An interview with Pierre Labric

At the Three Choirs Festival, Hereford Cathedral, England

Lorraine Brugh is currently resident director of Valparaiso University’s Study Centre in Cambridge, England. She is professor of music and the Frederick J. Kruse Organ Fellow at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.

The Three Choirs Festival celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2015. With a brief hiatus during each world war, this is the longest-running non-competitive classical music festival in the world. The festival is so named for the three cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. For more information, see Lorraine Brugh’s article on the 2018 festival at Hereford Cathedral in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 20–21. The festival included a recital by Olivier Latry on the cathedral organ.

This interview took place in the Hereford Cathedral gardens after Latry’s early morning practice time. His program for July 31, 2018, included: Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552, Johann Sebastian Bach; Choral No. 2 in B Minor, César Franck; Clair de lune, Claude Debussy, transcribed Alexandre Cellier; Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, opus 7, number 3, Marcel Dupré; Postlude pour l’office des Complies, Jehan Alain; Evocation, Thierry Escaich; improvisation on a submitted theme.

Lorraine Brugh: I came in this morning to hear you practice a bit. It sounded wonderful. Is the organ tuned above 440?

Olivier Latry: Yes, a bit. It is always the case in summer when the temperature is high.

I am curious about your recital. Is this the first time you played at the Three Choirs Festival?

No, I was here fifteen years ago for the festival, so this is my second time. I have played recitals on all three of the cathedral organs, but only once before at the festival.

Your program tomorrow includes the Franck Choral in B Minor, a favorite of mine.

Yes, it works very well on this organ.

I’m curious about the Debussy transcription. How did that become an organ piece? It is your transcription?

The piece was originally transcribed for the organ by Alexandre Cellier, a contemporary of Debussy’s. In fact it was normal at that time, when a piece was composed, to make transcriptions of these new works to other instruments. It helped the publisher to sell more copies of the music. Many publishers did that. There are other Debussy pieces that were published that way. Vierne did the same thing with Rachmaninov. With transcriptions we often have to adjust the music. I don’t think it’s a problem to transcribe a transcription, since it was already on the way toward that.

I’d like to hear about Gaston Litaize as a teacher, and the way you have followed him in his footsteps.

Let me say first why I went to Litaize because it is important. I grew up in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the north of France. I began to study the organ in 1974.

The year after, a new organ had just been built for the cathedral there, a very nice instrument by Schwenkedel in the German style. There were a lot of concerts there at that time.

We heard all the great organists. Pierre Cochereau came to play, Philippe Lefebvre, Litaize. Among them it was Litaize who impressed me the most. He had a way of playing the organ that was viril. (He looks up the word in a French dictionary.) In English it is virile, manly. (Latry makes a growl like a lion.)

I was so impressed because the organ sounded like I hadn’t heard it before. We knew that the organ wasn’t the master, he was the master. He played his own music, Franck on this German instrument, the Prelude and Fugue in D Major by Bach, and Clérambault. It was really great. Then I decided I wanted to study with that man at the Academy of Saint-Maur. He was very nervous, much like his playing in fact. Never relaxing, always speaking with a very big voice as well. He was impressive.

For my first lesson at the Academy of Saint-Maur, I was 16 and went on the train with my parents. He was not there that day. He had me play for his assistant. Then the next day he called me and said gruffly, “I heard that you are very good. We will meet next week, and you can play for me.”

So I went there, and he asked me to prepare the first movement of the [Bach] first trio sonata. I said OK, but I thought it wasn’t enough. He didn’t know anything about me so I prepared the whole trio, and then I also played the Bach B-minor Prelude and Fugue.

He first gave me a musicianship test, to see what I could hear, what kinds of chords he played. It wasn’t a problem to do that, it was almost like a game! Then, during the Bach, he made me play an articulation I didn’t like. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if I should say I don’t like that, or just say yes. I said, “I don’t really like that. Would it be possible to do something else?” He said gruffly, “Ah, very good! Yes, of course, you can do that.” He was so happy because I had my own way.

That was taking a risk.

Of course, especially since it was the first time I played for him. From that day, really, it was very nice, because Litaize could teach his students at different levels. For those who didn’t know anything or have their own musical personality, he would say, “No, do it like this . . . that,” making everything very precise. When someone had enough of their own ideas, then he said they could do it on their own, which was very good. In some ways he taught me many things.

