904, named as the Square Samuel-Rousseau in 1935, Théodore Dubois, director of the Paris Conservatory since 1896, expressed the Conservatory’s gratitude to César Franck:

If there was, as one had pretended, some coldness, or rather some indifference of certain colleagues of César Franck, I ignore this, and even I do not believe it, but I insist on officially proclaiming that the Conservatory is very proud to have counted among its professors such an artist, and the actual director considers it a great honor to have been his friend and colleague during all these years. And in my name and in the name of the Conservatory, I bring here a moving homage of admiration to the memory of a noble and powerful artist to whom we erect this monument today.¹⁴⁵

Conclusion

An ardent, prolific music teacher with an open-minded spirit, César Franck faithfully accomplished his duties as an organ professor at the Paris Conservatory. Due to a lack of funds, its Cavaillé-Coll organs were limited, but they were equipped with a thirty-note pedalboard, indispensable to playing Bach and contemporary works. In this institution founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he respected his students, understood their potential, gave them practical advice, encouraged them to constantly work with rigor, and guided them with suppleness in the right direction.

To become accomplished artistic organists and excellent church musicians, Franck’s students needed to acquire a solid pedal technique, internalize their musicianship by memorizing their repertoire, and study harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and composition to be able to realize subtle plainchant accompaniments and master the art of improvisation, which helped them to compose. His private organ and composition students who audited his class benefited from his wise advice. Johann Sebastian Bach’s music inspired and influenced the improvisations and compositions of both the master and his students. Franck’s impassioned quest for artistic beauty and spiritual approach to teaching produced a lasting legacy.

Notes

87. Jacques Viret, “César Franck vu par ses élèves,” La Tribune de l’Orgue, 1990, No. 3, page 11, quoted in Fauquet, page 477.

88. Prepared with A. N., AJ37 283 and Russell Stinson, J. S. Bach at His Royal Instrument (New York: Oxford University Press 2021), pages 159–172.

89. Karen Hastings, “New Franck Fingerings Brought to Light,” The American Organist (December 1990), pages 92–101.

90. Stinson, page 74.

91. Constance Himelfarb, “Chronologie,” in Charles-Valentin Alkan, sous la direction de Brigitte François-Sappey (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1991), page 21.

92. Ibid.

93. Vallas, “César Franck,” Histoire de la musique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), page 894, and Stinson, pages 81–88.

94. Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La grandeur de Bach (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2000), page 115.

95. Cited in Fauquet and Hennion, page 115. See René de Récy, “Jean-Sébastien Bach et ses derniers biographes,” Revue des deux mondes (September 15, 1885), pages 406–427.

96. Mel Bonis, Souvenirs et Réflexions (Paris: Éditions du Nant d’Enfer, s.d.), page 38, quoted by Norbert Dufourcq in L’Orgue, No. 185 (1983), page 5, by Fauquet, page 574, and by Fauquet and Hennion, page 132.

97. Fauquet, page 485.

98. Tournemire, page 70. After Franck’s death, Tournemire studied composition with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum.

99. Tournemire, page 72.

100. Vallas, page 244.

101. On June 1, 1889, Henri Dallier performed Prélude, Fugue et Variation at the Trocadéro for the World’s Fair.

102. Tournemire, page 24.

103. Jean Langlais, “Propos sur le style de César Franck dans son œuvre pour orgue,” Jeunesse et Orgue (Automne 1878, page 6), mentioned in Smith, page 134.

104. Tournemire, page 23.

105. Tournemire, page 21.

106. Tournemire, page 25.

107. Tournemire, page 26. For more information on Franck’s metronomic markings, see Rollin Smith in The American Organist (September 2003), pages 59–60.

108. Maurice Duruflé, “Notes to the Performer,” César Franck, Volume IV, Les Trois Chorals (Paris: Durand & Cie, D. & F. 13.794), undated.

109. Viret, page 11, cited in Fauquet, page 179.

110. Winslow Cheney, “A Lesson in Playing Franck: Measure-by-Measure Outline of Technical Details Involved in Attaining an Artistic Interpretation of Pièce héroïque,” The American Organist (August 1937), page 264.

111. César Franck, Pièce héroïque, measure 27 (Paris, September 19, 1878), B. N. Music Department, Ms. 20151 (3), page 2.

112. Tournemire, page 63.

113. See François Sabatier, “L’œuvre d’orgue et de piano-pédalier,” in Charles Valentin Alkan, 233, and in Georges Guillard, “Le piano-pédalier,” R. I. M. F., No. 13, February 1984.

114. Vierne, Mes Souvenirs, page 20.

115. According to Gustave Lyon, “Letter to Ambroise Thomas,” October 31, 1893, A. N., AJ37 81 12. In 1893, this director of the Pleyel, Wolff et Cie. firm opened his workshop to Widor’s students and gave such a pedalboard to the Conservatory.

116. Büsser, pages 33–34.

117. Marty, L’Art de la Pédale du Grand Orgue (Paris: Mackar et Noël, 1891/Philippo et M. Combre, 1958), on the cover. It was printed in braille just after Franck’s death.

118. Published in Marty, page 1.

119. Published in Marty, page 22.

120. Published in Sabatier, page 240.

121. Published in Marty, page 37.

122. Mahaut, “Souvenirs personnels sur César Franck,” Bibliothèque Valentin Haüy in Paris, MTP138, 4066, page 587. This work was composed in 1884.

123. Vierne, Journal, page 165.

124. Vierne, Journal, page 164.

125. See Fauquet, page 491.

126. Tournemire, “Letter to Alice Lesur,” L’Herbe, September 21, 1930, Collection Christian Lesur, published in “Mémoires de Charles Tournemire,” Critical Edition by Jean-Marc Leblanc, L’Orgue, No. 321–324, 2018—I–IV, XXI. At least three of Franck’s organ students received the Grand Prix de Rome: Samuel Rousseau (1878), Gabriel Pierné (1882), and Henri Büsser (1893).

127. Paul Wachs, L’organiste improvisateur: traité d’improvisation, Paris, Schott (1878) and Petit traité de plain-chant, Énoch (undated).

128. Alain Litaize, Fantaisie et Fugue sur le nom de Gaston LITAIZE, Souvenirs et témoignages (Sampzon: Delatour France, 2012), page 38.

129. Tournemire, letter to Pierre Froidebise, April 17, 1935, published in Pierre Froidebise, “Grande rencontre: Charles Tournemire,” Exposition itinérante, Art & Orgue en Wallonie, undated, page 13. Pierre Froidebise took private organ and composition lessons with Charles Tournemire in his Parisian home beginning in April 1935.

130. Arthur Coquard (1846–1910), a composer, also earned a Doctor in Law degree and was a music critic for Le Temps and L’Écho de Paris. He wrote Franck in 1890.

131. Vierne, Journal II, page 157.

132. Mahaut, page 588. Two years later, his body was transferred to the Montparnasse Cemetery.

133. This association was founded in 1889 by Maurice de la Sizeranne. Albert Mahaut succeeded him as its director (1918–1943).

134. See Fauquet, page 476.

135. This list was established thanks to Pierre Guillot, Dictionnaire des organistes français des XIXe et XXe siècles (Sprimont, 2003), and the assistance of Vincent Thauziès from the Archives Historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris.

136. See Denis Havard de la Montagne and Carolyn Shuster Fournier, “Maîtres de chapelle et organistes de la Basilique Sainte-Clotilde,” in “La Tradition musicale de la Basilique Sainte-Clotilde de Paris,” L’Orgue, No. 278–279, 2007—II–III, page 5.

137. Samuel Rousseau also directed the women’s choir at the Société des Concerts at the Paris Conservatory.

138. He was also a choir director at the Opéra-Comique.

139. Cf. Smith, page 45.

140. Kurt Lueders, “Samuel Rousseau: simple figure marginale ou témoin privilégié d’un ‘Esprit Sainte-Clotilde’?,” in Carolyn Shuster Fournier, L’Orgue, No. 278–279, 2007—II–III, page 23.

141. According to Denis Havard de la Montagne, who had spoken with D.-V. Fumet’s organ student, Odette Allouard-Carny, in March 2007 Sainte-Clotilde’s annexed Catechism Chapel, located at 29, rue Las-Cases, had been inaugurated in 1881. According to Shuster Fournier, page 159, from 1861–1885 their choir was accompanied on a Victor Mustel harmonium, previously placed in their Sainte-Valère annexed chapel (rue de Bourgogne). According to Smith, page 43, around 1885 this parish acquired another Victor Mustel harmonium, a Model K with 19 stops. In 1888 a fourteen-stop Merklin choir organ was installed in Sainte-Clotilde’s chancel area. Thanks to its electro-pneumatic action, it was divided into two elevated sections in the side arches of the sanctuary; its console was located on the left side, at the end of the choir stalls, and its bellows were placed behind the high altar.

142. Philippe Rambaud, “D.-V. Fumet,” Bibliothèque des Lettres françaises, No. 4, February 15, 1914, published in Pierre Guillot, 223.

143. See Joël-Marie Fauquet, Catalogue de l’œuvre de Charles Tournemire (Geneva: Minkoff, 1979), page 99. These five improvisations were reconstituted by Tournemire’s disciple Maurice Duruflé and published by Durand in 1958.

144. Emmanuel, page 124.

145. Julien Tiersot, “Inauguration du monument de César Franck,” Le Ménestrel, No. 44 (October 30, 1904), page 34, and in Théodore Dubois, Souvenirs de ma vie, annotated by Christine Collette-Kléo (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009), page 194.

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article, “César Francks orgelklas aan het Parijse conservatorium, zijn gepassioneerde zoektocht naar artistieke schoonheid,” appeared in Orgelkunst, issue 179, 2022, pages 168–191.

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

 A French-American organist and musicologist, Carolyn Shuster Fournier studied piano and violin before taking organ lessons at the age of thirteen with Gary Zwicky. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College Conservatory, Wheaton, Illinois, with Gladys Christensen, and a master’s degree from New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts, with Yuko Hayashi, she continued her organ studies in Paris with Marie-Claire Alain, André Isoir, and Michel Chapuis. During the summers of 1976 and 1977, she studied organ with Wolfgang Rübsam at Northwestern University. She received Premiers Prix in organ at the conservatories in Rueil-Malmaison and Boulogne-Billancourt, a master’s degree in music education with highest distinction at the Sorbonne in Paris, and a Ph.D. in musicology with honors at Tours University for her doctoral thesis on Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s secular organs. Organist at the American Cathedral in 1988 and 1989, she was then appointed titular of the Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at the Church of the Holy Trinity, where she founded a weekly noontime concert series. After thirty-three years of faithful service, she was named Honorary Choir Organist.

An international concert organist, in 2007 the French Cultural Minister awarded Shuster Fournier the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2022 Delatour France Editions published the English translation she made with Connie Glessner of Helga Schauerte’s book, Jehan Alain, Understanding His Musical Genius. She has made recordings and contributed to specialized reviews and to Fugue State Films Documentaries.

César Franck: a worthy heir to François Benoist and Alexis Chauvet in promoting Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works

César Franck (1822–1890) taught organ at the Paris Conservatory for eighteen years, from 1872 to 1890. François Benoist preceded him as organ professor from 1819 to 1872, and Charles-Marie Widor succeeded him from 1890 to 1896. What were the circumstances that led to Franck’s nomination to this institution sponsored by the French government? Who were his students? What were his pedagogical principles? How did they differ from those of his successor? Did he leave a legacy?

Much is known about the life of this child prodigy whose authoritarian father, Nicolas Joseph Franck (1794–1871), a modest bank employee and an amateur musician, had exploited his talents and those of his younger brother Joseph (1825–1891) after their musical education at the Royal School of Music in Liège, Belgium.¹ It is certainly thanks to Pauline García that César Franck came to Paris to study privately with her professor, Anton Reicha.² They met in Brussels on April 25, 1835. She highly appreciated his agile and energetic musicianship when accompanying her sister Maria Malibran. From June 24, 1835, to May 11, 1836,³ like Pauline García, Franck embraced Reicha’s free spirit, his vast Germanic cultural outlook, his interest in the writings of Kant and Aristotle, his faithfulness to past German masters, and his love of architectural compositional structure and canonic writing manifest in his 36 Fugues (1805).

Equipped with this musical baggage, César Franck studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he won a first prize in piano in 1838, a first prize in counterpoint and fugue in 1840, and a second prize in organ in 1841. This sufficed for his shrewd father, who made him leave the conservatory on April 22, 1842, to earn his living as a music professor and concert artist. In October 1838 at the age of sixteen, Franck began teaching piano and harmony with his brother, Joseph, from their home at 22, rue Montholon in the New Athens neighborhood. The brothers were inspired by Anton Reicha’s visionary pedagogy.⁴ He then gave music lessons at the Collège Rollin (now the Jacques-Decour High School [Collège-Lycée]), at the Augustinian College of the Assumption (234, Faubourg Saint-Honoré), at an Institution for Young Girls in Auteuil, and in the autumn of 1852 at the Jesuit High School [Collège] of the Immaculate Conception in Vaugirard, where Henri Duparc and Arthur Coquard experienced his “musical rhetoric:”⁵

renown as “a nearly mysterious” professor . . . who was at once ingenious, with a peculiar face and a delightfully pleasant and a comical manner of dressing. He seemed to have the piety of a saint, and that filled us with an artistic awe . . . whose expression, really exuded a gentle manner, happiness, honesty, which were hardly terrestrial.⁶

César’s assiduous teaching enabled him to escape his father’s exploitation of his talents. He married one of his students, Félicité Desmousseaux, on February 22, 1848, at Notre-Dame de Lorette Church, where he had been the choir organist since 1845. His son Georges was born at the end of the year. Franck felt very comfortable in this New Athens neighborhood where cosmopolitan artists such as Frédéric Chopin, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Franz Liszt, Chevalier Sigismund Neukomm, and his piano professor, Pierre Zimmermann, played J. S. Bach’s music.

On May 15, 1851, the year Franck was appointed titular organist of the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Jean-Saint-François Church, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll installed his first organ with a thirty-note German-style pedalboard in Pauline García-Viardot’s home at 48, rue de Douai. Nine months later, on January 16, 1852, these musicians all attended a performance by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens of Bach’s works on the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Church. Following this concert, François Benoist wrote to Aristide Cavaillé-Coll:

That which especially struck me was this calm and religious greatness and this severe style which is so appropriate to the majesty of God’s temple. . . . It is a great merit, in my viewpoint, to rest faithful to the traditions of the grand masters who, in the past century, had founded the true art of the organ.⁷

Franck had lived at 69, rue Blanche, in the same building as Adèle Blanc, who married Cavaillé-Coll on February 4, 1854, in the second chapel of Sainte-Trinité Church.⁸ On December 19, 1859, Franck became titular organist of the new Cavaillé-Coll organ at Sainte-Clotilde Church, located in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In 1862 when his melody Souvenance [Remembrance] was published, Franck thanked Pauline Viardot by dedicating it to her.⁹

In 1868 when Franck’s Six Pièces, composed between 1858 and 1862, were published, they were dedicated to his close friends: Alexis Chauvet, Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély, François Benoist, and Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. One must remember that Alexis Chauvet had been destined to succeed François Benoist as organ professor at the Paris Conservatory. An extremely talented organist, composer, and professor, Chauvet had won first prizes in organ, fugue, and composition at the Paris Conservatory, where he had assisted Ambroise Thomas in teaching his class. His Twenty Pieces for organ, published in 1862 and dedicated to François Benoist, manifest the influence of Bach and the French Classical composers; like Alexandre Boëly’s music, his works are linked to the German and French schools.

Chauvet’s and Franck’s collections greatly assisted the resurrection of the great art of the organ in France.¹⁰ Both of them had performed in Cavaillé-Coll’s workshops and inaugurated his organs, those at Notre-Dame Cathedral on March 6, 1868, and at Sainte-Trinité Church on March 16, 1869, where Chauvet was appointed titular organist on March 24. Thanks to Chauvet’s highly esteemed advice, Cavaillé-Coll’s great organ and choir organ at Sainte-Trinité Church both had thirty-note pedalboards. Nicknamed “little Father Bach,”¹¹ Chauvet’s Fifteen Preparatory Studies to the Works of Bach (1867) had initiated his students to this great master’s polyphony.

The Leipzig Bach Society published the Bach Gesellschaft between 1851 and 1899. Bach’s organ works became available in 1864 to Parisian subscribers such as Alkan, Chauvet, Viardot, and Saint-Saëns. In 1865 E. Repos published Joseph Franck’s editions of twenty-two Bach preludes and fugues. Unfortunately, the Paris Conservatory’s organ students were not able to acquire an excellent pedal technique necessary for performing Bach’s organ works, simply because its 1819 Grenié studio organ only had a twenty-note pedalboard that was “too large and disproportionate.”¹²

In 1853 Pierre Érard constructed concert pianos with a thirty-two-note pedalboard, with a ravalement that began at A, using a system that was coupled to the low notes of the piano. In 1855 both Pauline Viardot’s organ and Érard’s piano-pédalier were promoted at the World’s Fair. On the piano-pédalier, Alkan performed Bach’s virtuosic Toccata in F Major, which highlighted two pedal solos. In this same year Bach’s Fugue in E Minor was a required work for the Paris Conservatory’s organ competition. In 1858 the Niedermeyer School imposed Bach’s Passacaglia at its final organ exam. Cavaillé-Coll had applied a pedalboard to an upright piano¹³ and Franck had purchased a Pleyel vertical pedalboard (N° 25 655),¹⁴ which, “instead of merely coupling the piano keys to the pedals, was completely independent, with its own strings, hammers, and mechanism.”¹⁵ Chauvet had installed one in a painting studio where he taught. At the Collège in Vaugirard, Franck gave his lessons on a piano with a pedalboard in a small room with stained glass windows.¹⁶

In 1870 the conservatory ordered two Cavaillé-Coll organs,¹⁷ one with three sixty-one-note manuals and seventeen stops for the Société des Concerts Hall, contracted on September 26, 1870, and the other one with three fifty-six-note manuals and twenty-six stops, contracted on November 5, 1870, to replace the inadequate Grenié studio organ. Chauvet advised that these organs should possess thirty-note pedalboards. Unfortunately, he died of a lung infection on January 29, 1871, during the Prussian siege of Paris, just one week after the death of Franck’s father in Aix-la-Chapelle and three days after the armistice had been signed. Charles Gounod lamented his death on March 13 in London:

In London, I learned at this very instant through one of my friends of the death of poor Chauvet, organist of the Great Organ of our parish. This is a great loss! There are few Chauvets, unfortunately.¹⁸

Esprit Auber, director of the Paris Conservatory, died on May 5, 1871, during the revolutionary government that had been instituted on March 18. Ambroise Thomas succeeded him, after Gounod had refused to become director of the conservatory. Twenty-three days later, a week of bloody violence ended the Commune. Franck, a “moderate Republican” (Républicain modéré),¹⁹ had remained in Paris during this difficult period. On February 25, 1871, he contributed to the founding of the Société national de musique, which aspired to give birth to new French music.