I remember some very nice teaching on the Franck Second Choral. It was just wonderful. The French Classical literature was also very nice. Then we became closer. The second year I went to Paris. I lived with a friend of Litaize who had an organ in his home. Litaize didn’t want to go back home during his two days of teaching in Paris, so he also stayed in that home. He spent all evening speaking about music, listening to music, which for me was very nice. I heard a lot of stories from the 1930s; it was great, great, great. He was also very nice to all of his students. He arranged concerts for his students, and he set up invitations for us to play recitals. The first concert I gave in Holland was because of him. He just gave my name, and that was it. The same thing happened in Germany, and that was very funny.

He said he had accepted an invitation to play in the cathedral in Regensburg, but he didn’t want to go there. He said to me, “Here is my program. You practice my program, and three weeks before the concert I will tell the people that I am ill and I can’t go there. Then I will give your name, and you will play it.”

Can we talk about Notre-Dame? You became one of the titulars early in your life. Can you speak about how the position is for you?

It’s just the center of my life (laughs) although I am not there very often. The three of us titular organists rotate, playing once every three weeks.

I see that you are on to play this weekend.

Yes. We make the schedule at least three or four years in advance; we are currently scheduled until 2022, so we know when we are free. If we need to be away, it is no problem to switch with a colleague.

Notre-Dame is the center of my life for several reasons. First, as you said, I began there early in my life, and it was quite unexpected.

Wasn’t it a competition for that position?

No, there was not a competition for that position. When Cochereau died, Jean-Jacques Grunenwald at St. Sulpice died almost a half year before Cochereau, so that meant that both big instruments had a vacancy for the titular organist at about the same time.

Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, made a rule for hiring the organists for the entire Archdiocese of Paris. We young organists all competed for that, to create a list for the Archdiocese of Paris. This is what the competition was for. I just applied, and was thinking, because I was the second assistant to François-Henri Houbart at La Madeleine, that perhaps there might be another opening there. I played some of the Masses there, and I thought François might move to Notre-Dame. He was one of the best organists in Paris. He first applied and then pulled out. He felt it was better for him to stay at La Madeleine than to be one of four organists at Notre-Dame.

In fact, I didn’t know that, but I suspected that many of the finest organists would apply for Notre-Dame, and that would create vacancies in other parishes. But a few weeks before the competition, I just got a letter saying I was chosen for the competition for Notre-Dame. I was surprised and wondered why. I think it was because I had already been a finalist twice for the Chartres competition, so I was already known by some of the organ world. In addition there was a scandal related to the second competition. In fact I was more known for not winning the prize than had I won the prize. Many people as well as the newspapers were on my side. They all reported that I didn’t win the prize, so everyone was talking about it.

That’s a good way to get famous if it works.

In fact, it was normal, well, not normal, but at least it happened many times in those years that competitions were contested. The Rostropovich competition, the Besançon conductors’ competition, which happened at exactly the same time, also the Chopin Competition, where Martha Argerich left the jury, because Ivo Pogorelich was kicked out.

Was it politics?

We never know. I was also known by the clergy because I was teaching at the Catholic Institute of Paris, so that’s probably why I went on the list for Notre-Dame.

I was so sure that I would not be chosen that I was totally relaxed. I just played. I almost never improvised at that time. The first time I improvised three hours in a row in my life was at Notre-Dame for the rehearsal for the competition. It was very funny. And it worked!

Evidently! That’s a good way to enter something, though, when you don’t think you have a chance.

It was not difficult afterwards, because I was ready technically, but I was only twenty-three. I had a lot of repertoire, but I wasn’t fully mature. With Litaize I played at least thirty to forty minutes of new music every week. I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire.

Did he require that?

No, I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire. I could learn pretty fast. It is how I was trained. If you are trained to learn fast, you can learn even faster. I remember, once on a Monday I started the Diptyque by Messiaen, and I spent nine hours that day, and I played it the next day for a lesson. I couldn’t do that now.

Do you think you have some unusual kind of memory or is that just how you were trained?

It is my training. I don’t have a photographic memory; that is actually my weakest kind of memory. Even so, visual memory would be the last kind I would use. When I see someone just use their visual memory it makes me nervous. I would use more tactile memory.

We call that muscle memory.

The best is always intellectual memory. I’ll come back to that.