How did Franck succeed François Benoist? It is well known that Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Théodore Dubois supported his nomination as organ professor at the Paris Conservatory. On August 21 Franck had written to Charles Blanc, director of fine arts, to notify him that he could replace François Benoist.²⁰ On October 1, 1871, his friend Pauline Viardot was appointed voice professor at the Paris Conservatory. Charles Blanc and his brother Louis, a socialist and Republican politician, were both friends of Pauline’s husband, Louis Viardot, an eminent art collector. The Viardots and Louis Blanc had just seen each other in London. On November 12, 1871, a decree by the president of the Republic granted Franck the rights to reside in France.²¹ On January 31, 1872, Jules Simon signed a decree for the General Secretary of the State Department of Public Instruction of Worship and the Fine Arts, which stipulated that Franck would be appointed as organ professor there.²² Benoist retired on the next day, February 1. However, Ambroise Thomas only officially appointed Franck to succeed him after he had received on February 17, 1872, the official letter from Charles Blanc indicating César Franck’s appointment as organ professor. Then forty-nine years old, Franck had been nominated for this eminent post in spite of the fact that he had only received a second prize in organ there, unlike his brother Joseph, who had received a first prize in Benoist’s class in 1852.

Two new Cavaillé-Coll organs at the Paris Conservatory

Unfortunately, the violence in the capital had drastically reduced the conservatory’s funds. Constructing two new organs was out of the question. Since the Grenié studio organ was unplayable, the conservatory had asked Cavaillé-Coll to revise it and to construct another one for the conservatory’s Société des Concerts Hall, using elements from Sébastian Érard’s 1830 Château de la Muette organ, which his daughter-in-law, Madame Pierre Érard, had given to the conservatory in 1863. The construction of the seventeen-stop concert hall organ was delayed—it began on August 31, 1871, but was not finished until October 5, 1872.

Cavaillé-Coll encountered some difficulties installing this organ. Constructed in a parallelogram shape of wood covered with painted canvases, the concert hall had an excellent acoustic. However, in 1866 Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle had redecorated it by placing irremovable panels in the Pompeian style of the Second Empire that were eight and a half meters high at the back of the stage. This stage was reserved for the declamation classes, and the only possible place to install the organ without bothering the scene shifters

was behind the decorative panels at the back of the stage, where an insufficient opening was found that would allow it to be seen as a half-length portrait, as in a Guignol theater.²³

According to Jules Lissajous, the organ was placed in a limited space, on the axis with the stage at the height of the first balcony, and the access to its pipework and mechanics was difficult since

the instrument was entirely separated from the Hall by a rotunda that formed the stage and that encircled the amphitheater where a notable part of the Orchestre Société des Concerts was placed; the sound not coming from this side, resounds from the openings on the upper sides of the stage and is lost in the ceilings and in the hallways and, to make these circumstances worse, a ceiling sagged in two [sections] is suspended at a rather short distance in front of the organ and immediately blocks the sound waves that emanate from the expression box.²⁴

A vintage drawing of the console is illustrated in Example 1.²⁵

Due to the unmovable panels, the sound of the organ was insufficient to accompany singers. Cavaillé-Coll was very disappointed, especially since he was then building a monumental sixty-four-stop concert organ for the city of Sheffield in England, installed in 1873. Unfortunately, due to the violent Commune, the French government had to wait until 1878 to finance the construction of the organ for the concert hall of the Trocadéro festival hall. In the meantime, Cavaillé-Coll observed that

the delay justified by the extent of the work on the grand orgue nevertheless would not have resulted in any loss to the administration, since in this manner, the organ class was able to use the former studio organ until the installation of the grand orgue on which the students may continue to work during the repairs of the studio organ.²⁶

Example 2 of the organ room located just behind the stage of the concert hall illustrates this situation, “Salle d’Orgue.”

After his appointment to the conservatory in 1872, Franck taught on the concert hall organ from February to June and began teaching on the studio organ in October, since it was reconstructed beginning February 23 with reinstallation completed on October 7 in the organ room,27 a small eighteenth-century Rococo-style theater where Benoist had taught. Its pipes were placed in an expressive box to protect them from accumulating dust often found in theaters. It had new mechanical-action keyboards, but its former windchests and nine and a half of its sixteen stops, excluding free reeds, had been retained:

Grand-Orgue (enclosed, 54 notes)

8′ Flûte

8′ Dessus de Flûte Harmonique (30 notes)

8′ Bourdon

4′ Dessus de Prestant (30 notes)

4′ Flûte

8′ Trompette

Récit (enclosed, 54 notes)

8′ Principal

8′ Flûte Traversière

8′ Voix Céleste

4′ Flûte Octaviante

8′ Trompette

8′ Basson and Hautbois

Pédale (enclosed, 30 notes)

16′ Soubasse

8′ Flûte

4′ Flûte

8′ Basson

Pédales de combinaison

Tirasse Grand-Orgue

Tirasse Récit

Copula Récit sur Grand-Orgue

Expression

This “wretched cuckoo of an organ”²⁸ was activated by pulling a stop labeled Sonnette (Bell), and one stop remained Tacet. Its expression was activated by a hitch-down pedal with two notches located on the lower right side of the console as shown in the console layout diagram.²⁹

Each of these organs was equipped with a thirty-note pedalboard. On December 29, 1872, Franck had performed Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor on the new concert hall organ for the Société des Concerts. He had already performed “Adagio” and “Finale” from Hummel’s Fantaisie in E-flat Major on the piano in this hall on March 24, 1839. Performing at the organ this time, he was hidden from the auditors. Alexandre Cellier wrote about this concert hall organ in 1927:

In the hall of the former Conservatory, it’s the poor old instrument with 16 stops placed too high and muffled by an imposturous décor, which must struggle against 70 to 80 musicians. If the disproportion is less grand elsewhere, it does not place the organ in such a position of inferiority with the orchestra.³⁰

Unfortunately, both organs have been removed and have disappeared.

César Franck’s approach to teaching: the technique should serve artistry and musicality

Franck, “a model functionary” (fonctionnaire modèle),³¹ punctually³² taught organ at the Paris Conservatory on the rue Bergère for six hours each week, during two hour-long sessions on three days.³³ These collective lessons with male and female students mirrored the ones he had given in his home in 1838, which enabled students to listen to each other and to their professor. As in the past under François Benoist, his students took two semester exams, at the end of January and June, during which they accompanied a plainchant in four parts, improvised a four-part fugue and a free piece in sonata form—both based on themes chosen by the examiners—and played “a classic piece” of their choice by memory. In 1852 this memorized piece was a fugue; in 1867 it became a Bach fugue; in 1872 a Classical-era piece.³⁴

Franck’s duty was to prepare his students to pass their exams. Prior to these exams, Franck received a report that indicated each student’s name, age, year of study, and previous awards in the class, on which he briefly evaluated, in a blank space that measured one and a half by four and a half inches, the student’s progress and indicated the piece he or she would play during the exam, in order to prepare the scores for the jury members. If they approved a student’s progress, they could award either a second or first accessit (certificates of merit). After each year’s final exam, a competition was held for advanced students, who could obtain either a second or first prize. Although these exams and competitions were closed to the public, their results could have a meaningful impact on the future career of each student.

While much has been said about Franck’s students who won first or second prizes, little is known about the rest of his class. Following is a list of students who enrolled in his class, their dates of participation, the period they were enrolled, and their awards:

Franck’s enrolled students at the Paris Conservatory³⁵

Abbreviations: 1A (first accessit), 2A (second accessit), 1P (first prize), 2P (second prize)

Students who began with Benoist and continued with Franck:

Georges Deslandres (1849–1875), 1868: 1A/1868, remained until 1872

Paul Rougnon (1846–1934), 1868–1872

Paul Wachs (1851–1915), 1869: 2P/1870, 1P/1872

Bazile Benoît (1847–after 1900), 1868: 2A/1872, remained until 1873

Samuel Rousseau (1853–1904), 1871: 2A/1872, 1A/1875, 2P/1876, 1P/1877

Francis Thomé (1850–1909), 1871–1873

Students who studied entirely with Franck:

Jean Tolbecque (1857–1890), November 21, 1872: 1A/1873

Joseph Humblot (born in 1845), 1872: 1A/1873, 2P/1874

Marie-Antoinette [nicknamed Thérèse] Gaillard (1850–after 1900), November 9, 1872–June 7, 1873

Adèle Billault (1848–after 1900), December 20, 1872–June 11, 1875

Amédée Dutacq (1848–1929), January 1874–October 12, 1874

Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931), studied privately with Franck beginning October 13, 1872, and was an auditor in his class before officially enrolling January 14, 1874: 2A/1874, 1A/1875

Léon-Gustave-Joseph Karren (1854–1920), February 1875–1876

Georges Verschneider (1854–1895), 1873: 2A/1874, 1A/1875, remained until 1879

Marie Renaud [Madame Maury] (1852–1928), January 1874: 2A/1875, 1A/1876, remained until June 1877

Louise Genty (born in 1850), January 1875: 2A/1876

Camille Benoît, 1875–1876

Marie-Anne Papot (1855–1896), January 1876: 2A/1876, 1A/1878, 2P/1879, remained until December 1880

Clément Jules Broutin (1851–1900), October 1877–June 1878

Georges Hüe (1858–1948), December 1878–June 1879

Henri Dallier (1849–1934), November 1876: 1P/1878

Georges Marty (born in 1860), December 1878–June 1879

Auguste Chapuis (1858–1933), December 1878: 1A/1879, 2A/1880, 1P/1881

Jean Louis Lapuchin (1850–1895?), December 1878–January 1879

Théophile Sourilas (1850–1907), January 1880: 1A/1880, remained until July 1881

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937), December 1880: 2P/1881, 1P/1882

Louis Ganne (1862–1923), December 1880: 1A/1882

Paul Jeannin (1858–1887), auditor/1880, December 1881: 1A/1882

Lucien Grandjany (1862–1891), December 1881: 2P/1882, 1P/1883

Henri Charles Kaiser (1861–1920?), December 1881: 2A/1882, 2P/1883, 1P/1884

Frédéric Duplessis (born in 1858), December 1881

Marcel Rouher (1857–1940), November 1882–1885

Léonie Guintrange [Madame E. Rouher] (1858–1900), December 1883–January 1885

Louis Landry (born in 1867), November 1882: 1A/1884, remained until June 1886

Carlos Mesquita (born in 1864), December 1883: 2A/1884, 1A/1885, remained until January 1886

François Pinot (1865–1891), November 1884: 1P/1885

Aimé Féry (born in 1862), December 1885–June 1887

Émile Fournier (1864–1897), October 4, 1885–June 1886

Louis Frémaux (born in 1867), December 1885

Dynam-Victor Fumet (1867–1949), December 1885

Georges Aubry (1868–1939), December 1885: 2A/1888, remained until July 1889

Henri Letocart (1866–1945), December 1885: 2A/1887, remained until June 1890

Alfred Georges Bachelet (1864–1944), December 1885–1887–1888

Louis d’Arnal de Serres (1864–1942), October 1885–1888

Albert Pillard (1867–1943), December 1886–June 1888

Édouard Bopp (born in 1866, Switzerland), December 1887–January 1888

Jean-Joseph Jemain (1864–1954), January 1885: 2A/1886, 1A/1887

Adolphe Marty (1865–1942), December 1886: 1P/1886

Hedwige Chrétien [Madame P. Gennaro] (1859–1944), December 1886–January 1887

Georges Bondon (1867–after 1900), December 1885: 2P/1887, 1P/1889

Cesar[ino] Galeotti (Italy 1872–Paris 1929), December 1885: 1P/1887

Joséphine Boulay (1869–1925), December 1887: 1P/1888

Marie Prestat (1862–1933), December 1887: 2A/1888, 1A/1889, 1P/1890

Jean-Ferdinand Schneider (1864–1934), December 1887–June 1889

Bruno Maurel (1867–after 1900), December 1887–January 1889

Albert Mahaut (1867–1943), December 1888: 1P/1889

Students who began with Franck and continued with Widor:

Achille Runner (1870–1938?), December 1888: 2P/1893, remained until June 1895

Paul Ternisien (born in 1870), December 1888–June 1892

Georges Guiraud (1868–1928), December 1889–June 1891

André-Paul Burgat (1865–1900), December 1889–June 1891

Jules Bouval (1867–1914), December 1889: 2A/1891, remained until June 1894

Henri Büsser (1872–1974), December 1889–January 1893

Henri Libert (1869–1937), December 1889: 2A/1892, 1P/1894

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939), December 1889: 1A/1889, 1P/1891

[Louis Vierne (1870–1937), auditor 1889, enrolled on October 4, 1890, or January 16, 1891: 2A/1891, 2P/1892, 1P/1894]36

In 1872 the six students enrolled in his class had studied with François Benoist. For the next thirteen years his class fluctuated from two to eight students. Just six years after he began to teach organ, he applied to teach composition instead of organ and had hoped to succeed François Bazin, who died on July 2, 1878. However, Jules Massenet was appointed as Bazin’s successor and Franck continued to teach organ. Franck was naturalized as a French citizen on March 10, 1873, yet his teaching would cross the fraternal bridge linking French and German music.³⁷ In the autumn of 1885, his class had grown from four to twelve students and leveled off to about ten pupils per year. Franck’s initial salary of 1,500 francs rose to 2,400 francs.³⁸ This increase was partially due to his successful organ recital³⁹ on October 1, 1878, at the monumental 5,000-seat Trocadéro festival hall during the World’s Fair, which had reaffirmed his reputation as “an artist at the forefront of organ teachers in France.”⁴⁰ Foreign organists entered his class: Carlos Mesquita of Brazil, Édouard Bopp of Switzerland, and Cesarino Galeotti of Italy, his favorite and youngest student, who won his first prize in organ at the age of sixteen.

Seven of Franck’s students—Paul Wachs, François Pinot, Émile Fournier, Georges Guiraud, Henri Letocart, and Henri Büsser—previously received a complete musical training in the Niedermeyer School of Classical and Religious Music, a boarding school located at 10, rue Neuve-Fontaine-Saint-Georges (today rue Fromentin). Founded in 1853 it thoroughly trained church musicians, offering courses in solfège, piano, organ, plainchant, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, accompaniment, music history, and vocal ensemble. These students had acquired the eight volumes of the Peters Edition of J. S. Bach’s organ works and played them daily,⁴¹ as well as great classical works by Palestrina, Handel, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, etc.⁴² When Clément Loret, a former Lemmens student in Brussels, began to teach there in 1858, his Cours d’orgue had appeared in the school’s journal, La Maîtrise. It included exercises in manual substitutions and glissandi as well as the use of both toes and heels in order to play legato. According to Lemmens, “a good method for pedaling was as necessary as good fingering to properly play the organ.”⁴³ Loret’s method explained how an organ functioned and taught students to transpose, accompany plainchants, and improvise.

Students could practice on small Cavaillé-Coll organs, fifteen pianos, and even a piano with a pedalboard, as well as in Cavaillé-Coll’s workshops, where they occasionally gave concerts.⁴⁴ At the end of the 1880s, Loret’s student Aloÿs Kunc taught students in Toulouse who then entered Franck’s class—Dynam-Victor Fumet, Henri Büsser, Georges Guiraud, and Jules Bouval. In 1889 when Büsser went to meet Franck at Sainte-Clotilde Church to show him his recent exams in harmony, fugue, and composition at the Niedermeyer School, Franck told him,

Young man, you seem to be very talented, come tomorrow morning to my class at the Paris Conservatory and, without doubt, I will make something of you.⁴⁵

The next day, Büsser played a Mendelssohn sonata, a Bach fugue, and then improvised on a free theme that Franck had given him. Franck then told him, “I think that you may enter my class as a student, after the examination in January.”⁴⁶

Four of Franck’s students—Adolphe Marty, Albert Mahaut, Joséphine Boulay, and Louis Vierne—had studied at the National Institute for Blind Youth⁴⁷ with Louis-Bon Lebel (1831–1888), who used Lemmens’ École d’Orgue to teach pedal technique. Around 1875 Franck became the inspector of musical studies there and the president of the final exams at the end of each year.⁴⁸ Students worked rigorously and practiced four or five hours each day on their two Cavaillé-Coll studio organs, one in the boys’ quarters and the other in the girls’ quarters. In 1883 Cavaillé-Coll built a three-manual, thirty-six-stop organ for their chapel, decorated by the painter Henri Lehmann, a friend of Franz Liszt. The chapel also served as a concert hall when movable panels enlarged the room. For this organ’s inauguration on March 17, 1883, Franck had composed his Psalm CL for choir, organ, and orchestra, for which Louis Vierne played timpani.

Some of Franck’s students came from musical families. Paul Wachs’s father was a composer and choirmaster at Saint-Merri. Georges Deslandres’s father Laurent and his brother Adolphe were musicians at the Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles Church; his brother Jules-Laurent was a bass player, and his sister Clémence was a singer. Samuel Rousseau’s father was a harmonium manufacturer in Paris. Georges Verschneider came from a family of three generations of organ builders active from 1760 until 1900 in Moselle. Hedwige Chrétien was the granddaughter of the violinist J. Ternisien. Jean Tolbecque came from a family of French-Belgian musicians. His father Auguste was a cellist and composer who taught at the Marseille Conservatory from 1865 until 1871; a friend of Camille Saint-Saëns and Ambroise Thomas, he had acquired an organ for his early instrument collection installed in the Fort-Foucault in Niort in 1875.⁴⁹ Henri Letocart’s father Joseph was a music professor.