When I began at Notre-Dame it was difficult because I was not ready for that kind of exposure to the public. When I played a concert before, perhaps forty a year or so, I had between eighty and two hundred people at a concert. Then, from one day to the next, it was never less than two hundred, and usually more. And why? I don’t play better or worse than yesterday, so why is it like this now? That is the first point.

The second point is that I discovered that people can be very tough. Many critics I had for a recording I made early attacked me for no reason. Just because I was there at Notre-Dame, I was the target. That was really difficult for the first two years, and then afterwards I was OK, I just said, ‘let’s go.’ Before that I was on my way to resigning. Some friends had said to me if I didn’t feel comfortable there, if I needed to protect myself more, perhaps I shouldn’t stay there. These were not organists who wanted to be there, they were just friends. Then I realized that I am an organist at Notre-Dame. I can’t leave it now. So I just changed my mind, and that was that. It was very hard.

Can we talk about your teaching and how much you do at the Conservatoire?

In fact, I started at Rheims, and then Saint Maur where I succeeded Litaize, and remained there for five years. Then I was approached by the Conservatoire in 1995. It was very funny because before that, I was assistant to Michel Chapuis. When he was retiring, the director of the Conservatoire asked if I would like to be one of the teachers. He wanted to divide the organ class in three different ways. One teacher would teach ancient music, i.e., the music up to Bach; another would teach Bach and after, including contemporary music; the third position would be for improvisation. He wanted me to be the teacher for Bach and contemporary music.

I said I wasn’t sure I wanted something like this because I like to teach every style of music. I don’t think it’s good to have some sort of specialization like that. One really needs to have a general approach to literature. He said that it was my choice, but think about it, and that if I didn’t want to do that, it was my decision. I was quite depressed about this and called my good friend Michel Bouvard. I said I had to tell him something, I was just asked to teach at the Conservatoire de Paris, and he let me speak.

Bouvard told me that he agreed with my approach not to specialize, and he said what he liked in music is what is common in all music. He let me speak for ten minutes, and then he said that the director had called him also. I didn’t know that! He wanted him to teach the early music part, and he would refuse because he didn’t want to do that. So we both refused. Then, finally, we decided to have an organ class with two teachers teaching all the literature.

The students can go to either teacher. It’s very nice, because it’s a different approach for the students. It is sometimes difficult for them, because Bouvard and I are never in agreement about interpretation. Often we have a student for one year, and then we switch, but it can be less, sometimes months or even one lesson. In fact, when they have the same piece with both teachers it is very funny because I might say, “Why do you do it like this?” and “It’s not right, you should do it like this.” And the same goes for Bouvard. The student wonders what they should do. It can be disturbing for the student in the beginning because they have to find their way, their own way. The only time we ask them to do something really as we want is when we both agree. Then they better do that.

It is very effective because we are friends, and don’t always agree, but we never fight, even over these twenty-three years. It is also a good thing for the students to see that we can disagree about some things. It is also good for the general idea of the organ world. It is not that we are only critical of one another. In fact since we have made these changes at the Conservatoire, other areas, the oboes, for example, have started sharing students. The best would be when the pianists will share students, but, for that, we will probably have to wait another hundred years.

It is nice because Bouvard and I have the same goal with the music but we always take it in different ways. We have a lot of discussion; we write and call each other five or six times a week and discuss and argue about musical points. We have long discussions.

That’s nice for the students, too, that they can see you dealing with each other in mutual respect.

Yes, I agree. Especially in Paris, where there are so many instruments and that long tradition of fine organists, it is important for the students to see and hear as many of the Parisian organists as possible, to meet them, hear their improvisations, like Thierry Escaich, as I did when I was a student. I went to Notre-Dame, to Madeleine, to Trinité. We encourage them to do that, too. Beyond that, though, we set up some exchange for the students to perform concerts, or to be an organist-in-residence. We have an exchange at the castle in Versailles. Not bad, eh?

Not bad at all!

Each student will play once on their weekly concert there in the French Classic tradition. For that they have five hours of rehearsal on the castle organ. The castle is closed, and they have the keys to the castle in their pocket. Can you imagine having that as a student?

It’s like heaven!

Yes, I think that too. This is one of the things that we do. We also have an exchange with the concert hall in Sapporo, Japan. We send a student there every year. They do teaching, playing concerts in the concert hall.

We have an exchange with the Catholic Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana. We send a student there the first Sunday in Advent, and they are in residence until the Sunday after Easter. They are playing for the choir there, also for Masses.