Among Franck’s sixty-three enrolled students, seventeen were awarded first prizes; two received second prizes; ten, first accessits; four, second accessits, and twenty-nine received no awards. Those who received no award had not studied harmony or counterpoint and could not improvise (Léon Karren, Clément Broutin, Jean Lapuchin, Émile Fournier, Amédée Dutacq, Georges Deslandres, Louis Landry, and Henri Letocart). These students could escape to a small room situated underneath the organ to help Jean Lescot, the conservatory’s janitor, pump the organ’s wind bellows.⁵⁰ Some became ill (Albert Pillard, Jean-Ferdinand Schneider, Georges Aubry, Georges Verscheider, Louis de Serres, and Léonie Guintrange). Others were talented, conscientious, and had studied accompaniment or composition, but were too busy to practice (Alfred Bachelet, Francis Thomé, Aimé Féry, Louis Frémaux, Paul Ternisien, Louis Ganne, and Paul Jeannin). Some students specialized in other instruments, such as the pianist Bazille Benoît and the cellist Jean Tolbecque. Joseph Humblot was his only organ student who improvised very well but he had difficulty performing. Other excellent students with high-level musical intelligence worked hard, interpreted well, but had difficulty improvising, such as Louise Genty, Marie Renaud, Théophile Sourilas, Georges Verschneider, and Vincent d’Indy. Both Vincent d’Indy and Marie Renaud had received only a first accessit. D’Indy was very bitter about this and spoke rather unkindly about his fellow students in his Journal.⁵¹ He left Franck’s organ class but continued to study composition privately with him. Marie Renaud, one of Franck’s ten female students, was the first woman to win a first prize in counterpoint and fugue (1876) at the conservatory. Unfortunately, she could not compete for the Grand Prix de Rome because it was forbidden for women to do so until 1903. She was also the first woman to be a member of the Société nationale de musique.

Those who had successfully won a first prize in organ had also studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and composition in order to become complete musicians. All of Franck’s students who had studied at the National Institute for Blind Youth had won a first prize in organ: Adolphe Marty, Albert Mahaut, and Joséphine Boulay quickly received it due to their excellent training. In 1888 Boulay was Franck’s first female student to win a first prize in Franck’s organ class. Marie Prestat was the first woman to obtain five first prizes at the conservatory (in harmony, accompaniment, composition, fugue and counterpoint, and organ). Henri Dallier also earned his first prize very quickly, because he had studied at the Reims cathedral choir school and had been choir organist there.

To prepare his students for their exams, Franck taught them to accompany plainchants given in whole notes with very free developments in four-part florid counterpoint, with the cantus firmus placed in the bass and three voices above it.⁵² The suppleness of the chants, such as Stabat Mater, Dies irae, or Jesu Redemptor, gave birth to beautiful improvisations and compositions in all forms. Franck desired that the embellishments of these admirable melodies be musically expressive, in order to bring them to life.⁵³ When the organ room was occupied by exams, he taught the accompaniment of plainchant on a piano in another room.

With indulgence, patience, severity, and austerity, Franck taught improvisation five out of the six hours of his organ class each week,⁵⁴ according to the conservatory’s imposed strict regulations. To improvise a four-voice fugue d’école, students had to listen carefully to Franck’s severe advice in order to strictly follow a set architectural plan and construct fugues solidly and harmoniously with an absolute pureness of style. After exposing the theme in four voices, they chose a countersubject with entries in the outer voices and developed a stretto toward the end. The free improvisations used a one-theme exposition, which after a bridge subtly introduced a new element during the transition to the dominant, which could later serve during the development, before the recapitulation in the tonic.

As in François Benoist’s class, the themes provided during Franck’s class were sometimes taken from Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies, but during their exams students improvised on popular tunes from operettas. However, from January 1879 to June 1887, fugue subjects and modern themes were composed specially for the exams⁵⁵ by Auguste Bazille, Jules Cohen, Léo Delibes, Théodore Dubois, Henri Fissot, Alexandre Guilmant, and Ambroise Thomas.⁵⁶

Franck encouraged his students to improvise with “melodic invention, harmonic discoveries, subtle modulations, and elegant figurations:⁵⁷

He did not stop the student who was developing a Gregorian theme or another free or imposed one, a fugue, a sonata movement with florid counterpoint, but gave several interjections, launched with a vibrant loud bursting voice, sometimes with a tremendous crescendo to impose the order of a development, a tonality, a modulation, to prevent the apprentice organist from getting lost in the contrapuntal plan, to proclaim criticism or praise: “Modulate! . . . Some flats!!! Some sharps!!! E in the bass, in the tonal key. . . . Something else! I don’t love that! I love that!”⁵⁸

According to Maurice Emmanuel, he gave his students practical principles with severity and sweetness and encouraged them to listen to the beautiful Cavaillé-Coll organ at Sainte-Clotilde:

One should see one of Franck’s lessons in this small half-obscured theater, where the master’s beautiful voice resonated like a deep bell, at one moment detailing the exercise underway, and at another moment expressing, with general ideas, the preference of the musician. Severe when supervising the construction of a fugue, he wanted this rhetoric to be as worthwhile as possible. “First search for a beautiful countersubject,” he said. . . . And the student, invited to discover one on his own, was not always able to invent one. Then Franck took his place on the oak bench and demonstrated one in grand style—“And here’s a second one! And a third one! . . . And yet another one!” The students were confounded. . . . The same tactic for the “divertissements.” Those which the young beginning “fugue improvisers” came up with were not always to his liking: therefore, his hands ran to the keyboards, substituting an example for the precept. This pedagogical method was perhaps insufficient for many students, who had only applied, desired, or were waiting for precise recipes. This eloquent persuasive model was addressed to the worthy disciple who could understand it and who was capable of becoming inspired by it.

It is especially while exercising free improvisation that Franck applied this method. It was as good as any other. He created in front of his students a “verse” or a more developed piece in order to enable them to succeed in the double exam on the day of competition. He gave his students practical precepts and was very strict concerning the choice and order of modulations. He had magistral ideas concerning them. But all things considered, “Listen to me,” he cried; or even, unsatisfied with the resources that the small old organ in the class offered him, he said to his students: “Come to Sainte-Clotilde on Sunday. I will demonstrate this to you.”⁵⁹

Gabriel Pierné, Louis de Serres, and Louis Vierne observed that “no form of teaching could be livelier: his playing was magnificent, seductive, leading the student to his utmost potential. . . .” [nulle forme d’enseignement ne pouvait être plus vivante: c’était un jeu magnifique, séduisant, entraînant à l’extrême. . . .].⁶⁰ Franck did not need to resort to words to express his thoughts, which he could more fully express by music.⁶¹ Therefore, he played various solutions to show them how to develop a good fugue.⁶² According to Augusta Holmès, who studied composition with him beginning in 1875, “He never substituted his own manner of thinking for that of his students. After having opened the way, he let them entirely follow their own initiative.”⁶³ Maurice Emmanuel emphasized, “As necessary as it may be, the form is not sufficient. It only constitutes a framework. And the most beautiful technique in the world can remain a dead letter if it is not used to serve an idea.”⁶⁴

Franck’s three primary maxims were:

Don’t try to do a great deal, but rather seek to do well no matter if only a little can be produced. Bring me the results of many trials that you can honestly say represent the very best you can do. Don’t think that you will learn from my corrections of faults of which you are aware unless you have strained every effort yourself to amend them.⁶⁵

Louis de Serres, whose expressive delicateness Franck particularly appreciated, confirmed that, “No one better than he knew how to make his students understand a strictly severe organ style . . . at the same time deeply felt and expressive.”⁶⁶

Franck did not use a particular method or follow any strict rules, but orally gave each student personal advice. According to Albert Mahaut, “He spoke little, in small phrases, but we sensed the deepness of his soul, his greatness, his energy, at the same his penetrating sweetness.”⁶⁷ His innate, perceptive intuition enabled him to understand each student’s personality, temperament, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Whatever their level, Franck deeply loved teaching and instilled in each student his impassioned ardor and love of musical beauty. As Charles Tournemire expressed, “Never did one leave this seraphic musician demoralized; but certain observations, said in a few words, generally gently and penetrating, striking and exact, enlightened the soul and warmed the heart.”⁶⁸ “César Franck had a great influence on my artistic philosophy. I owe him the calm and the courage that strengthens artists. . . . If he lived for transcendent art, he knew how to help those who came to him.”⁶⁹

Extremely generous, Franck did not accept any payment from talented students who needed money more than himself, such as Henri Büsser, whom Franck asked to substitute for him at Sainte-Clotilde.⁷⁰ His class was like a family reunion. Léonie Guintrange met her husband, Marcel Rouher, there. His lack of pride and his joy of accomplishing his everyday tasks with “constant optimism emanated from his perfect kindness, his incapacity to experience any resentment or jealousy; his ongoing cheerful nature”⁷¹ was a consolation and encouragement to all his students, who deeply respected him.

According to Joël-Marie Fauquet and Rollin Smith, the following musicians were auditors in his organ class:⁷²

Ca. 1870 (?): Camille Rage

Ca. 1872: Maurice Cohen-Lânariou (from Romania)

Ca. 1875: Georges Bizet⁷³ (1839–1875), Henri Kunkelmann (1855–1922), Albert Renaud (1855–1924)

1876: Julien Tiersot (1857–1936)

1879: Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)

1880: Paul Vidal (1863-1931)

1880–1881: Herman Bemberg (1859–1931, from France and Argentina), [first name?] Bessand, Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Fernand Leborne (1862–1929), Jules-Gaston Melodia

1880–1885: John Hinton⁷⁴ (1849–1922, from England) [organ], Paul Dukas (1865–1935)

1888: Anne-Berthe Merklin (Mme. Lambert des Cilleuls, daughter of Joseph Merklin) (1866–1918) [piano and organ], Raymond Huntington Woodman (1861–1943, his only student from the United States, a private organ student for three months)

1889: Mlle. De Mailli [harmonium and organ], Louis Vierne

It is likely that some of his other private organ students attended his organ class, such as Charles-Auguste Collin⁷⁵ (1865–1938) and Saint-René Taillandier (who died in 1931). Many of his composition and piano students during these years could have attended his courses:

1872: Alexis de Castillon (1838–1873), Albert Cahen d’Anvers (1846–1903)

1872–1875: Henri Duparc (1848–1933), one of his most talented students [ca. 1863–ca. 1875], Urban Le Verrier (1811–1877)

1873: Arthur Coquard (1846–1910), Mlle. de Jouvencel [piano]

Ca. 1875: Edmond Diet (1854–1924), Marguerite Habert [piano], Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), Henri Kunkelmann (1855–1922), Charles Langrand (1852–1942) [piano and composition?]

1876: Mel-Bonis, Mélanie Bonis (Mme. Albert Domanche) (1858–1937) [piano]

1878: Mme Charles Poisson [piano]

Ca. 1880: Raymond Bonheur (1861–1939), Paul Braud [piano], Laure Fleury [piano, year uncertain], Joséphine Haincelin [piano], Marguérite Hamman [piano], Léon Husson, Mlle Javal [piano], Henry Lerolle (1848–1929), ? Fernand Fouant de La Tombelle (1854–1928), Léo Luguet (1864–1935), H. Kervel [organ and piano?], Georges Rosenlecker, Gustave Sandré (1843–1916) [composition, piano, and organ?, year uncertain], Alice Sauvrezis (1866–1946) [piano, year uncertain], Gaston de Vallin [piano?], Paul de Wailly (1856–1933)

1881–1887: Pierre de Bréville (1861–1949)

Ca. 1885: Charles Bordes (1863–1909), Cécile Boutet de Monvel (1864–1940) [piano], Paul Carré de Malberg [composition?], Paul Dukas (1865–1935), Henri Expert (1863–1952), Marie Fabre, Mme Soullière [piano and composition], Henry Huvey (died 1944) [organ], Sylvio Lazzari (1857–1944) [born in Austria], Mme Édouard Lefébure [piano], Charles Pierné [harmonium], Henri Quittard (1864–1919), Guy Ropartz (1864–1955), Georges Saint-René Taillandier (1852–1942) [year uncertain], Théophile Ysaye (1865–1918) [piano, brother of Eugène]

1887: Stéphane Gaurion [a private organ student?]

1887–1890: Erik Åkerberg (1860–1938) [Swedish], Jules Écorcheville (1872–1915)

1888: Mlle Olympe Rollet [piano]

1889: Charlotte Danner [piano], Mme Saint-Louis de Gonzague [piano], the Argentinian Alberto Williams (1862–1952)⁷⁶

Ca. 1889–1890: Guillaume Lekeu (1870–1894)

Ca. 1890: Clotilde Bréal (1870–1947) [one of Franck’s favorite piano and organ students, to whom he dedicated his Choral in E Major, in the copy that belonged to her second husband, Alfred Cortot], Frank [Franz] Godebski (1866–1948).

Franck understood each student’s capacities and needs, which often led to liberal conclusions that were quite different from the formalism of other professors at the Paris Conservatory. In 1880 and 1881, when Claude Debussy attended his class as an auditor for six months to obtain his advice in composition, Franck had confided to him, “The fifths, there are some nice ones. . . . At the Conservatory one does not allow that. . . . But I myself, I love it well!”⁷⁷

As Erik Kocevar indicated, Gustave Derepas understood Franck’s teaching when he confirmed that instead of imposing his own musical ideas on his students, he let each follow their own paths:

Radically setting aside a personal and intolerant biased opinion, the master penetrated with a rare sagacity his students’ thoughts. . . . How remarkable! Musicians trained in his school of thought all possessed a solid science that can be qualified as profound; but each maintained his own personality. The master was so respectful of the inspiration of others!⁷⁸

To thank him, Franck’s students wholeheartedly supported him. They deeply respected their master, referred to him as a Pater Seraphicus, and developed a doctrine known as “Franckism.”⁷⁹ Many of them contributed to the fact he received the Légion d’honneur on August 6, 1885, during the distribution of prizes at the conservatory, in gratitude for his fifteen years of service there.⁸⁰ In spite of his Germanic origins, many of them revered him as a true renewer of French music, labelled as ars gallica, according to the motto of the Société nationale, which Franck presided over in 1886. Just to give one example, in 1879 Camille Benoît encouraged him by publishing several articles on his works in the Gazette musicale and the Guide musical. His students organized and paid for a Festival Franck, which was given at the Cirque d’Hiver on January 30, 1888.

Franck was not responsible for his students’ complaints to Ambroise Thomas that he had not been appointed as a composition professor at the Paris Conservatory. Unfortunately, this created considerable hostility.⁸¹ Also, Vincent d’Indy had interpreted Franck’s noble character as a sort of religious absolutism that “obeyed the three theological virtues known as Faith, Hope, and Charity,”⁸² to which Franck’s son Georges was totally opposed. According to Maurice Emmanuel, “Franck was never pious, and he was not a practicing Christian.”⁸³ One of his favorite books, which had inspired his Beatitudes,⁸⁴ was The Life of Jesus (published in 1863)⁸⁵ by Ernest Renan, a close friend of Pauline Viardot. César Franck had meditated and was “guided”⁸⁶ by Christ’s Beatitudes since 1845; he had completely set them to music thirty years later. However, although art goes hand in hand with religion, due to its essentially noble character, Franck’s teaching was not religious in nature, but it was deeply spiritual. He simply desired to mold his students’ capacities to express themselves musically, with noble grace, in order to enable them to become genuine artists.

To be continued.

Notes

1. Léon Vallas, La véritable histoire de César Franck, 1822-1890 (Paris, Flammarion, 1955), page 10, and Joël-Marie Fauquet, César Franck (Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1999), page 42.

2. Fauquet, page 54.

3. Vallas, page 19.

4. Fauquet, page 120.

5. Fauquet, page 464. This college was located on the rue de Vaugirard. According to Rollin Smith, Playing the Organ Works of César Franck (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1997), page 25, in 1860, Hippolyte Loret built an organ for their chapel. Franck taught beside another Belgian, Father Louis Lambillotte, who participated in the movement to restore Gregorian chant. In 1856, Adrien Le Clère published César Franck’s Organ Accompaniments of Gregorian Chant, restored by Father Lambillotte.

6. M. Louseau, “Souvenirs de Collège,” Le Gaulois, November 23, 1903, published in Franck Besingrand, César Franck, Entre raison et passion (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2002), pages 165, 167. Carolyn Shuster Fournier translated the original French citations in this article.

7. Cécile and Emmanuel Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Paris, Fischbacher, 1929), page 92.

8. This chapel was located at 12, rue de Clichy. Lefébure-Wély and Pierre Érard were witnesses at this ceremony. In addition to the other addresses mentioned in this article, Franck also lived at 6, rue de Trévise beginning in the spring of 1841 and at 43, rue Lafitte in the autumn of 1842. In 1865, his family moved to 95, boulevard Saint-Michel.

9. Composed in 1846, it was originally intended for his future fiancée, Félicité Desmousseaux. Fauquet, page 54.

10. Félix Raugel, “La Musique religieuse française de l’époque révolutionnaire à la mort de César Franck,” La Revue Musicale, No. 222, 1953–1954, page 119.

11. Henri Maréchal, Souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris, Hachette, 1907), page 171.

12. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, “Description de l’orgue actuel du Conservatoire impérial de musique,” March 12, 1864, A. N. [Archives Nationales de France], F21 1037.

13. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, “Letter to Eugène Gautier,” January 29, 1858, published in Fenner Douglass, Cavaillé-Coll and the Musicians (Raleigh, North Carolina, Sunbury Press, 1980), vol. II, page 997.

14. Vallas, page 142.

15. Smith, page 16.

16. M. Louseau/Besingrand, page 165.

17. See A. Cavaillé-Coll, Traité propose à Monsieur le Ministre des Cultes de l’Instruction publique, des Cultes et des beaux arts, November 5, 1870, A.N. AJ37 82, 4, and Jesse Eschbach, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, A Compendium of Known Stoplists, vol. I (Paderborn: Verlag Peter Ewers, 2003), pages 726–727.

18. Charles Gounod, “Autograph letter to Monsieur le Curé,” London, March 13, 1871, private collection; published in Shuster Fournier, Un siècle de vie musicale à l’église de la Sainte-Trinité à Paris (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014), page 42.

19. Fauquet, page 406.

20. Fauquet, page 466.

21. Fauquet, pages 471 and 834.

22. See Jules Simon, “Arrêté pour le Secrétaire Général du département de l’Instruction publique des Cultes et des Beaux Arts,” Janvier 31, 1872, A. N., AJ37, 69, 2, n° 7, and Charles Blanc, “Le Directeur des Beaux-Arts, Membre de l’Institut, Lettre au Monsieur le Directeur [du Conservatoire National de Musique & de Déclamation],” Février 17, 1872, A. N., AJ37, 69, 2, n° 4.

23. Albert Dupaigne, Le Grand Orgue de la nouvelle salle de concert de Sheffield (Paris, Plon et Cie., 1873), page 48.

24. Jules Lissajous, “Rapport sur l’orgue établi par Mr. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll dans la grande salle du Conservatoire de Musique de Paris,” A. N., AJ37 82, 4d.

25. A. Cavaillé-Coll, “Mémoire général des travaux du grand orgue de la salle des Concerts du Conservatoire de Musique de Paris,” January 12, 1872, A. N., AJ37 82, 4d, stoplist also published in Eschbach, page 338. According to Gilbert Huybens, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Opus List, page 22, this organ was delivered on January 29, 1872.

26. A. Cavaillé-Coll, “Letter to Monsieur Ambroise Thomas, Director of the Paris Conservatory,” December 5, 1871, A. N., AJ37 82, 4.

27. A. Cavaillé-Coll, “Mémoire general des travaux de reconstruction et de perfectionnement effectués à l’orgue d’Étude du Conservatoire de Musique à Paris,” October 24, 1872, A. N., AJ37 82, 4d, included in Carolyn Shuster’s doctoral thesis, “Les Orgues Cavaillé-Coll au salon, au théâtre et au Concert,” delivered in 1991 at the François-Rabelais University in Tours.

28. Louis Vierne, “Mes Souvenirs,” In Memoriam Louis Vierne (Paris, Les Amis de l’Orgue, 1939), page 21.

29. Jules Lissajous, “Rapport sur l’orgue d’étude du conservatoire national de musique, reconstruit et perfectionné par Mr. A. Cavaillé-Coll,” October 25, 1872, A. N., AJ37 82, 4d. The stops on the Grand Orgue keyboard, Eschbach, page 349, indicate that the 8′ Flûte and 4′ Prestant have 30 notes without specifying that they are the upper 30 notes; Rollin Smith, page 31, and Orpha Ochse cite Louis Vierne, who mentioned, in Mes Souvenirs, an 8′ Dessus de Montre without indicating the Dessus of Flûte Harmonique and Prestant stops.

30. Alexandre Cellier, L’Orgue Moderne (Paris, Delagrave, 1927), page 106.

31. Vallas, page 316.

32. Albert Mahaut, “Souvenirs personnels sur César Franck,” Musique et musiciens (Paris, l’Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, 1923), page 586.

33. Louis Vierne, in his Journal II (Cahiers et Mémoires de L’Orgue, No. 135 bis, 1970), page 162, mentions that his courses took place on Mondays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. and on Saturdays at 11:00 a.m., but in Mes Souvenirs II (Cahiers et Mémoires de L’Orgue, No. 134 bis, III, 1970, page 22), he indicates that they took place on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m.

34. A. N., AJ37 251.

35. Prepared with: A. N., AJ37 283; Fauquet, pages 960–964.

36. Vierne, in Mes Souvenirs, page 24, mentions that he was admitted as an organ student at the Paris Conservatory on October 4, 1890. According to Widor’s report, January 24, 1891, A. N., AJ37 292, 54, he enrolled on January 16, 1891.

37. See Fauquet, pages 408 and 471.

38. Vallas, page 174.

39. See Eugène Gigout, “Concerts et Soirées,” Le Ménestrel (XLIV), N° 45, October 6, 1878, page 363.

40. See Smith, page 37, who quotes “Nouvelles diverses,” Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, November 10, 1878, page 367.

41. Henri Letocart, “Quelques Souvenirs,” L’Orgue, No. 36, December 1938, pages 2–7; 37, March 1939, pages 4–6.

42. Orpha Ochse, Organists and Organ Playing in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994), page 209, quoting Gabriel Fauré, “Souvenirs,” La Revue musicale, No. 3, October 1922, pages 3–9.

43. Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, École d’Orgue basée sur le Plain-Chant Romain (B. Schott’s Söhne, 1862), page 2.

44. Marie-Louise Boëllmann-Gigout, “L’École Niedermeyer,” in Histoire de la musique 2, under the direction of Roland-Manuel, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1963), page 854.

45. Henri Büsser, “La classe d’orgue de César Franck en 1889–1990,” L’Orgue, No. 102, 1962, page 33.

46. Ibid.

47. It was founded by Valentin Haüy in 1794 and was located on the boulevard des Invalides. Louis Briaille (1809–1852), organist and professor at this institute, had developed the musical writing for the blind in 1829. Its organ class had been founded in 1826.

48. Had Franck recalled that forty years previously his first music teacher, Dieudonné Duguet, had become blind in 1835, the year Franck had left the Liège Conservatory?

49. Alban Framboisier, “The compositions of Auguste Tolbecque (1830–1919),” text of the CD jacket in Homage to Auguste Tolbecque (Netherlands, Passacaille, 2019), pages 19–22.

50. See Fauquet, page 475.

51. Vincent d’Indy, Ma Vie (Paris, Séguier, 2001).

52. Odile Jutten, “L’Évolution de l’enseignement de l’improvisation à l’orgue au Conservatoire,” in Anne Bongrain and Alain Poirier, eds., Le Conservatoire de Paris: Deux cents ans de pédagogie, 1795–1995 (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1999), page 83.

53. Vallas, pages 327–328.

54. Vierne, Mes Souvenirs, page 23.

55. Jutten, page 85.

56. Théodore Dubois, themes used during organ exams at the Paris Conservatory from January 1879 to June 1887, A. N., AJ37 237, 3.

57. Smith, page 41.

58. Vallas, page 319.

59. Maurice Emmanuel, César Franck (Paris, Henri Laurens, 1930), pages 106–108.

60. Vallas, page 319.

61. Emmanuel, page 106.

62. Vierne, Mes Souvenirs, page 45.

63. J. Bernac, “Interview with Mlle. Augusta Holmès,” The Strand Musical Magazine, 1897, Vol. 5, page 136, quoted in Florence Launay, Les Compositrices en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, Arthème Fayard, 2006), page 56.

64. Emmanuel, page 113.

65. John W. Hinton, César Franck: Some Personal Reminiscences (London, William Reeves, n.d.), page 43, quoted in Smith, page 43.
66. Louis de Serres, “Quelques souvenirs sur le père Franck, mon maître,” L’Art musical, November 29, 1935, page 68, quoted in J.-M. Fauquet, page 477.

67. Vallas, page 329.

68. Tournemire, page 70.

69. L’Orgue, Nos. 321–324, 2018—I–IV, LXX and 8.

70. Büsser, page 34.

71. Emmanuel, pages 15–16.

72. Fauquet, pages 960–964, and Rollin Smith, “César Franck’s Metronome Marks: from Paris to Brooklin,” The American Organist, September 2003, page 58.

73. This laureate of a first prize in organ in 1875 came to listen to Franck’s class and distributed tickets to his students who were lucky enough to attend the premiere of Carmen on March 3 at the Opéra-Comique.

74. According to Ochse, page 159, John Hinton studied privately with Franck in 1865 and 1867 and was an auditor in his organ class in 1873.
75. See Charles Augustin Collin, “César Franck et la musique bretonne,” Le Nouvelliste de Bretagne, August 1912.

76. The author thanks Vera Wolkowicz who kindly communicated this to her.

77. Vallas, page 322.

78. Gustave Derepas, César Franck/Étude sur sa vie, son enseignement, son œuvre (Paris, Fischbacher, 1897), page 27; quoted in Erik Kocevar, “Ses élèves et son enseignement,” in César Franck (1822–1890), Revue Européenne d’Études Musicales, No. 1, 1991, Paris, Éditions Le Léopard d’Or, pages 41–42.

79. Vallas, page 341.

80. Vallas, page 234.

81. Vallas, page 323.

82. Fauquet, page 22.

83. Emmanuel, page 12.

84. Vallas, page 306. In Louis Vierne’s “Choral,” number 16 of his 24 Pièces en style libre, opus 31, the second half of the choral theme is very similar to the theme of the baritone solo (the voice of Christ) in Franck’s third Beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn.”

85. Fauquet, page 315.

86. Emmanuel, page 12.

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article, “César Francks orgelklas aan het Parijse conservatorium, zijn gepassioneerde zoektocht naar artistieke schoonheid,” appeared in Orgelkunst, issue 179, pages 168–191, 2022.

Sally Gordon-Mark

Born in New York City, Sally Gordon-Mark has French and American citizenships, lives in Europe, and is an independent writer, researcher, and translator. She is also a musician—her professional life began in Hollywood as the soprano of a teenage girl group, The Murmaids, whose hit record, Popsicles & Icicles, is still played on air and sold on CDs. Eventually she worked for Warner Bros. Records, Francis Coppola, and finally Lucasfilm Ltd., in charge of public relations and promotions, before a life-changing move to Paris in 1987. There Sally played harpsichord for the first time, thanks to American concert artist Jory Vinikour, her friend and first teacher. He recommended she study with Huguette Dreyfus, which she had the good fortune to do during the last three years before Huguette retired from the Superieur regional conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, remaining a devoted friend until Huguette passed away.

During Sally’s residence in France, she organized a dozen Baroque concerts for the historical city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, worked as a researcher for books published by several authors and Yale University, and being trilingual, served as a translator of early music CD booklets for musicians and Warner Classic Records. She also taught piano privately and at the British School of Paris on a regular basis. In September 2020, she settled in Perugia, Italy. In May 2023, Sally will be the guest editor of the British Harpsichord Society’s e-magazine Sounding Board, devoted entirely to the memory of Huguette Dreyfus. For more information: www.sallygordonmark.com

Read Part 2 here.

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every barrier only fires my firm resolve. He who is fixated on a star does not change his mind.

—Leonardo Da Vinci¹

Huguette Dreyfus, France’s grande dame de clavecin, the self-proclaimed “inexhaustible chatterbox,”² slipped away silently near midnight on April 16, 2016. She was a world-renowned concert artist and teacher and the most important harpsichordist of her generation in France. Exuberant, intelligent, and quick-witted, her attention was almost always turned outwards, keeping her personal world out of the realm of discussion. In conversation, this tacit barrier was intuitively respected. Being unassuming, she spoke little about herself and even less about her past. Therefore, extensive research, interviews, and access to her archives in the Bibliothèque nationale de France were required in order to bring to light her rich and vibrant life. Revealed were the energy, courage, strength of will, and discipline with which she conducted herself from an early age.

Her birth certificate reads “Paulette Huguette Dreyfus,” but her doctor had made an error. Her parents had actually named her Huguette Pauline when she was born on November 30, 1928, in Mulhouse (Alsace, France). Her first ten years as the adored little girl of an upper-middle-class Jewish family were secure and full of warmth. Her father, Fernand, owned two feather factories, one in Mulhouse, the other near Vichy. Neither Fernand nor her mother, Marguerite (née Bloch), were musicians, but they did love to listen to music.³

Pierre, Huguette’s twelve-year-old brother and only sibling, took piano lessons. Huguette, aged four, asked for lessons too, but her mother told her that she was too young and only wanted to copy Pierre. However, the piano teacher, Madame Rueff, convinced her mother to give it a try, and it was soon understood that Huguette was motivated by music, not by her brother. At the end of the first lesson, she could read the notes. Because of health problems, Madame Rueff eventually recommended that Huguette study instead with the distinguished pianist Pierre Maire, a professor at the Ecole Normale in Paris, who also taught in nearby Epinal.⁴ Comfortable playing in public from the very beginning, Huguette participated in two of his recitals, one in 1938, the other on July 2, 1939, when she performed the third movement from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata.⁵ She was ten. Two months later, World War II erupted.

The Alsace region on the border of Germany was the first to be evacuated. Huguette’s father took his family to Vichy, where they had friends. There she took lessons from pianist André Collard.⁶ Huguette entered the Clermont-Ferrand music conservatory under a pseudonym, since Jewish children were not allowed to enroll. There may have been a teacher in Strasbourg who had connections there and referred her. When the Nazis commandeered the University of Strasbourg, its professors had already moved to the University of Clermont-Ferrand, which would become a hotspot of resistance. The now-nomadic Dreyfus family also spent time in Montpellier, where her brother was studying medicine.⁷

After Nazi soldiers occupied all of France in 1942, Huguette and her family crossed the Alps on December 10, settling in Lausanne where her father’s sister lived. She enrolled in the Lausanne music conservatory for piano lessons at the “virtuoso” level. When the war ended, she received an attestation from the conservatory to be able to take her final exams in Clermont-Ferrand in March and June 1945, which she did, receiving first prizes.⁸

Pierre moved to Paris in 1945, and sixteen-year-old Huguette joined him, enrolling at the Ecole Normale de Musique to study with concert pianist Lazare-Lévy, whose illustrious students had included Clara Haskil. He had been a student of Louis Diémer, an important exponent of early music in the late 1880s. In 1920, Lazare-Lévy had been named professor at the Paris Conservatory, but he was forced to give up his position during the Occupation, because of German anti-Jewish laws. His teaching was widely respected for being innovative and original with respect to fingering, technique, and analysis of music. Huguette later acknowledged his influence on her, particularly his guidance with technique. She concluded her lessons with him in June 1948, obtaining a diploma at the superior level.⁹ She continued with counterpoint and solfège at the Ecole Normale in the fall and got a job there accompanying the vocal class of a Madame Kedroff, most likely the well-known soprano, Irene Kedroff, who had performed in a quartet under the direction of Nadia Boulanger.¹⁰ In 1949, her parents moved to Paris, where her father purchased a large apartment in a stylish building at 91 Quai d’Orsay, on the banks of the Seine by Pont Alma. The family would live there for the rest of their lives.¹¹

For the school year of 1949–1950, organist and musicologist Norbert Dufourcq chose Johann Sebastian Bach as the subject of his advanced music history course at the Paris Conservatory. While the conservatory had once owned period harpsichords, twenty-four of them were burned in 1816 and twelve sold at auction in 1822.¹² Fortunately, Dufourcq was able to obtain the use of a Pleyel harpsichord for his classroom. Huguette enrolled in his class that year, as did other future harpsichordists: Sylvie Spycket, Laurence Boulay, and Anne-Marie Beckensteiner. Conductor Jean-François Paillard and singer Jacques Herbillon were also among her classmates. This intense focus on Bach’s music surely made an impact on her: out of the 117 recordings she would make, thirty-six would be of Bach’s works. Dufourcq inspired his class with a fiery enthusiasm that comes across on his radio programs;¹³ she described him as “impassioned and lively.” This class would forever alter the course of Huguette’s life—it was the first time she would lay hands on a harpsichord. 

Huguette took an aesthetics and music analysis class with Olivier Messiaen and a pedagogy course while at the Paris Conservatory. In autumn 1950, attracted by his personality, she joined the musical aesthetics class of Alexis Roland-Manuel. She had been listening religiously to his radio program, Le Plaisir de la Musique, transmitted live every Sunday at noon. This erudite composer, music critic, and radio broadcaster recognized her gifts and would become her ally; if anyone acted as her mentor, it would have been him.¹⁴

There was no harpsichord class at the Paris Conservatory, so Dufourcq created an unofficial one (referred to in conservatory records as an “annex”), inviting a former student, Jacqueline Masson, to teach it. Accompanied by her mother, Huguette auditioned for the class and was accepted along with Anne-Marie Beckensteiner and Laurence Boulay, but the class lasted for only eight months. On June 15, 1951, Huguette passed her exam, playing the Bach Toccata in F-sharp Minor, with Aimée van de Wiele, a former student of Wanda Landowska, on the jury.¹⁵ Huguette had abandoned the piano for the harpsichord, but she did not know where to turn for the training she needed in order to play an instrument and a repertoire so uncommon at that time.

In the years following World War II in France, conditions for early music performers were quite different than they are now. It was difficult even to listen to early music; there were few recordings, and urtext and facsimile editions were not available. Most radio transmitters had been blown up during the war, and LP records and television did not exist. In order to hear the music they were studying, students had to sight-read manuscripts they found in French archives and libraries, write them out themselves, and attend any concerts they could. There were no copies of historic instruments being constructed in France; contemporary harpsichords were expensive. Aix-en-Provence hosted the only music festival in the country, created in 1948. Since early music was little known to the public and there were few harpsichords, impresarios were skittish about scheduling concerts. Certainly there were not today’s masterclasses, and only the Schola Cantorum and l’Ecole de Musique Ancienne offered early music courses in France.

Either Dufourcq or Masson recommended to Huguette that she take Ruggero Gerlin’s summer class at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy. An audition there was mandatory, but she could not leave Paris. In October 1951, having survived the war, Huguette’s father was killed when he was struck by a truck in front of their apartment building. Her brother was temporarily replacing another doctor in the south of France, so it fell on Huguette to help her mother while she continued to work and pursue her studies.¹⁶ However, the following year she successfully auditioned for Gerlin. The Accademia granted her the first of three scholarships to assist with her travel and living expenses in Siena, there being no fees to pay.¹⁷

In June 1953, Huguette completed Dufourcq’s comprehensive course—studies in French and foreign vocal and instrumental music—as well as Roland-Manuel’s course, receiving nothing but the highest marks. On July 15, she arrived in Siena. Classes were scheduled annually from mid-July to mid-September. The Accademia had been founded in 1932 by Count Guido Chigi Saracini in the palace where he resided, because he “adored music but detested traveling,” according to Huguette. Operas and nightly concerts were given in the palace theater. The Accademia had a library, well stocked with books and music scores, a notable collection of musical instruments, and an important art collection. To Huguette, it was like being in a dream.