So they’re there for Mardi Gras. That’s rather dangerous.

(Laughter)

The Conservatoire makes the arrangements for this, but it is our decision to have this kind of exchange. We could just give our lessons, and that would be it. That is all that is required. We feel that it is so important for the students that we want them to have these experiences.

We also have now at Versailles a student in residence for a year there, and also at Notre-Dame. They play for the choir and other things. It would be like an organ scholar in the UK. They might accompany the choir, work with singers, do improvisations in the Mass, maybe play for Mass on the choir organ, anything that the professional organist would do.

At the Conservatoire we are trying to expand the students’ repertoire for the master’s students. They have to play fifty minutes of ‘virtuoso’ music the first year. This is music of their choice and proof that they can handle that. Then they play twenty minutes of music on the German Baroque organ, twenty minutes on the historical Italian organ from 1702 at the Conservatoire, then twenty minutes of French Classic music on the Versailles organ, to see how they react to different repertoire. Then for the master’s degree program they can choose the organ they want to play in Paris. They could say they’d like to play Vierne, Alain, or Florentz at Notre-Dame, or Messiaen at La Trinité, or Franck Three Chorals at St. Clothilde, or a Mass by Couperin at St. Gervais, and we arrange that.

I studied a few lessons with Chapuis one summer in Paris.

One really needs the instruments to do that.

And the teacher. He was wonderful.

Yes, he was. I also had lessons with him, together with the musicologist, Jean Saint-Arroman. Jean is still alive, in his eighties. He wrote a dictionary for French Classical music from 1651 to 1789. It is really incredible because so much information is there. Each time we have a question we just call him. Even when I would have a fight with Mr. Bouvard, we could call him up, and he would settle it! We will have a great project on the music by Raison next term at the Conservatoire, with all the approaches (old fingerings, story, religious and political context, figured bass, etc.) ending with two concerts.

I know one of the things you are interested in is new music.

Well, yes and no. What I love is music that is expressive, that brings something in an emotional way. So it could be something different for each piece of music. For instance, music can be angry. I don’t play music for that only. (laughs) I think sharing those emotions is important. It is also sharing in a spiritual way. Being an artist and an organist, I think we have that privilege to connect the emotional and the spiritual more than other instruments, even more than a pianist.

I like contemporary music that touches me. I play a lot of this music. Sometimes I just play it once, some I hope to play many times. The French composers like Thierry Escaich and Jean-Louis Florentz are so emotional. I also play a lot of music for organ and orchestra. It is a way to connect the organ to the real world of music. Otherwise the organ is always a satellite, only found in a church.

Those concerti help more people to be connected to the organ. I played a new piece by Michael Gandolfi for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I performed a piece by Gerald Levinson at the 2006 dedication of a new organ in Philadelphia.

In Montreal, we first premiered a piece by Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer. This piece was also performed in London and in Los Angeles under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is important to me to have that kind of relation with orchestras and other musicians. I will play the Third Concerto by Thierry Escaich in Dresden, and then in 2020, I will play the Pascal Dusapin Concerto.

What is your relationship to the Dresden Philharmonie?

I have a position in residence there for two years, ending in June 2019. This allows us to do things we would never do otherwise. We will play a concert with the brass ensemble, Phil Blech of the Vienna Philharmonic, and they play wonderfully. We will also perform the same concert at the Musikverein in Vienna. Concert halls are important because some people don’t want to go into a church. Hearing an organ concert in a concert hall shouldn’t be a problem. In Paris we fight a lot to have organs in the concert halls. I just did a recording of transcriptions on the new organ at the Paris Philharmonie. It is an incredible organ. The CD Voyages is now available.

What would you like to say to American organists? Most of the readers are practicing organists or organ enthusiasts.

It is difficult to know, but what I would say is just hope and try to do our best. We need to convince people that the organ can really add to our life in many ways. I don’t know how it is in the United States with the relation to the clergy, but it can be complicated. I would say, at Notre-Dame, I only play the organ. I don’t have anything to do with the administration, with anything about running the cathedral. The organ is high, far away from everything. We are there, and if we don’t want to see the clergy, we can do that. It is better, though, to have a closer relationship.

The musicians go for an aperitif with the clergy after the Sunday Masses and we are all together. It is rather funny, because we talk about little details, and we can banter back and forth. We have mutual respect for each other, which allows us an easy rapport. It is a sort of communion between the priest, the choir, and the musicians. We rarely play written literature during the ritual action in the service. We cannot make the priest wait for two minutes because our chorale isn’t finished.

You time the organ music to the liturgical action?

Yes, so, for that, we usually improvise, and it is much better. We can improvise in the style of what we heard, in imitation of a motet by the choir, or the sermon. Sometimes the clergy react to what we do. After a prelude or a sermon, the priest might say he heard something from the organ and responds in the moment.

So the priests assume there is a dialogue going on with the music?

Yes, of course. It works both ways. It is not possible to do something against one another. We can do everything. The music isn’t something to just make people quiet; it can make them cry or be angry. Usually after the sermon we do something soft, on the Voix céleste or something similar. However it is not a problem to improvise for two minutes on the full organ, even clusters, if it is a response to what the priest said. We have never heard a priest comment that it is too loud. This can only happen with a kind of relationship that allows everything to be open for discussion.

We have an organ that has a lot of possibilities. We have to exploit all those possibilities rather than follow a prescribed response just because it’s the middle of the Mass. The context is not always the same. It is our job to create the atmosphere for the service.

One of my favorite times is the introit for the 10 a.m. Gregorian Mass. 11:30 is the polyphonic Mass, which is especially for tourists, and the evening Mass is the cardinal Mass, most like a parish Mass. Notre Dame is not a parish, but that is when the local people come. From the introit of the first Mass we have Gregorian texts and their interpretations. I read the texts before the improvisation. The texts will be the source for a ten-minute improvisation. It is like a symphonic poem. We can bring people to the subject of the day.

Let’s talk about memorization, because it is so important how to learn to learn. We try to do this with memorization, especially at the Conservatoire, because people are scared. We say that a memory slip is like playing a wrong note. Don’t be scared if you get lost. If you know how to come back to the music and learn the technique to do so, you won’t have a problem. It is also a question of confidence. If you are confident, there is no problem.

It is like riding a bike. One must know first how to memorize the technical way. For me the best way to memorize is to have all the connections together. Memorization is like a wall. When you see a wall, one sees that the stones are never the same size. In fact, the actual musical notes are one level of the stones. Another level is the harmony, another is the fingerings, and then the movements, the music. All combined makes the big wall. Then, if there is one step missing you are still OK. If you have too many holes, then the wall falls down. So it is important to be sure that everything is in place.

One must know what is the fingering there, without moving the fingers. Be able to copy the music down like it is in the score, to make sure it is the same as the score. What I do for the students, because they are so scared, is I say “stop” while they are playing. I ask if they know where they are, and ask them to pick up the music two bars later.

Then, finally I’d like to finish by talking about memorization with Litaize. We attended each other’s lessons with him because we were all friends. He didn’t require it but we wanted to. We were there at the same time. I listened to the lessons, and it was very nice. When he wanted to make an example to people, he could play, at the right tempo, the place in the music he wanted to demonstrate. It was like he had a film of the music going on in his mind, and he could play anywhere he wished. I do that with the students, and it is so effective. It is even better with a trio sonata. I ask the student to play, and then I turn one manual off and have them continue. This teaches them that they can go anywhere.

They have learned the music deeply.

Yes. Once you have the music in your head, then it is easy to practice all the time. You don’t need an organ to practice. Of course, you have to learn the notes on a piano or organ. Once it’s in your head you can practice while you’re walking, in the shower, sleeping. One can practice twenty-four hours a day.

It’s time we bring this to a close, and I think our readers will be interested in hearing what you have said today. I appreciate the time you have taken today to meet me the day before your recital. I look forward to hearing your recital tomorrow. Best wishes.

Thank you very much.

Editor’s note: On Monday, April 15, the world watched as Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris suffered a catastrophic fire that has damaged much of the historic building. Some of the edifice and its pipe organs have survived in a state that continues to be assessed for eventual restoration.

Mr. Latry recorded a compact disc on the cathedral organ in January, the last CD recorded before the fire. Released by La Dolce Vita, Bach to the Future features the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. For information, readers may visit: www.ladolcevita.com. The disc is also available from www.amazon.com, and other resources.