Having been granted the first of four scholarships, Jill Severs entered the class in 1953 along with Huguette, Jacqueline Masson, Françoise Petit, Sylvie Spycket, and Anne-Marie Beckensteiner. Kenneth Gilbert joined them the following year. The class remained small every year. Huguette audited classes by George Enesco and Andres Segovia. Students she met over the years from other classes included a twelve-year-old John Williams, Narciso Yepes, and Claudio Abbado. Jill remembers, “After the war, to discover Italy in the early 1950s was a revelation; a new world of warmth, beauty, colour, hope and optimism.”¹⁸ The summers spent in Italy affected Huguette deeply, as did the warm Italian temperament. Every morning she would go to the same bakery for coffee and the Siennese specialty, panforte. If she did not appear, it was assumed that she was ill, and the owner would bring her a tray of tea and sweets. Huguette would later say that with memories like that, she could never have been a pessimist.¹⁹

Ruggero Gerlin, born in Venice, had come to Paris to study with Wanda Landowska in 1920. He eventually served as her teaching assistant, and they often performed together on European tours. During the lessons at the Accademia, Jill Severs heard him sometimes refer to Landowska as “ma mère.”²⁰ Their close collaboration was cut short by World War II. Landowska, fleeing the Nazis, left for New York in 1940, and the following year, Gerlin returned to Italy. He settled in Naples, where he taught harpsichord at the prestigious Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella. After the war, he returned to Paris where he stayed until his death in 1983.

Although his “admiration for her was without limits,” Gerlin did not use or teach Landowska’s technique, which surprised Huguette. He also preferred a Neupert to a Pleyel, Landowska’s favorite, but Huguette did not ask him why. He was very sensitive, and if he thought his response could be construed as criticism of Landowska, Gerlin would withdraw into himself, according to Huguette.

Gerlin’s classes were held in French, and Huguette found them intense and tiring.²¹ There were three classes a week, lasting four hours each, during which the students remained silent.

I recognize, having taught a lot since, that he was absolutely correct in imposing this. Even if the students are talking about things concerning the class, it is very disturbing for the professor and very disturbing for the students’ concentration. So we were in prayer for four hours and we learned a ton of things. Gerlin was extremely meticulous. . . . He had an intelligent way of teaching fingering. . . . Above all, the fingering had to be adapted to the interpretation, that is to say, to the musical phrase.

The students generally worked on music by Bach, Rameau, Couperin, and Scarlatti, the quartet that would dominate Huguette’s concert programs later.

At first, the class shared a Cella harpsichord, “a sort of false copy of a Pleyel made by an Italian maker.”²² Jill remembers it being hard to play expressively on the Cella with its hard and unresponsive touch. It was later replaced by a Neupert, which was “extremely different from a Pleyel” and was for Huguette “a complete discovery,” an improvement on the Pleyel. The Neupert was “called the Bach harpsichord at the time, 8′ and 4′ above, and 8′ and 16′ below.”

Gerlin was extremely meticulous. . . . We could spend hours on two measures for the quality of the sound. Touch was extremely important, fingering, analysis of a work. . . . At first, the interpretation was left to the discretion of (the student), which was discussed at length. He did not always agree and if he didn’t, there was no question of arguing afterwards. . . . In the end, he always won.²⁴

But his comments were always respected. Jill Severs has kept her copies of music with fingerings he noted, all this time.

Although his manner was reserved and his moods not always easy to fathom, Gerlin was very gracious. According to Jill Severs, neither silence nor pieces were imposed. The silence came naturally as a result of the intensity of the lessons and the concentration they required, and students could choose to play the pieces that they had selected to prepare. To her, his lessons were a source of “discoveries and inspiration.”²⁵ If he was reserved in his expression of emotions, he always spoke passionately about music.

Anne-Marie Beckensteiner, who had married Jean-François Paillard in 1952, took the class the following year, while her husband searched for manuscripts in Italian libraries. She later wrote:

Gerlin’s lessons were exciting, and he noticed Huguette’s touch very quickly, her “pretty little round hand,” as he used to say, and had her show her hand position to us as an example. We began with the (Bach) inventions with two and three voices, and Huguette’s facility in playing them so easily, with so many colors, with such facility of expression and phrasing, overjoyed Gerlin. . . . He did not content himself with the inventions, very soon—Scarlatti. And what a school it was for us!!! The Count, all dressed in white, often proposed musical evenings. (Huguette) had an unquenchable thirst for music and the harpsichord was truly “her” instrument.²⁶ 

Each summer session ended with a concert in which Huguette, Jill, and Kenneth Gilbert were always invited to play. Count Guido Chigi Saracini was usually in attendance. As Jill Severs recalls, “Those chosen to perform in the beautiful white and gold Sala di Concerto were presented with an enormous bouquet of red or white carnations.”²⁷ Gerlin would be Huguette’s sole maître, and she attended his classes in Siena for a total of eight summers.

From 1954 on, Huguette worked tirelessly, playing continuo and accompanying other artists in concert. She also taught privately, an average of ten students a month. Although her days were filled with appointments noted in her neat, roundish penmanship without flourishes, her evenings were spent going to the opera and concerts. With virtually no teacher ten months out of the year, one of the ways she studied was by listening to music. 

Her day began at 8:00 a.m. at the Salle Pleyel, where she rented a practice room.²⁸ Huguette joined her first ensemble, the Quatuor Instrumental de Lutèce, in 1954. In January 1956, they recorded a disc, her first, of unpublished Boismortier and Naudot sonatas, fruits of the research encouraged by Dufourcq. She also played continuo in Robert Dalsace’s ensemble Fiori musicali, the Fernand Oubradous Orchestra, Maxence Larrieu’s Instrumental Quartet, l’Orchestre Lamoureux, and Le Collegium Museum de Paris, directed by Roland Douatte. 

On July 28, 1956, invited by Roland-Manuel, she played in a chamber group on his program, Le Plaisir de la musique, the first of 194 radio appearances. Wanting to learn more about performance practices, Huguette studied for three years with Antoine Geoffrey-Dechaume, an important figure in the early music revival. Having been initiated into early music by Arnold Dolmetsch, he studied period treatises and published an influential book at the time, Les Secrets de la Musique Ancienne. She liked him and thought him interesting, but stopped seeing him finally because she could not bear his “absolute fanaticism” with regard to historical performance practices.²⁹ Nevertheless, what she did learn from him, based on French music and texts, was important because it included basso continuo. She was also in frequent contact with the French musicologist Marcelle Benoît, another student of Norbert Dufourcq.

In November, she would turn thirty, the usual age limit for conservatory studies and harpsichord competitions. If she were to have a career, she would have to distinguish herself. She needed an instrument of her own. Ever since childhood, she had been determined to be a musician. Huguette was doing everything she could to lay the foundations for a career, but the clock was ticking.

To be continued.

Notes

1. Les Carnets de Léonard de Vinci (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1942), volume I, page 98 (translation by the author).

2. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview by Marcel Quillévéré, “Traverses du temps,” France Musique, Paris, 2012.

3. Françoise Dreyfus, interview by the author, Paris, July 25, 2016.

4. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, Paris, December 8, 2008.

5. Recital program in the author’s personal collection.

6. Having studied with Paul Dukas, Alfred Corton, Yvonne Lefébure, and Nadia Boulanger, Collard became an eminent pianist, as did his daughter, Catherine Collard.

7. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, op. cit. 

8. Bibliothèque nationale de France, VM Fonds 145 DRE-3 (12). 

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. Irene Kedroff and her family had emigrated from Russia to Paris in 1923, where her father formed the Quatuor Kedroff consisting of Irene, her parents, and her cousin Natalia.

11. Françoise Dreyfus, interview, op. cit.

12. Florence Gétreau, “Les précurseurs français: Moscheles, Fétis, Méreaux, Farrenc, Saint-Saens,” Wanda Landowska et la renaissance de la musique ancienne (conference in March 2009), under the direction of Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger. Musicales Actes Sud/Cité de la Musique, Paris, October 2011. 
citedelamusique.fr/pdf/insti/recherche/wanda/pdf_complet.pdf.

13. “Concerts de Paris,” Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, March 10, 1960, INA ID PHD88011289.

14. Huguette Dreyfus, video interview by Rémy Stricker, June 7, 2015. Youtube.

15. Olivier Baumont, “La classe de clavecin du Conservatoire de Paris,” La Revue du Conservatoire, 30/11/2016, URL: https://larevue.conservatoiredeparis.fr:443/index.php?id=913.

16. Françoise Dreyfus, op. cit.

17. Accademia documents in the author’s personal collection.

18. Jill Severs, “Tribute to Kenneth Gilbert,” Sounding Board xv, The British Harpsichord Society, https://www.harpsichord.org.uk/sounding-board-issue-15/.

19. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, op. cit.

20. Jill Severs, video interview by the author, August 24, 2022.

21. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, op. cit. 

22. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Wanda Landowska symposium, Paris, March 5, 2009. 

23. Jill Severs, video interview by the author, August 8, 2022.

24. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, op. cit.

25. Jill Severs, interview, op. cit.

26. Anne-Marie Beckensteiner-Paillard, her tribute to Huguette Dreyfus, https://www.clavecin-en-france.org; also her interview by author, Saint-Malo, October 23–25, 2016.

27. Jill Severs, “Tribute to Kenneth Gilbert,” op. cit.

28. Agendas (1955–1967), Bibliothèque nationale de France, VM Fond 145 DRE-3 (5). 

29. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, op. cit. 

Sally Gordon-Mark

Born in New York City, Sally Gordon-Mark has French and American citizenships, lives in Europe, and is an independent writer, researcher, and translator. She is also a musician: her professional life began in Hollywood as the soprano of a teenage girl group, The Murmaids, whose hit record, Popsicles & Icicles, is still played on air and sold on CDs. Eventually she worked for Warner Bros. Records, Francis Coppola, and finally Lucasfilm Ltd., in charge of public relations and promotions, before a life-changing move to Paris in 1987. There Sally played the harpsichord for the first time, thanks to American concert artist Jory Vinikour, her friend and first teacher. He recommended she study with Huguette Dreyfus, which she had the good fortune to do during the last three years before Huguette retired from the superieur regional conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, becoming a devoted friend.

During Sally’s residence in France, she organized a dozen Baroque concerts for the historical city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, worked as a researcher for books published by several authors and Yale University, and being trilingual, served as a translator of early music CD booklets for musicians and Warner Classic Records. She taught piano privately and also at the British School of Paris. In September 2020, she settled in Perugia, Italy, where she is studying medieval music and continues to offer her services as a translator in the world of the arts. Sally was the guest editor of the March 2023 issue of the e-magazine published by the British Harpsichord Society, Sounding Board, Number 19, devoted entirely to the memory of Huguette Dreyfus. For more information: sallygordonmark.com.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series appeared in the March 2023 issue of The Diapason, pages 18–20; part 2 appeared in the April 2023 issue, pages 14–19; part 3 appeared in the July 2023 issue, pages 10–15; part 4 appeared in the August 2023 issue, pages 10–14.

Et les fruits passeront la promesse des fleurs.

—François de Malherbe¹

Huguette Dreyfus’s performing career started while she was still a student in 1956, skyrocketed in the 1960s, and lasted until the end of 2008. During that half-century, she gave concerts all over the world, made 117 recordings,² and, in France alone, appeared on about 200 radio broadcasts and thirty television programs.³ Huguette received prizes, medals, and awards throughout her life in recognition of her achievements. What’s more, her reputation as an extraordinary pedagogue travelled beyond France’s borders, attracting harpsichordists, pianists, and organists from all over the world to study with her. Huguette once said in a radio interview:

For me, pedagogy is a very important part of my professional life, and I would say that in general, it is also very important for the evolution of an artist, because it prevents one from stagnating in one’s convictions. . . .⁴

Huguette greeted the arrival of the twenty-first century with her usual unfailing enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, and energy. In the fall of 2000, she performed with Eduard Melkus at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and was featured several times on French radio. In 2000 and 2002, she gave masterclasses in Budapest and at the Villecroze Academy in France, and again in 2003 and 2004 at the Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milan, Italy.

In a letter to a former student, Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Huguette wrote that she was “continuing to teach, but playing less. . . . I often go out, and I lead an active life.” She mentioned that she would sit on national and international juries in 2004 and would give another concert in Vienna in March with Melkus and his ensemble, Capella Academica Wien.⁵ Until 2012, she continued to give interviews on French radio. On December 28, 2003, she participated in a documentary on French television, Johann Sebastian Bach: the Last Years, along with Philippe Herreweghe and other major artists.⁶

In the new century, CDs of her recordings continued to be released, notably reissues of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos; the historic recordings of C. P. E. Bach’s Concerto pour flûte et orchestre en ré majeur, with Jean-Pierre Rampal on flute and Pierre Boulez conducting the chamber orchestra; and with Henryk Szeryng, George Frideric Handel, 6 Violin Sonatas, Arcangelo Corelli, La Folia. The Japanese label Denon released her recordings of Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias in 2005 and the 16 Harpsichord Transcriptions in 2006. In 2008, the CD of Konzert für Cembalo und Streicher, Schauspielmusik zu Ritter Blaubart [Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, Playful Music for the Knight Bluebeard] by Hugo Distler came out on the Musicaphon label. Huguette had recorded the concerto in 1964 but did not play on the Bluebeard recording, which was done in 2002.⁷ The last reissue in her lifetime would be in 2013, Henri Dutilleux: The Centenary Edition, a compilation of remastered discs by Erato.⁸

In February 2006 in another letter to Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Huguette wrote that she had been ill since the beginning of January with a severe case of infectious bronchitis.⁹ Illness was unusual for her, even though her schedule had always been demanding and full of voyages. Later in the year she was chosen by the Fondation Prince Louis de Polignac to present its prizes in a ceremony “under the high patronage of her very serene highness, the Princess Antoinette of Monaco.”¹⁰

In 2008 the two concerts that would bring her career to a close were personally meaningful. On May 28 Huguette performed Bach’s fifth Brandenburg Concerto with old friends Eduard Melkus conducting the Mulhouse Conservatory Chamber Orchestra and soloists Antje Lallart and Miwako Shiraï-Rey on violin and flute, respectively. This concert in her honor took place in the Saint Jean Temple in her native Alsatian city of Mulhouse, which had presented her with a municipal medal on May 25. In a local review, it was noted:

Known throughout the world, Huguette Dreyfus, the harpsichordist from Mulhouse, contributed considerably to the renaissance of early music. This Baroque festival pays tribute to her. . . . Huguette Dreyfus has only performed here twice before: the first time [as a prizewinner] of the Geneva competition, then a second time at the Temple St. Jean, in the context of a Bach festival organized 30 years ago. . . .¹¹

Huguette’s final concert would be with her musical partner of more than fifty years, violinist Eduard Melkus. He invited her to perform with him and his ensemble in Vienna on November 27, 2008, in honor of her eightieth birthday on November 30. That summer, she had given her last masterclass 
at Villecroze.

After having officially retired, Huguette accepted an invitation from Kristian Nyquist, a former student, to give a masterclass at the school where he taught, the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. Noticing that her neck seemed to bother her, he hesitated to ask her to play, but she surprised him by giving an impromptu but masterly performance for his students.¹²

In March 2009 Huguette participated in a major two-day conference on Wanda Landowska at the Cité de la Musique in Paris; her interview was broadcast on the radio. Introduced as “fervently admired by her students . . . luminous and profoundly human,” she was interviewed on March 5 by the event’s director, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger. She began by speaking about her teacher, Ruggero Gerlin, who had been a student and disciple of Landowska for twenty years before the Second World War, when Landowska had to flee to the United States and he had to return to Italy. A detailed description of his style of teaching in her class at the Chigiana Academy in Siena followed. This led to a discussion of the Pleyel and Neupert harpsichords available at the time, and then to the acquisition of her own instrument, which, because of its quills, informed her touch. Huguette said that at the time the player had to accept what was available and adapt. “The truth of it is that I always liked the instruments that I was playing at the time that I knew them.” Interestingly enough, Eigeldinger gave her free rein, and she did not speak directly about Wanda Landowska at all.¹³

In October of that year, Huguette gave up her car, cancelling the insurance. She showed signs of having pain in her neck and back, but true to her nature, she did not complain. Those dearest to her would soon depart: her cousin Nicole on February 11, 2010, and Myriam Soumignac on September 7, 2012. She had already lost two of the teachers that had inspired her the most—Ruggero Gerlin in 1983 and Norbert Dufourcq in 1990—and her close friend and collaborator Luciano Sgrizzi in 1994.

On March 21, 2010, Huguette spoke as the guest of honor at the annual event hosted by the association of harpsichordists, Clavecins en France. That year it was held at the former location of the Paris Conservatory at 14 rue de Madrid, where many past students and colleagues, including her friends Kenneth Gilbert and Myriam Soumignac, came to pay tribute to her. In 2012, France Musique produced a two-hour comprehensive interview with Huguette in two parts, and seemingly for the first time on air, Huguette spoke about her personal life, even going back to her childhood.¹⁴

In 2013 Huguette was honored in Brazil, where she had given masterclasses during the entire month of October 1975 under the auspices of the Museum of Art in São Paulo, which had organized a unique event, the “Course-Festival of Harpsichord Interpretation.” As a result of those classes, several of her young students (Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Ana Cecilia Tavares, and Ilton Wjuniski), who had had little opportunity to come into contact with a harpsichord before, received grants to come study with her in Paris, and they did. It is believed that her presence in Brazil and her influence inspired a surge in interest for the harpsichord in general. Harpsichordist Marcelo Fagerlande, who had witnessed the enthusiasm of the participants, created a Harpsichord Week (Semana do Cravo) when he became professor in the School of Music at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and he eventually organized a tribute to Huguette. On October 30, 2013, a video conference with Huguette was arranged, since she could not make the trip to Brazil, and she was greeted by many of her former students.¹⁵

Shortly thereafter, in November, Huguette fell and fractured her skull, which resulted in her being in a coma for months. But she miraculously survived, and on November 30, 2014, Huguette returned home to be greeted on the phone by worried friends calling to wish her a happy birthday. During the following year, she recuperated slowly, seeing family and friends who came to visit. On June 7, 2015, she gave an interview, captured on video, to her old friend Rémy Stricker, a musicologist and former radio producer.¹⁶ However, the following year after a second fall, she was readmitted to the Corentin-Celton hospital in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, just south of Paris. A steady flow of friends, relatives, and students kept her company. When she stopped speaking, her silence, something that had always been unimaginable, was deeply unsettling.

The last time I saw Huguette, on May 14, 2016, a piece by Mozart was playing on her bedside radio. Small pots of roses stood under the windows. She had always loved flowers, but could have no garden, just as she had always loved animals, but could have no pets. She had no children; she had never married, but she had created a family nonetheless of her friends and students. For she did nurture many of her students, and for some of us, she was a mother. Sitting by the bed, holding her hand, my mind was unable to accept the incomprehensible fact of her absence, for she was no longer conscious of her surroundings. I had never known her to be inanimate before, so against all reason, I kept expecting her to say something or pat my hand. I wondered if her expectations and hopes had been fulfilled, if her unfailingly cheerful façade had been supported by real happiness. Her vitality that had seemed inexhaustible and indestructible was now mysteriously gone.

Huguette passed away serenely in the early morning hours of Monday, May 16, 2016. According to her wishes, a simple ceremony was held at the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where her ashes were eventually scattered in its memorial garden.

§

Huguette’s orphaned students honored her with concerts and book dedications. On May 5, 2018, Maria de Lourdes Cutolo (who had traveled from Argentina just to participate), Frank Gousset, Elisabeth Joyé, Frank Mento, Kristian Nyquist, Joël Pontet, Brice Sailly, Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, Marie Van Rjhin, and Ilton Wjuniski performed in a memorial concert at the Rueil-Malmaison conservatory where she last taught. The auditorium was packed, despite little publicity, and latecomers had to stand in the uppermost balcony. Harpsichord makers Claude Mercier-Ythier and Marc Ducornet were in attendance: Claude mounted a display he had created out of color photocopies of all of Huguette’s LP covers, and Marc loaned his most popular concert harpsichord. Each player prefaced their performance with an anecdote about Huguette. After the concert, which ended with a moment of silence, we celebrated her memory with a reception as jolly as she would have wanted it to be. We lifted our glasses to her, wishing she were with us.

The following month, on June 18, the Conservatoire de musique, danse, et art dramatique de Mulhouse Huguette Dreyfus was inaugurated. Xavier Lallart, the director of the conservatory at the time, had nominated her as a candidate for the name, and she emerged the winner after a public municipal election. Given her love of teaching, no tribute to her could be more significant than this. According to Eduard Melkus, it was also Lallart who was behind the concert in May 2008 in Mulhouse. His wife Antje, conductor and violinist, had been old friends with Huguette, having met her through Eduard Melkus, with whom she had studied.¹⁷

In addition to her extensive discography, she left behind three publications: Mélanges François Couperin, published by A. et J. Picard et Cie of Paris in 1968; Rencontres de Villecroze (1995) François Couperin: nouveaux regards, actes des Rencontres de Villecroze, 4 au 7 Octobre 1995, sous la direction d’Huguette Dreyfus; and J. S. Bach: Goldberg-Variationen, Variations for Piano, BWV 988, Wiener Urtext Edition, Schott/Universal (UT50159), “Edited from the new Bach-Edition by Christoph Wolff. Fingering and comments on interpretation by Huguette Dreyfus.”

Beginning early in her career, many of Huguette’s recordings received France’s most prestigious prizes. She was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque de l’Académie Charles Cros¹⁸ in 1962, 1970, 1971, 1972; the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Disque français¹⁹ in 1964 and 1968; the Grand Prix des Discophiles in 1964; the Prix de l’Institut de Musicologie de l’Académie du Disque français in 1970; the Grand Prix du Président de la République from l’Académie Charles Cros in 1985; and the Prix de la Nouvelle académie du disque in 1995.²⁰

Huguette bequeathed her papers, photographs, recorded and published music, concert programs, and posters to the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris. Her archives are located at the Richelieu site, identified as FM FONDS DRE in the catalogue. To the Musée de la Musique in the Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris, she bequeathed her harpsichord, “Le Dreyfus,” and an 1821 Broadwood fortepiano. She left her Neupert spinet to an anonymous person, and her piano was sold at auction.

In an interview with musicologist Denis Herlin,²¹ Huguette told him that her brother had purchased her harpsichord from an antique dealer on Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and that she went to see it there, as did Norbert Dufourcq at her request. The harpsichord, said to be a Blanchet, had been in Raymond Russell’s collection, and was auctioned in June 1956 to the Pelham Galleries. She acquired the instrument in 1958 and hired the leading technician of the time, Marcel Asseman, to do necessary repairs to render it playable, but not to restore it.

When the Musée de la Musique acquired the harpsichord, its authenticity was questioned. Rumors had been circulating for years in Paris that it was not an authentic Blanchet, but no one wanted to tell Huguette. William Dowd, in partnership with Reinhard Von Nagel from 1971 to 1985, came to her apartment sometime in 1973 to examine the harpsichord for a piece he was writing on the Blanchet workshop. Without being able to disassemble it, he noticed that the keyboards and action had been replaced. He saw evidence of an earlier restoration, which could have been done in England, possibly by Arnold Dolmetsch, or in France before Raymond Russell acquired it. But without consulting Russell’s archives in Edinburgh, the instrument’s prior history cannot be ascertained.

The museum submitted Huguette’s harpsichord to scientific tests and a minute examination before undertaking its restoration. Analysis showed that the instrument had been reconstructed in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century by an unknown person. Technicians often leave identifying marks in the instrument, and one was found from Marcel Asseman. The wood was determined to be from the eighteenth century, which could mean that an old harpsichord had been rebuilt. Neither the soundboard nor the decoration on the bentside are original. The rose, a harpsichord maker’s trademark, is not considered to be Blanchet’s. Therefore, it has been concluded that the instrument was not built by Blanchet or anyone in his atelier. However, because it has historical significance, having been played by Huguette and her illustrious students, it has been named after her. The harpsichord is now completely restored and available for concerts, recordings, and masterclasses, according to Huguette’s wishes.²²

During her lifetime, the French government bestowed its highest awards on her, acknowledging her service to her country. There are two French national orders: the highest is the Legion of Honor, the second one is the National Order of Merit. They are very similar in their award criteria, the main difference being the minimal period of service: ten years for the National Order of Merit, twenty years for the Legion of Honor. Both of them have three ranks, Knight, Officer, and Commander; and two titles, Grand Officer and Grand Cross. Huguette was awarded the Knight of the National Order of Merit medal on June 6, 1973, then one for Officer on April 3, 1987, and then one for Commander on May 14, 2004. On December 30, 1995, she was awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honor medal, and then promoted to Officer on December 31, 2008.²³ She was also honored by the Austrian government, which made her a Commandeur de l’ordre national du Mérite, and Officier des Arts et des Lettres et du Mérite de la République d’Autriche.

Aside from the recordings, instruments, and publications she left behind, Huguette’s most important legacy may have been the indelible imprint she left on the performers she taught, who in turn became teachers themselves. For example, it was she who inspired concert artist Elisabeth Joyé to take up the harpsichord:

I was 17, passionate about music, and I played the piano. My dad was the treasurer of a music festival in the south of France, and I was the official page-turner. That summer, Huguette Dreyfus had been invited to the Collégiale de Six-Fours to play all of the Bach sonatas for violin and harpsichord on the Hemsch harpsichord that belonged to Claude Mercier-Ythier. I was turning the pages and was immediately fascinated by all that Huguette was doing on that magnificent instrument as to expressivity and dynamics. I was familiar with the Neupert harpsichord as being the instrument that played bass continuo in an orchestra. I adored Bach’s music that I was playing a lot on the piano. That night, I made the decision to start playing the harpsichord. Huguette advised me to study with André Raynaud in Aix-en-Provence because I did not envisage moving to Paris at the time—I was young! The following year, no doubt thanks to my obstinacy and my passion for Bach and the harpsichord, I was accepted into Huguette’s class at the Bobigny Conservatory, where I remained for three years before leaving for the Netherlands. I remember her lively and exacting teaching. I stayed in touch with Huguette until the end of her life, and we shared a great deal of memories. We also spoke about teaching and the young generation.²⁴

One of her colleagues, Françoise Lengellé, recalls her experience working with Huguette when they taught at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse in Lyon, France:

The relationship between two colleagues that Huguette and I were able to have—outside of the admiration that I felt for her as an artist—was a source of permanent evolution and creativity for me. Watching and listening to her teach were always superb lessons in themselves. I was always thankful for her great culture, humor, and the epic laughs at Lyon and elsewhere that we shared. I owe her so much.²⁵

And so do many of us, as well as the audiences to whom Huguette introduced the harpsichord and the lesser-known Baroque repertoire in the 1960s. Later, it would be twentieth-century contemporary music for harpsichord that she would help make known to the public. Although future audiences will not be able to experience her effervescence and artistry in person, the recordings she left behind for future technology to embellish and the seeds she planted in her students will ensure her enduring presence in the perennial transmission of harpsichord music from generation to generation.

Notes

1. “And the fruits will surpass the promise of the flowers.” François de Malherbe, “Prière pour le Roy Henry Le Grand allant en Limozin,” Œuvres poétiques de Malherbe, E. Flammarion (Librairie des Bibliophiles), 1897, Paris, pages 108–113.

2. Huguette Dreyfus’s complete discography, compiled by the author, dolmetsch.com/huguettedreyfusdiscography.htm.

3. INA, http://inatheque.ina.fr/docListe/TV-RADIO/.

4. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview by Myriam Soumignac, “Portraits en musique,” June 9, 1988, France Musique. INA, op. cit.

5. “Je sors beaucoup et mène une vie active,” Huguette Dreyfus, letter to Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, December 10, 2003.

6. Les chemins de la foi: Jean Sébastien Bach, les dernières années. France 2. INA, 
op. cit.

7. Robert Tifft, email to the author, June 13, 2023.

8. Huguette Dreyfus’s complete discography, compiled by author, op. cit.

9. Huguette Dreyfus, letter to Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, February 3, 2006.

10. Correspondance D, E, F. BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (3).

11. Coupures de presse, BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE 5 (4).

12. Kristian Nyquist, interview with author, March 5, 2022, Karlsruhe, Germany.

13. Huguette Dreyfus, interviewed by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, March 5, 2009. “Wanda Landowska et la renaissance de la musique ancienne,” March 4–5, 2009, Cité de la Musique, Paris, France.

14. Marcel Quillévéré’s radio interviews of Huguette Dreyfus, “Les traversées du temps,” France Musique. March 7, 2012 (part 1) and March 8, 2012 (part 2).

15. Marcelo Fagerlande, phone interview by author, October 21, 2022. Also see Sounding Board, number 19, page 33. 16. “L’Entretien d’Huguette Dreyfus et Rémy Stricker sur Roland-Manuel,” June, 2015. youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_NjzI_cV0. The film was produced by Les Amis de Maurice Ravel, boleravel.fr, and directed by Gérard Guilloury, gerardguilloury.com.

17. Xavier and Antje Lallart, interviews by phone, email, and in person from July 15 through November 2022.

18. Charles Cros (1842–1888), an important poet, scientist, and inventor who experimented in the reproduction of sound.

19. The Académie du disque français was founded in 1951 by Jean Cocteau, Colette, Arthur Honegger, the poet Guy-Charles Cros (the son of Charles Cros), and Michel de Bry. In 1964 Georges Auric and Darius Milhaud were co-presidents of the academy.

20. Huguette Dreyfus’s complete discography, compiled by author, op. cit.; Biographie Huguette Dreyfus, https://www.whoswho.fr/decede/biographie-huguette-dreyfus_23542.

21. Denis Herlin, Sounding Board, number 19, page 35, March 2023.

22. Jean-Claude Battault, interview with author, March 9, 2022, Cité de la Musique, Paris, France. For more information on the instrument, see “Guillaume Finaz and ‘Le Dreyfus,’ ” Sounding Board, number 18, page 33, May 2022.

23. Alice Bouteille, director of communication, Cabinet du grand chancelier, Paris, France. Email to author, February 1, 2023. Translated from French by the author.

24. Elisabeth Joyé, email to author, April 1, 2023. Translated from French by the author.

25. Françoise Lengellé, email to author, April 11, 2023. Translated from French by the author.
 

Acknowledgments

After Huguette passed away in 2016, the first person I interviewed was our mutual friend, Claude Mercier-Ythier. He was eager to help me with my project to document Huguette’s life, giving me information and photographs. We made plans to collaborate on her discography, based on the accounts he painstakingly kept of her recordings. Since then, I was fortunate to meet six other contemporaries of Huguette: Eduard Melkus, Zuzana Ružicková, Anne-Marie Becksteiner Paillard, Paul Kuentz, Jill Severs, and Marie-Claire Jamet, who graciously welcomed me and shared their memories. Some gave me videos, recordings, and photographs of Huguette. Sadly, Claude, Zuzana, and Anne-Marie have since passed away.

However, the first person I must thank is Huguette herself. For many of her students, she was a midwife, a catalyst. She revealed me to myself, and I switched tracks, moving in a different direction towards a life that better suited my true nature. She showed me that I could perform the music I loved if I worked in a more efficient way and focused my attention only on the piece as I played. “The only thing that’s important is the music,” she once told me. In 2000 Huguette wrote the recommendation letter required for me to obtain a research pass at the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, and I discovered another life-changing passion.

With gratitude for their assistance and/or participation in articles I have written on Huguette for both The Diapason and Sounding Board, I thank Judith Andreyev, Andrew Appel, Jean-Claude Battault, Olivier Baumont, Christine Bayle, the late Anne-Marie Beckensteiner-Paillard, Nanon Bertrand, Dr. Brian Blood (Dolmetsch Foundation), Alice Bouteille (Cabinet du grand chancelier), the Conservatoire Emmanuel Chabrier de Clermont-Ferrand, Jocelyne Cuiller, Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Laurence Decobert (Bibliothèque nationale de France), Renaud Digonnet, Matthew Dirst, Françoise Dreyfus, Marc Ducornet, Mahan Esfahani, Marcelo Fagerlande, Guillaume Finaz, Catherine Findlayson, Elisabeth Giuliani, Katarina Glachant, Stuart Gordon (who restored many otherwise unusable images), François-Pierre Goy, Yannick Guillou, Ellen Haskel-Maserati, Denis Herlin, Marie-Claire Jamet, Elisabeth Joyé, Niamh Kenny (l’Académie musicale de Villecroze), Mark Kroll, Paul Kuentz, Chiaopin Kuo, Laetitia Faetibolt (City of Mulhouse, France), Antje and Xavier Lallart, Susan Landale, Véronique LeGuen, Yohann Le Tallec (Bibliothèque nationale de France), Françoise Lengellé, Edna Lewis, Jean-Rémy Macchia, Eduard Melkus, Frank Mento, the late Claude Mercier-Ythier, Laure Morabito, Marie-Claire Moreau-Mangin, Novine Movarekhi, Pamela Nash, Jenny Nex (The University of Edinburgh), David Noël-Hudson, Kristian Nyquist, Shigeru Oikawa, Larry Palmer, Olivier Papillon, Miriam Pizzi (Accademia Musicale Chigiana), Mario Raskin, André Raynaud, Julie Reid (archivist, Centre du patrimoine), Jean-Paul Rey, Marie Van Rhijn, Lionel Rogg, Salvo Romeo, Christophe Rousset, Alan Rubin, the late Zuzana Ružicková, Pascal Scheuir, Lucile Schirr (Archives, Strasbourg, France), Didier Schnorhk (formerly with the Concours de Genève), Jill Severs, Miwako Shiraï-Rey, Richard Siegel, Laurent Soumignac, Ana Cecilia Tavares, Pascal Teixeira da Silva, Mariko Terashi, Robert Tifft, Catherine Vallet-Collot (Bibliothèque nationale de France), Reinhard von Nagel, Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, Kamila Valkova Valenta, Jory Vinikour, Daniel Wagschal, Olivia Wahnon de Oliveira (librarian of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels), Peter Watchorn, Jed Wentz, John Whitelaw, Laura Widolf (Conservatoire Huguette Dreyfus), Ilton Wjuniski, and Aline Zylberajch-Gester.

I am especially indebted to Françoise Dreyfus and François-Pierre Goy for their involvement, support, and assistance, without which these articles could never have been written. Special thanks go to Pamela Nash, Robert Tifft, and Jed Wentz for reading my drafts and making important observations. I am very fortunate to have benefited from their good natures, knowledge, and expertise. For their constant encouragement for me to write over the years, my heartfelt thanks go to Selina Hastings, Stuart Gordon, and Richard Hieronymus.

Nicholas Halbert

Nicholas Halbert is director of music at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (Bachelor of Music), Southern Methodist University (Master of Music, PhD) and Arizona State University (Doctor of Musical Arts).

Hans Fährmann, Dresden’s organ composer

Hans Fährmann’s fourteen sonatas for the organ make up one of the most compelling bridges between organ music and the mainstream German Romantic musical world, and yet they remain largely forgotten. There has been a surge in interest over the last two decades, with several volumes of a complete cycle by Dietrich von Knebel and a recording of the Sonata No. 8 by David Fuller having been released. Several scholarly works have also appeared, most notably the summaries of Fährmann’s life, context, and work written by Stefan Reissig and Hans Böhm. James Garratt has recorded Sonata No. 12 and written about this and several miscellaneous works in connection with his study on organ music and World War I. Nevertheless, energy around Fährmann’s music remains stagnant, and his music is far from being heard live with any frequency.