Various news media sources of the world have reported that numerous donations have been made already to rebuild the cathedral. However, Mr. Latry has pointed out that a very different and very real problem exists as the 67 employees of the cathedral are now without an income. Those who wish to make a contribution to the rebuilding of the cathedral and to assist those who work at the cathedral may visit: https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/participate-in-the-reconstruction-of-th…

Photo caption: Olivier Latry and Lorraine Brugh (photo credit: Gary Brugh)

Lorraine Brugh was recently resident director of Valparaiso University’s Study Centre in Cambridge, England. She is professor of music and the Frederick J. Kruse Organ Fellow at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.

This interview took place October 17, 2018, at Westfield House of Theological Studies in Cambridge, England.

Lorraine Brugh: I’m interested in your visits to Cambridge and what your work is here.

Colin Walsh: I teach the two organ scholars at Trinity College. I work with them both on solo repertoire and also the accompaniments. In some ways, the accompaniments are the most important thing at Trinity, as they have to accompany that choir under the direction of Stephen Layton. Of course, the playing has to be right for the choir to be able to perform at a high standard. I teach on the fine Metzler instrument, which doesn’t lend itself to all literature, so there are compromises that have to be made.

Is it a tracker organ?

Yes, it’s built as a classical instrument, so some of the Romantic repertoire needs quite a bit of thinking through. I use my experience to try and influence these youngsters to find the best solution.

Do you spend much time working on registration?

Yes, quite a bit of that. Of course, the organ is very different from King’s College. King’s is one of the finest organs for accompaniment there is. Trinity was really designed for Bach and his contemporaries, so that takes time to adjust. I like to think that I’m not dogmatic in my teaching. These are bright students who have their own ideas. I like to ask them to justify what they are doing. If I think they are playing something in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, I would ask if they think that is the right approach. If they think it is, then I would try to work with their idea.

I think that’s where American teaching would be somewhat different. We wouldn’t tend to be so kind.

They are Cambridge undergraduates. They have quick brains, so they soak it up quickly. Of course, debate and justification are very much the modus operandi here. One must believe in the way they are playing.

Who were your significant teachers?

Nicholas Danby, who was at the Royal Academy and taught me at Oxford, Jean Langlais, and Simon Preston. I learned the French repertoire from Langlais and, in part, from Danby. Guy Weitz, who had been a student of Widor, taught Nicholas Danby, so there is another connection with France.

So what inspired you to study with Langlais?

It was Nicholas Danby. I’d been to Notre-Dame and heard Pierre Cochereau, and his playing had a dramatic effect on me. Danby knew I liked all this French repertoire and wanted to study it with someone in France, and he suggested Langlais.

I’ve always enjoyed travelling. I’m going to Germany tomorrow. As long as I get to Luton airport in time, I’ll be in Berlin tomorrow night. Then on Friday morning I’ll take a train to Leipzig, then to Zwickau for a recital on Sunday, which is where Schumann was born, a couple hours from Leipzig.

Anything else you’d like to say about Cambridge?

It’s always a joy to hear the Cambridge choirs when I’m here. Yesterday, for example, I went to the first part of Evensong at King’s, then caught part of Trinity, then ended at St. John’s College.

There is such a confluence of people and excellence here.

Indeed.

I know of you most from Lincoln Cathedral. I enjoyed one of your recitals there. Can you talk about the position, and what the organist laureate entails?

I’ve been there for thirty years. I went as organist and master of the choristers. In 2002 I became organist laureate; I’m there as the organist and have the freedom to be an ambassador for the cathedral, to give concerts at home and abroad, make recordings, and teach in Cambridge.

I do have a regular playing schedule. I spend half of my time in Lincoln and half in other places. In Lincoln we have two treasures; the cathedral is one of the finest religious buildings in the world. Every time I get back to it, I realize it is really special. The other treasure is the Father Willis organ, which you heard in all its glory. I never tire of it. It has such a deep and rich quality.

Father Willis knew that building, and it’s interesting, having worked in Salisbury, which is also a Father Willis, how different those two instruments are. I’ve always thought the Salisbury organ has a more vertical sound, much like the building itself. It was also built twenty years earlier than Lincoln. For me it has a lighter and more classical sound.

Lincoln Cathedral is a big, solid mass of stone, very wide with those huge towers. It is a much broader, reed-based organ.

Do you think he had those ideas in mind with the two organs?

Yes, I think he did. Lincoln needs the weight of the reeds and foundations to project the sound into the building.

And also the 16′s and 32′s?