How did it come to be that such a significant set of large-scale sonatas have been nearly entirely forgotten? Fährmann was certainly not unknown in his own time. As both the cantor of a large Dresden church and a lecturer, director, and professor of the Royal Conservatory of Dresden, he was well regarded in the Saxon capital. In his own time, he was referred to as the “Richard Strauss of the organ.”^{1, 2} An article in a British music journal of 1912–1913 about chorale-preludes mentions three such works in the genre by Fährmann immediately after discussing Max Reger and writes that these are well known in Germany.³ And yet, in the same year J. Hennings writes in his special printing for the readers of Die Harmonie that he has undertaken the essay on Fährmann because he remains relatively unknown and blames it on the composer’s modesty with the press.⁴ Fährmann was evidently pleased with Hennings’s pamphlet about his music, because he dedicated his Sonata No. 10 to him in 1913. While Hennings is probably right, Fährmann’s new works were at least well-advertised in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

Probably far more significant is Fährmann’s lack of a famous interpreter who was promoting his music. Unlike Reger, whose music was championed by the formidable Karl Straube, Fährmann promoted his own music. What Straube did for Reger solidified his reputation; not only did he edit Reger’s music and perform it frequently, he also included it in the repertoire of his students, cementing the legacy of the composer. Straube only performed Fährmann—the Introduzione e Fuga triomphale—once during his time at Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig (in the period of 1903–1918).⁵ Speculatively, Straube may not have had much interest in Fährmann’s thoroughly Romantic music; Reger’s music carries far more of Bach’s influence. Straube would eventually become an important proponent of Orgelbewegung ideals, a movement that would have further rejected the Dresden composer’s music. Fährmann’s disappearance from the musical landscape was all but guaranteed when the publishing house of Otto-Junne-Verlag in Leipzig was destroyed during the 1943 bombing and with it all the printing plates of his works, some of which appear to be permanently lost.⁶

These works are worthy of performance and study. They are of high craftsmanship and musical interest. More importantly, they contain compelling narrative arcs capable of creating real emotional response. And they offer the organist something that is missing from the canonic repertoire: organ music written in dialogue with the massive Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition at the turn of the century. The late German Romantic music currently considered canonic tends to be valued for its synthesis of conservative and progressive musical aesthetics; this is not the case with Fährmann. This is music unabashedly written in the style and form of Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler. For so many musicians, it is exposure to the music of these composers in the symphony hall that sparks their deep love of the art. How wonderful it is then that we have these organ sonatas that take part in that genre and allow us to engage with it. This essay will lay out a basic image of Fährmann’s musical context and the organs he would have known, and will then discuss this in relation to his Sonata No. 1.

Böhm and Reissig have both written excellent, short biographical sketches of Hans Fährmann. He was born on December 17, 1860, in Beicha, Saxony.⁷ The composer told his student, Böhm, that he had not had a sunny childhood,⁸ and a contemporary musical chronicler, Franciscus Nagler, remembers the composer as a stubborn and determined young man, hardened by an overly strict household.⁹ Fährmann’s musical teachers at the Dresden-Friedrichstadt included pianist Hermann Scholtz, organist Carl August Fischer, and composer Jean Louis Nicodé.¹⁰ The latter, also largely forgotten today, was a first-rate composer and conductor in Dresden during the latter portion of the nineteenth century, whose magnum opus was a massive symphony lasting over two hours named Gloria! Ein Sturm- und Sonnenlied Symphonie in einem Satze für Grosses Orchester, Orgel und (Schluss-) Chor. This maximalist work demonstrates the influence of the New Weimar School in Dresden. Also living in Dresden at the time was Felix Draeseke, a Wagnerian who wrote four symphonies. These Dresden composers, fusing more structured forms with the freedom and expressivity of the Liszt/Wagner camps, had obvious influence on Fährmann.

In 1884 Fährmann went to Weimar and performed his own Piano Sonata, opus 7, for Franz Liszt, who encouraged him to continue his career in music.¹¹ Upon graduating he held the position of cantor at the Johanneskirche from 1890 to 1926. He began as a lecturer in organ at the conservatory in 1892 and would hold a number of positions there, retiring at the rank of professor in 1939.¹² During his time at the church he held an extremely successful recital series at which he would perform and lecture on music from all historical periods and national schools. This occurred over eight years, from 1892 to 1900 in thirty separate programs; Johann Sebastian Bach was the centerpiece of the series, including performances of all six trio sonatas.¹³

In 1900 Fährmann suffered an apparent nervous breakdown as a result of the demands of his heavy concert schedule and turned his focus to composition and teaching while maintaining his church position.¹⁴ On retirement from the Johanneskirche position in 1926, Fährmann moved to a house in a forested suburb of Dresden in order to focus on composition.¹⁵ It is noteworthy that two contemporaries, Rost¹⁶ and Hennings,¹⁷ both describe the composer as a deeply committed and passionate man who was immune to any vain desires for fame or popularity and instead remained thoroughly true to himself and his musical convictions. Fährmann was married twice and had five children.¹⁸ He died in Dresden on June 29, 1940.¹⁹

The German Romantic organ sonata and Hans Fährmann

As might be expected of a musical landscape dominated by the legacy of Ludwig van Beethoven, the sonata was of central importance to nineteenth-century German organists. The genre of the organ sonata began in the High Baroque, with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, generally constructed in the fast-slow-fast, three-movement layout. Felix Mendelssohn’s sonatas for organ are collections of voluntaries. The effect of Franz Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam,” S. 259, in 1850 was profound. This single-movement work in a modified monothematic sonata-allegro form became the inspiration for dozens of similar pieces, most famously Julius Reubke’s Sonata on the Ninety-Fourth Psalm and August Gottfried Ritter’s Sonata No. 3 in A Minor. From 1865 the organ sonata trended toward the classical three- or four-movement format.²⁰ Rudolf Kremer’s incredibly useful index of German organ sonatas counts a total of 158 sonatas by forty-six composers in the final three decades of the nineteenth century.²¹ This set the stage for music increasingly influenced by the post-Beethovenian conception of the sonata and symphony. Ironically, Fährmann’s organ sonatas bear much more formal similarity with the sonata-forms of Beethoven than of Liszt—even though the contemporaneous iteration of the genre developed thoroughly from the New Weimar School. This speaks to the influence of Brahms, Josef Rheinberger, and the generally conservative nature of the Dresden School.

Music written by nineteenth-century German composers often looks like a symphonic reduction on the page, with some virtuosic passagework borrowed from the piano. While music of the French School (as it always has been, from the French Classical period) is married to the timbres on which it is being played, German Romantic organ music is conceived usually for choruses, often with no more instruction than the desired dynamic level. Only occasionally are specific solos or combinations of color required. This is mirrored in the orchestrations of Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Brahms in which the strings play most of the time and carry the bulk of the musical content, with the addition and subtraction of winds and brass for dynamic and color contrast.

This relationship between orchestration and organ registration is also true of the French; for instance, compare the music of César Franck, Louis Vierne, and Charles-Marie Widor with the work of Hector Berlioz, and then compare Olivier Messiaen’s organ music with his orchestral music. German organ music tends to be focused on thematic development, dense counterpoint and harmony, and the formal outline of a composition, often instead of writing idiomatic and virtuosic keyboard passagework.

Hans Fährmann’s organ music meets this description aptly and is even more symphonic in conception than other canonic organ repertoire of the time. Rheinberger’s sonatas, predecessors to Fährmann’s oeuvre, feature idiomatic keyboard writing similar to Liszt’s approach to the instrument with the presence of pianistic figurations borrowed from nineteenth-century practice. This is true of the many German Romantic organ sonata composers influenced by Liszt: Reubke, Ritter, Gustav Merkel, et al. Fährmann’s most famous direct contemporaries nearby in Leipzig both wrote extremely idiomatic keyboard music for the organ. Max Reger’s music, so marked by the legacy of Bach, is built of constant, dense, and intricate counterpoint that is nevertheless decidedly keyboard music. His virtuosic explosions of chaotic figurework contrasted with sudden, hushed stillness show the influence of the Baroque stylus fantasticus and of Liszt and other piano improvisers of the nineteenth century. Sigfrid Karg-Elert, influenced by the Impressionists, uses registration and figuration to develop colors and textures in kaleidoscopic progressions and contrasts. This is to say: these now-canonic German Romantic composers wrote organ music that was fundamentally keyboard music, not orchestral music as translated to the organ. Even as these composers’ music is “orchestral” in the sense of color, it is not in a formal or stylistic sense.

Fährmann is distinct from all of the afore-mentioned composers in that he generally eschews non-motivic passagework (with some key exceptions) and writes with consistently thick textures echoing the dense symphonic writing common throughout the nineteenth century seen most characteristically in Wagner and Anton Bruckner. In further contrast with contemporary German organ composers, Fährmann’s work is characterized by an endless stream of melodic content. His resourcefulness with and the constant presence of motivic material is clearly indebted to the Beethovenian/Wagnerian tradition. Even in his fugal writing his subjects are often marked by forgoing conventional sequences and figurations in favor of idiosyncratic intervals, contours, and rhythmic shapes, which then entirely shape the subsequent fugue.²² Where virtuosic figuration does occur, it is not in the style of keyboard music, where often it is used to expand the harmony and build a sonorous and energetic texture, but tends to look like the type of runs assigned to strings in symphonic movements. This is in no small part due to the way in which his fast figuration usually interrupts and contrasts with the normal texture of a section of music, and the intervallic shapes of that figuration, which take on motivic significance in themselves.²³ All of these traits place Fährmann’s music solidly in the late-Romantic symphonic school, and characteristics like this can be easily found in the music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.²⁴

Arguably, Fährmann was the German Romantic composer who most explored the possibility of the organ as a vehicle for symphonic writing. His harmonic and melodic language is heavily influenced by late-Wagnerian music, particularly the sound world of Parsifal and Die Meistersinger. Fährmann’s harmony is dominated by constant extensions and suspensions paired with the generous use of all common-practice chord types. This results in an extremely colorful style that seems to carry maximal tonal tension within every phrase. He frequently uses chromatic voice-leading to result in surprising modulations and extreme harmonic distances being contained within musical units. However, this rich harmonic language is always subverted to the melodic content, usually in the soprano voice. As a result, much like Wagner, he is able to make extreme harmonic motions sound logical. Of note in his melodic writing is the frequent appearance of appoggiaturas, grace notes, and turn figures (these especially point to Wagner), which are all borrowed from Romantic string writing.

A few specific musical examples will illuminate this connection between Fährmann and Wagner. Examples 1 and 2 are excerpts from the famous “Transfiguration Music” in Act One of Parsifal. These are ideal models because they contain several key characteristics of late-Wagnerian style in the space of a few bars. Example 1 shows chromatic voice leading in the inner voices, the use of melodic contour to set up frequent suspensions in the melodic parts, and the upbeat triplet figure which is so essential to Wagner’s melodic language. Notice how the chromatic voice leading and suspensions allow Wagner to naturally incorporate a wide variety of chord types in a small space. Now looking at Fährmann’s application of these musical ideas, Example 3 (see page 15) shows the cadence of the main theme of Sonata No. 1. Here he resolves the first suspension in the tenor with a chromatic descending line in an identical way to Wagner, and here too it creates rapidly changing colors of harmony. Note how the melodic contour of the soprano allows Fährmann to naturally approach an augmented harmony on the downbeat of the second bar where it will be perceived as a suspension over a dominant. The incorporation of augmented sonority into moving contrapuntal textures is a major color of late Wagnerian writing. Example 4 depicts the beginning of the secondary thematic area of Sonata No. 1 and shows Fährmann adapting the lyrical upbeat triplet figure.

One of the most innovative harmonic devices in late Wagnerian music is the combination of chromatic voice leading and suspension to evade functional harmonic resolutions. Example 2, the climax of the “Transfiguration music,” is an excellent example of this technique. The fortissimo is reached on a clear tonic C-sharp minor chord with root in the bass. Wagner shifts two voices down by half step and sustains the C-sharp to create a German augmented-sixth harmony, but, rather than moving to the dominant, he moves those top two voices down another half step to arrive at a half-diminished sonority over G-sharp in the bass. Another chromatic motion resolves this into a C-sharp-major seventh chord and thoroughly destabilizes the tonic announced just a bar earlier. Example 5, an excerpt from the development of Fährmann’s Sonata No. 7, uses a similar technique in combination with a rising sequence to create a progression full of rich, functional sonorities that evade their natural resolution. This passage is also melodically similar to how Wagner moves out of the Tristan chord at the beginning of the “Prelude.” The rising half steps are identical in contour and rhythm. The harmonies, however, do not match the Tristan chord. Example 6, the final cadence of his Sonata No. 10, shows an absolutely spectacular utilization of this method to create a prolongation of the tonic. It is worth noting that this passage almost looks like Impressionist chordal planing, but the careful use of suspended voices (even if re-attacked) keeps this solidly within the tradition of counterpoint and its rules. The effect of this technique, present in Wagner and Fährmann, of denying conventional harmonies their functional resolutions creates a dizzying web of harmonic tension that stretches the boundaries of tonality.

On the other hand, his approach to form is significantly more conservative. Here the influence of Brahms and the Dresden School, including Draeseke, Nicodé, and of course Strauss, should be noted. As a result, Fährmann’s music does not contain the type of free-flowing modulation from section to section that can be found in Wagner and Franck. Instead it is fundamentally governed by the motion from tonic to dominant and back again. Fährmann’s harmonic language is used to embellish and develop tension over the basic tonal plan. He tends to write in relatively Classical phrase models built symmetrically. In this way his music is quite similar to that of Strauss in the 1880s.³¹ Gotthold Frotscher remarked that Fährmman’s music is built from Liszt’s harmonies with the thematic development of Brahms.³²

Fährmman’s primary similarity to Reger is in his skill as a composer of counterpoint, which was celebrated by contemporary musicians. His student Richard Rost observed in a notice in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik honoring Fährmann’s seventy-fifth birthday that his polyphony is never abstract but always meant to convey an expressive meaning.³³ In his important survey of Fährmann’s musical work, J. Hennings also remarks that he is a contrapuntist of the highest level.³⁴ He adds that the comparison to Richard Strauss is undoubtedly true but that Fährmann’s musical sensibility is firmly rooted in the Classical style and that this was influenced by the modern Zeitgeist. Fährmann always remained true to himself, Hennings says, and this speaks to his individuality as an artist “favored by God.”³⁵ What makes Fährmann a compelling composer is that his music surpasses direct imitation of any of these influences and becomes a unique prism reflecting them into a novel musical language.

The German Romantic organ

The development of writing for the organ has always been paralleled by developments in the instrument, and the German Romantic period is no exception to this. The connection between the instruments of Cavaillé-Coll and the French symphonic school has been well documented, but the influence of modern instruments on the German Romantic school is no less profound. In fact, differences in their design led to profound differences in the respective utilizations of the instruments. The first German instruments to be considered modern Romantic installations were those of Friedrich Ladegast and Adolf Reubke built in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some of the later organs of the High Baroque built by Silbermann and his students already pointed in the direction of future instruments with their substantial increase in the number of 8′ ranks. Ladegast and Reubke expanded in this direction with more foundations available at 16′, 8′, and 4′ pitches that were voiced with full, warm timbres emphasizing the fundamental. The powerful mixtures and mutations of the Baroque are preserved in these organs, giving them an unusual blend of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characteristics. Reeds remained in their position as color stops, never becoming the dominant chorus color as they were on contemporaneous French organs.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw builders developing from the aesthetic concept of Ladegast and Reubke: the blending of the Baroque plenum sound into a modern idiom of weighty foundations that emulate the orchestra. In the organs of Wilhelm Sauer and E. F. Walcker & Cie., the mixtures and mutations are folded into the foundations more convincingly, leading to an incredibly rich plenum that is built from nearly every rank on the instrument. These well-developed overtones made the German Romantic organ very capable of performing counterpoint. Its ability to perform in an orchestral style is enhanced by the wide variety of colors available in the foundations. Both tendencies make these instruments ideal vessels for the music written by German Romantic composers. Just as the nineteenth-century compositional school continually referenced the music of Bach, so the instruments constantly bear the signature of the Baroque plenum.

This was particularly true in the Saxon School of organbuilding that, surrounded by extant installations by Silbermann, tended to be more conservative than other regions of Germany. Jiri Jocourek, of the Eule Orgelbau, has written an excellent summary of the types of instruments that Hans Fährmann would have known during his musical development—these would have included the legendary Silbermanns of Dresden, a Hildebrandt and a Wagner organ, two mid-century Romantic organs by Friedrich Nicolaus Jahn, and then later in life some very large installations by the Jemlich firm.³⁶ But most significantly, Fährmann would have been influenced by the instrument over which he presided at the Johanneskirche in Germany.³⁷ This church stood in the Pirnaische Vorstadt, just east of Dresden’s Aldstadt, and was split off from the Kreuzkirchgemeinde, the main Lutheran church in the Saxon capital.³⁸ Built in a wealthy parish, it was one of the first neo-Gothic structures in the city. The building and instrument were destroyed by the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945, and nothing of the church remains on the site.³⁹

The Eule organ at the Johanneskirche was unusual for the firm. Hermann Eule was a thoroughly Romantic organbuilder, using large numbers of ranks at the fundamental and rich voicing characteristic of the nineteenth century.⁴⁰ However, the disposition at the Johanneskirche is significantly more conservative and more influenced by the Saxon organ building tradition having fewer 8′ foundation ranks and substantially more upperwork than usual for the builder. This instrument had neither a swell enclosure nor playing aids.⁴¹ In 1893 after the Sonata No. 1 had already been published, Fährmann had a swell installed.⁴² In 1909 a large overhaul took place, which created a Romantic instrument of fifty stops spread over three manuals.⁴³ Jiri Kocourek points out the absence of a 16′ rank on the third manual and the unusual selection of 8′ and 4′ ranks in the Pedal.⁴⁴ The latter almost certainly informs us that the pedal couplers were used consistently with any larger choruses. There is no record of the playing aids available on the 1909 instrument, as the next available record dates from work undertaken by his successor, Gerhard Paulik, and this documented a reduction in the number of console aids. Kocourek lists the playing aids available on a similar instrument, the Bautzen Cathedral organ, which include a walze, fixed combinations for various dynamic levels, and three free combinations.⁴⁵ If the Johanneskirche organ indeed contained these mechanisms, it would have been a thoroughly modern instrument. It is important to note that Fährmann’s scores do not call for as dynamic a use of the walze as was present in music by Reger or Karg-Elert. This is in line with his more orchestral conception of the use of the pipe organ.