Yes, there are two 32′s. At the concert you attended I had some choir men singing the plainsong in the Dupré pieces. They were hiding away in the triforium. I love accompanying in that building. The choir is good and fun to work with.

You’ve done some recordings at Lincoln. Let’s talk about recordings.

I have been involved in recordings beginning with Simon Preston during my time at Christ Church, Oxford. I noticed this week that the Archive of English Cathedral Music has put up on YouTube a 1977 recording called Romantic Choral Classics. I listened to some of it the other day, and the choir was so good, so virile, so energetic. When the choir went down to pianissimo the intensity was still there. It was something special, and it’s a great joy to see it now available to all again.

I recorded at Salisbury with the wonderful choir there, and that is where I made my first solo organ recordings with Priory Records. I did two recordings of French organ music with them in 1984. I was in Salisbury from 1978 to 1985.

Then at St. Albans I made another recording for Priory, Vierne’s First Symphony and the Duruflé Suite. At Lincoln I’ve done several recordings, some of the organ and some of the choir, and one that came out in August 2018 of J. S. Bach. I wanted to do something that showed that Bach can work well on a cathedral organ. Bach works well on the Trinity Metzler, but it’s very different when played in a cathedral on an electro-pneumatic action.

Last July I recorded at Saint-Ouen, Rouen, a Cavaillé-Coll that I believe is one of the finest organs in the world. I recorded all the Dupré Antiphons, opus 18, part of which you heard in Lincoln.

Do you think there is a future for organ recordings?

Who knows? It’s a different commercial world than it was thirty years ago.

I started working with Priory and they are still releasing new recordings. Recordings have been a big part of my career, and there are others being planned at the moment.

There was one recording I did with Priory that came out by accident four years ago. We make a recording of all recitals at the cathedral, primarily for our archive, and also so that a visiting organist can have a recording of their recital—a sort of souvenir of their time in Lincoln. I played Messiaen, La Nativité du Seigneur, which I do every Christmas, and the 2014 version was recorded and is now available on the Priory catalog.

They took it more or less live?

Yes, we just retook a couple moments to eradicate “noises off.” Overall I think it captures the atmosphere of a live performance.

Isn’t it also a problem for students, who listen to these perfect and edited recordings, and think that’s the level at which they should play.

There are plenty of people who can play all the right notes in all the right order. I don’t always want that. If there are one or two small accidents I don’t think that matters as long as they are making music. One also needs energy, drive, and danger. It’s what I call “letting the dogs off the lead.” There are times in a performance when one can change gear and go with the moment. I do like to light the fire sometimes and let it happen. It’s a wonderful feeling when you get this.

That’s also a way students can use their adrenaline, I believe. They’ve got all this energy, and they can put it into anxiety and nerves, or they can channel it for the performance.

Yes, that’s it, this channeling. Use this tension in a big space for the music. We’ve had some fabulous recitals over the years—Daniel Roth, Olivier Latry, Philippe Lefebvre. It is often the ones who have come from big buildings and know how to project the music a long way. There are others who just play to themselves, and that doesn’t work. Every stop needs its own nurturing, has its own little character. It’s a question of action, space, timing, legato, tempo.

That’s a very sophisticated level of performer and performance.

Those are the great ones. When I play on the reeds on the Great organ, I have to play into the keys so that the tone can develop. That’s what makes them carry into the building. One must see each stop as having a separate character, and above all, listen.

You can know those things when you know the instrument intimately.

It’s interesting. You cannot approach any organ with a pre-conceived idea of what you will do. One has to adapt to it. It’s the building, it’s the organ, it’s the music, and it’s you. These four things need to come together. In many cases an instrument will tell you how to play, and you have to be receptive to this.

That’s hard to teach.

It was Langlais who first said to me, “stop playing the console, play the pipes.”

I don’t remember him saying that to me. I don’t think I was there long enough.

There was a reason he had to say it to me. If you’re dealing with a little 2′ piccolo and you just give it a little of air, it will be alright. But if you’re dealing with the huge lumbering woods up in the roof, the largest and deepest pipes, one needs to give them time. It takes time, in a big building, for the sound to travel, so one often has to play them ahead.

Shall we talk about Langlais? I’m fascinated to hear how the experience was for you.

His apartment was in Rue Duroc, you’ll know where. I always felt it was like entering into a mystical cave where the ghosts of Widor, Vierne, Dupré, and Franck were all in the shadows.