Organ Sonata No. 1 in G Minor

The Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, opus 5, demonstrates, as Hennings says, that Fährmann was “predestined to become an organ composer.”⁴⁶ The reviewer draws the listener to the “originality of thought,” “fine thematic work,” and “skilled polyphony” of the sonata, along with the cyclical structure in which the main theme of the first movement is connected to the second theme of the closing double fugue.⁴⁷ This work holds a relatively early opus number; it was published in 1891 when the composer was thirty-one years old and after his appearance before Liszt. Though it is his debut organ sonata, it really should be considered a mature work and an intentional debut of his compositional skill in the genre of the organ sonata. The sonata contains three movements: “Moderato maestoso,” “Andante religioso,” and a Doppelfuge.

The first movement is in a straightforward sonata form with an appended “Cadenza” making up a substantial coda section. The main theme is heard clearly at the beginning (in many of the later sonatas Fährmann would write a lengthy introduction), and from its outset the richness of harmonic color is evident. The secondary theme is in the relative major of B-flat and is marked by numerous appoggiaturas giving it a longing lyrical character and reflecting the Wagner/Strauss influence (Example 7). The development section manipulates only the primary theme; it is a standard Beethovenian development moving among many tonal areas. After a normative recapitulation, the cadenza is the most obviously Wagnerian section of the sonata, having violin-like figurations very similar to those at the climax of the Meistersinger “Prelude,” with the strings continually beginning downward scales and arpeggios on the upper neighbor of the correct harmonic pitch (Example 8). A profoundly dissonant harmony over a pedal trill leads into a final statement of the main theme on full organ.

The second movement is an Andante in ternary form quite similar in structure to the slow movements found in early Beethoven piano sonatas. It opens with a chorale-like theme in the soprano, which is repeated immediately with more elaborate counterpoint. From there a cadence is evaded, and free material is introduced that destabilizes the key over a prolonged dominant pedal point and leads to the conclusion of the first section with a final statement of the first melody. The second section is in C minor with a darker chromatic quality (in this one might hear shades of Mahler). Another pedal point returns to E-flat major, and the main theme returns with a new obbligato flute-like solo line over it. Fährmann writes a fairly extended canon based on free material emerging from this solo and points the performer’s attention to it with a footnote. The final statement of the theme concludes with an increasingly chromatically inflected progression oscillating around several harmonies containing C-flat (Example 9). In the penultimate measure the music seems to land securely on a minor subdominant chord preparing the cadence, but only arrives at the desired E-flat by moving through a German sixth chord—again, one may hear a shade of Mahler in this closure.

The final Doppelfuge begins in the pedal, and the four voices enter from bottom to top until a fifth voice is added in the alto during a pedal point. The first subject begins unusually with a grace note followed by an ascending minor sixth, the inversion of the opening descending major third interval of the first movement. It is an idiosyncratic subject, full of chromaticism and strange leaps and changes of direction (Example 10). This is the type of fugue subject that Fährmann favored throughout his compositional career; one in which the subject dictates the harmonic and melodic content of the form, unlike the subjects chosen by Reger or even Karg-Elert, which, though often characteristic in their own right, are tonally open enough to be manipulated in numerous ways throughout the course of a movement. After a complete exposition of the theme, the subject is heard thrice through⁴⁸ in inversion before the conclusion of the first thematic area of the fugue. It is worth noting Fährmann’s incredible skill at writing imitative counterpoint, which interweaves with the fugal content, creating a dense polyphonic texture insistent on its horizontality.

The second subject is more obviously a quotation of the first movement, containing the initial four pitches of the main theme at its head (Example 11). The second countersubject is a chromatic scale, which leads to extremely chromatic counterpoint throughout the entire section. The second subject also contains more eighth-note motion, building momentum toward the fortissimo return of the first subject. The combination of these two is paired with a crescendo that arrives at the climax of the fugue, a restatement of the two subjects together now accompanied by rapid triplets­—here counterpoint dissolves into virtuosity. Another pedal point builds to a triumphant G major, with the second subject now appearing transformed. Though it is still accompanied by the chromatic countersubject, Fährmann has reconfigured it into a chain of secondary dominants that solidify the arrival of the major mode. The music goes through free, ecstatic progressions with characteristic Wagnerian harmonies into one final pedal point, which brings the music to its conclusion with a truly glorious restatement of the main theme of the first movement in G major, completing the cyclical construction of the sonata.

This work demonstrates many of the compositional elements that Fährmann would use throughout his career, and as such, makes an ideal starting point for any student delving into his oeuvre. Many of the issues of performance practice are similar to those found in other Romantic works of the same period: Brahms, Schumann, Reger, Franck (before Marcel Dupré’s influence on the interpretation thereof), and the like. This includes issues of rubato, large-scale tempo relationships (of flexible pulse throughout the course of a movement), legato touch, the use of agogics, etc.

What should be discussed here specifically regarding Fährmann is registrational practice. Most of Fährmann’s directions are communicated with dynamic markings alone, but the second movement has specific stops listed. These are a hint to understanding the work because they line perfectly with the specification of the Johanneskirche organ in 1891.⁴⁹ In the second movement, he switches colors between each phrase (similar to how one might perform English organ music of the same time), telling us that the change of color was for him a way of further increasing variance between sections—this could be applied to other slow movements of his. But this hint is helpful in another way; it makes it clear that this score was in some way a performance copy for himself. His instrument in 1891 would not have had a swell box, so we can safely conclude that the marked crescendi and diminuendi are not manipulations of the expression shoe but the addition and subtraction of ranks. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that there are nearly none of the hairpin markings associated with subtle manipulation of the boxes.⁵⁰ This instrument almost surely did not have any playing aids, so the changes must have been executed by assistants.

The exposition of the first movement shows how Fährmann combines clever manual terracing with the implied manual addition of stops one-by-one over extended crescendi to nearly replicate the walze mechanism with which he would have been familiar. Nevertheless, given the specification of his instrument at the Johanneskirche at the time, it is hard to imagine that these dynamic changes were convincingly seamless. There is no reason for the modern performer to not embrace the full possibilities offered by combining the walze⁵¹ with the expression box and generate the orchestral ideal present in the score. The performer should always seek to create as seamless and orchestral a crescendo as possible, but in the German way—through the addition of one rank at a time, one dynamic step after another.⁵²

Notice that nowhere in this score does Fährmann call for the type of dramatic dynamic contrast that was so common down the road in Leipzig. Consider how this might influence interpretive decisions about tempo development across extended dynamic build ups and tear downs. The organ student might consider listening to famed Austro-Germanic conductors of the older tradition like Wilhelm Furtwängler or Willem Mengelberg or the player-roll recordings of Reger and Straube to develop a sense of how pulse relationships operate over the course of entire movements in this style.

Conclusion

The Hans Fährmann repertoire is a rich landscape just waiting to be explored. Even as pioneering organists are beginning to dig into this music, it is beautiful to think that it will take a generation or two for this music and the interpretation of it to become canonized and thus crystallized. Every student should spend time working on non-canonic music to better develop their interpretive sense and their ability to think outside of the box and radically reconsider the handed-down interpretations of beloved works. It is important, of course, to study non-canonic music about which one is passionate, but also to find complementary works in each era and national school that can contextualize and shed light on the familiar. Furthermore, the scholarly study of non-canonic works always provides an opportunity to reconstruct the history of the literature. As the “story” of organ music settles in, it is easy to lose sight of all the many non-organ influences playing out in parallel and interacting with the organ literature in favor of studying the chain linking one organ work to another. It is unusual that Fährmann, a composer so influenced by the orchestral composers around him, wrote primarily for the organ, while for many of the composers heard more frequently today, the organ made up only a fragment of their total output.

This music is perfect for any student interested in organ music and the late Romantic symphony. Fährmann’s sonatas offer these musicians a synthesis of organ and orchestral style in a repertoire that has been neglected. As modern-day organists explore the sound world of turn-of-the-century Dresden, may they become the advocates that eluded Fährmann during his lifetime.

Notes

1. J. Hennings, Hans Fährmann: Eine Studie von J. Hennings (Hamburg: Hermann Kampen, 1912), page 8.

2. Fährmann’s Wikipedia page claims that the first appearance of this comparison was by Otto Schmidt in the Dresdner Journal in 1905. Unfortunately, the citation is no more detailed than this, and without complete searchability of the paper it is difficult to find the issue of the daily containing this. Interestingly, Reissig relies on Böhm for the citation of this quote, and Böhm leaves it uncited. However, in Hennings’s 1912 study, he says that it is “often said,” assuring us that the comparison was not original to him.

3. Charles MacPherson, “Chorale-Preludes: Ancient and Modern,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 39th Sess. (1912–1913), page 166. https://www.jstor.org/stable/765497.

4. Hennings, page 4.

5. Christopher Anderson, Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2016), page 331.

6. Hans Böhm, “Hans Fährmann, Organist at St. John’s Church: Organ Virtuoso–Composer–Teacher,” in Die Dresdner Kirchenmusik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Matthias Herrmann (Dresden: Laaber-Verlag, 1998), page 323.

7. Böhm, page 323.

8. Böhm, page 323.

9. Franciscus Nagler, Das Kligende Land: Musikalische Wanderungen und Wallfahrten in Sachsen (Leipzig: J. Bohn & Sohn Verlag, 1936), page 238.

10. Böhm, page 324.

11. Böhm, page 324.

12. Böhm, pages 324–325.

13. Richard Rost, “Hans Fährmann. Ein Dresdner Jubilar. Zu Seinem 70 Geburtstag,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 97 (1930), pages 1030–1032.

14. Rost, pages 1030–1032.

15. Rost, pages 1030–1032. Böhm writes that this move occurred in 1896, but this must be incorrect, as the move occurring in conjunction with his retirement is more logical.

16. Rost, pages 1030–1032.

17. Hennings, page 8.

18. Böhm, page 326.

19. Böhm, page 324.

20. Robert C. Mann, “The Development of Form in the German Organ Sonata from Mendelssohn to Rheinberger,” PhD diss. (University of North Texas, 1978), page 27.

21. Rudolph J. Kremer, “The Organ Sonata Since 1845,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri, 1963), page 7, quoted in Robert C. Mann, “The Development of Form in the German Organ Sonata from Mendelssohn to Rheinberger,” PhD diss. (University of North Texas, 1978), page 30.

22. Ibid.

23. A good example of this can be found in the main theme of the first movement of the Eighth Sonata. This can be found at the “Allegro risoluto.” The explosion of virtuosic writing in the sixth bar is juxtaposed with the harmonic and rhythmic stability of the first half of the theme, heard over a tonic pedal point. While it begins as a straightforward rising flourish, it takes on a turning shape marked by unusual intervals that give it a distinctive identity.

24. Even a quick comparison shows that Fährmann’s sonatas bear more resemblance in stylistic language and form to the Edward Elgar Organ Sonata, which is effectively an orchestral transcription, than to the chorale fantasies of Reger.

25. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, arr. Karl Klindworth (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1902), page 63.

26. Wagner, page 63.

27. Hans Fährmann, Organ Sonata Number 1 (Leipzig: J. Rieter-Biedermann, 1891), page 2.

28. Fährmann, Organ Sonata Number 1, page 3.

29. Hans Fährmann, Seventh Sonata for Organ (Leipzig: Otto Junne, 1904), page 10.

30. Hans Fährmann, Tenth Sonata for Organ (Leipzig: Rob. Forberg, 1913), page 20.

31. For instance, the Piano Quartet, opus 13, or the Violin Sonata, opus 18.

32. Gotthold Frotscher, Gesichte des Orgelspiels und der Orgelkomposition (Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1959), Band 2, pages 1211, 1246, 1255.

33. Richard Rost, “Hans Fährmann zu Seinem 75 Geburtstage,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 102 (1935): pages 1384–1385.

34. Hennings, page 8.

35. Hennings, page 8.

36. Jiri Kocourek, Hans Fährmanns Orgeln an der Johanniskirche Dresden, Eule Orgelbau, Bautzen, 2012, page 1.

37. Kocourek, page 1.

38. Joachim Winkler, “Die Johanneskirche,” in Verlorene Kirchen: Dresdens zerstörte Gotteshäuser. Eine Dokumentation seit 1938, ed. Stadt Dresden (Dresden: Stadt Dresden, 2018), page 27. http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/denkmal/verlorene-kirchen-2018_web.pdf

39. Kocourek, page 5.

40. Kocourek, page 2.

41. Kocourek, pages 2–3.

42. Kocourek, page 3.

43. Kocourek, page 4.

44. Kocourek, page 3.

45. Kocourek, page 4.

46. Hennings, page 9.

47. Hennings, page 9.

48. The careful observer will note that the first appearance of the inverted subject in the soprano contains an E-flat where there should be a repeated D. It is impossible to know if this intentional, though the E-flat certainly enhances the harmonic drama of the following leap. I play it as printed.

49. The fact that the work clearly matches the Johanneskirche organ and that it was published in 1891 suggests that he may have written it in conjunction with his appointment to the church.

50. With one major exception—the conclusion of the slow movement. The hairpins here are surely included for instruments that do have expression, though they also serve plausibly as rubato markings in the absence of the mechanism.

51. Or the Sequencer set up with one stop added at a time.

52. As opposed to the English-American approach, involving careful addition of rank and manipulation of the swell boxes.

53. Fährmann, First Sonata, page 3.

54. Fährmann, First Sonata, page 8.

55. Fährmann, First Sonata, page 13.

56. Fährmann, First Sonata, page 14.

57. Fährmann, First Sonata, pages 15–16.

Bibliography

Anderson, Christopher. Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Böhm, Hans. “Hans Fährmann, Organist an der Johanneskirche: Orgelvirtuose—Komponist—Pädagoge.” In Die Dresdner Kirchenmusik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Matthias Herrmann, pages 323–331. Dresden: Laaber-Verlag, 1998.

Fährmann, Hans. “Op. 24 6. Sonata für die Orgel; Op. 25. 7. Sonate für die Orgel.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 71, 1904. Page 620.

Fährmann, Hans. “Op. 40, 6 Charakterstucke für Orgel; Op. 42 Fantasia e fuga tragica b moll für Orgel.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 77, 1910. Page 176.

Fährmann, Hans. Organ Sonata No. 1. Leipzig: J. Rieter-Biedermann, 1891.

Fährmann, Hans. Organ Sonata No. 7. Leipzig: Otto Junne, 1904.

Fährmann, Hans. Organ Sonata No. 10. Leipzig: Rob. Forberg, 1913.

Frotscher, Gotthold. Geschichte des Orgelspiels und der Orgelkomposition. Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1982.

Garratt, James. “‘Ein gute Wehr und Waffen’: Apocalyptic and redemptive narratives in organ music from the Great War.” In Music and War in Europe: from French Revolution to WWI, edited by Étienne Jardin, pages 379–411. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.

Hennings, J. Hans Fährmann: Eine Studie von J. Hennings. Hamburg: Hermann Kampen, 1912.

Koldau, Linda Maria. “Fährmann, Hans.” MGG Online, edited by Laurenz Lütteken. RILM, Bärenreiter, Metzler, 2016. Accessed November 11, 2023. https://www-mgg-online-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/mgg/stable/13649.

Kocourek, Jiri. “Hans Fährmanns Orgeln an der Johanniskirche Dresden.” Eule Orgelbau Bautzen, 2012.

Kremer, Rudolph J. “The Organ Sonata Since 1845,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri, 1963. Quoted in Mann, Robert C. “The Development of Form in the German Organ Sonata from Mendelssohn to Rheinberger.” PhD diss., University of North Texas, 1978.

MacPherson, Charles. “Chorale-Preludes: Ancient and Modern.” Proceedings of the Musical Association 39th Sess. (1912–1913): pages 153–182. https://www.jstor.org/stable/765497.

Mann, Robert C. “The Development of Form in the German Organ Sonata from Mendelssohn to Rheinberger.” PhD diss., University of North Texas, 1978.

Nagler, Franciscus. Das Kligende Land: Musikalische Wanderungen und Wallfahrten in Sachsen. Leipzig: J. Bohn & Sohn Verlag, 1936.

“Organ Music.” The Musical Times vol. 38, no. 657 (November 1, 1897): page 744.

“Organ Music.” The Musical Times vol. 38, no. 658 (December 1, 1897): page 815.

Reissig, Stefan. “Zur Orgelmusik Hans Fährmanns.” In Orgelbewegung Und Spätromantik: Orgelmusik Zwischen Den Weltkriegen in Deutschland, Österreich Und Der Schweiz, edited by Birger Petersen and Michael Heinemann, pages 83–89. Studien Zur Orgelmusik. Sankt Augustin: J. Butz, 2016.

Rost, Richard. “Hans Fährmann. Ein Dresdner Jubilar. Zu Seinem 70 Geburtstag.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 97, 1930. pages 1030–1032.

Rost, Richard. “Hans Fährmann zu Seinem 75 Geburtstage.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jg. 102, 1935. Pages 1384–1385.

Wagner, Richard. Parsifal, arr. Karl Klindworth. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1902.

Winkler, Joachim. “Die Johanneskirche.” Verlorene Kirchen: Dresdens zerstörte Gotteshäuser: Eine Dokumentation seit 1938. Ed. Stadt Dresden. Dresden: Stadt Dresden, 2018. http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/denkmal/verlorene-kirchen-2018_web.pdf

 

Sample YouTube recordings of Fährmann works:

Sonata No.1 in G minor, op. 5

Sonata No. 12 (War Sonata), op. 65