Most of my lessons were in Rue Duroc, on a small mechanical-action organ, which played the wrong notes before you even looked at them. His dog, Scherzo, near your left foot, appeared to be waiting for you to play a wrong pedal note. Langlais, too, was listening. I remember once when using my third finger on an F-sharp in a work by César Franck, he stopped me and said, “No, you must use your fourth finger there.” He obviously heard it wasn’t absolutely legato. I remember his teaching was also interspersed with stories about the composers themselves. That brought a nice humanity, it brought it all alive.

He also had tales from when he was teaching in other places. As I prepared to play the Vierne First Symphony to him, he told me a story. In the USA someone was playing the “Final” from the symphony. His interpretation was too fast and mechanical. Langlais sat there and waited until he finished. He kept silent and finally said to the student, “what was that?’’ The student responded with the title of the piece. Langlais said, “I don’t know this piece. What have you played?” He was quite persistent; he wouldn’t let him get away with it. He said, “That wasn’t Vierne; that was you.”

Langlais was interested in his students beyond their lessons. He was interested in Salisbury Cathedral, where I was at the time, and what I was doing there. He was interested in other places in England, too.

I remember his approach, which I use with my students, that you must justify what you are doing. If he thought I played something too fast, he would say that the composer wrote little notes to be heard. His basic approach to articulation was that things were either staccato or legato. Staccato was half-length, or maybe three-quarter length. That’s really a Dupré thing, isn’t it?

Legato often meant Franck legato with a great emphasis on line and phrase. Yes, Franck was different from Vierne or Duruflé. Langlais would often say, “Insist on that note,” highlighting by holding a tied note or the middle of the phrase as long as possible.

That’s why I wanted to study with Langlais. I would play a different Franck piece every day and would soak up all of his suggestions. He had a way of seeing that music. I wanted to understand the overlapping legato that he could do so well.

Everything had to breathe. Take your time; don’t hurry. But, at the same time, the music must move forwards. He taught me that playing Vierne involves playing a bit more robustly. In the “Adagio” of the Third Symphony, for example, he would want Franck-like legato, with overlapping notes, etc. In the more rhythmic movements, though, something quite different. There is much drama and emotion in his music that must be conveyed.

I remember watching Langlais play a couple of Masses when I was with him, and it was amazing how he knew how and when to play the pedal ahead of the manuals. He knew how to make the music come together, not at the console, but for the congregants downstairs.

Sometimes we went to Sainte-Clothilde to play the famous Cavaillé-Coll organ. I remember comparing notes with Daniel Roth, who went to Langlais as a student. He played the Fantaisie in A for him. Like me he got some instructions from Langlais before he began concerning strict time or rubato and the use of the swell box in Franck. The idea of the crescendi and diminuendi and the swell box were all connected to his use of rubato and the direction of a phrase.

Yes, inside the pulse was the flexibility. One doesn’t lose the pulse; the flexibility comes inside it. That was a good thing to learn.

The pulse is not a metronome. It should change with the tension in the music. If there is a rising sequence, especially with some of those Vierne symphonic movements, the tension needs to be emphasized. Langlais taught that the closer one got to the resolution, the more muscular playing was needed.

Langlais’ criticism of American playing was well taken, I believe, because of the difficulty of understanding these differences. It is easy to err on either side of that flexible pulse idea. So all this happened while you were at Salisbury. Can you talk about that position?

Yes, I went there in 1978 and stayed seven years. It was great working with Richard Seal who was a consummate musician and ran a fine choir. His emphasis was on color, legato, and line. I like to think I learned a lot from him.

Before that was Christ Church, Oxford. How was that?

Christ Church was another special experience. This gave me the opportunity to work with the legendary Simon Preston. I had been listening to his recordings since I was twelve. His commitment to the choir was staggering. His energy seemed limitless.

How old was he at the time?

He was in his mid-thirties, very young. The influences of Boris Ord and David Willcocks, with whom he had worked at King’s College, were evident. At the same time I worked with Preston, I also worked with Christopher Robinson with the Oxford Bach Choir for four years. That was a great experience and privilege, too.

Shall we keep going back and talk about Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle?

I was lucky there. I was eighteen; I went straight from school, so it was a sort of gap year. The man at the keys at the time was Sydney Campbell, who had been previously organist at Canterbury; he was a wonderful organist and inspiring accompanist. In those days the organist had no sight lines to the choir and conductor, so one had to listen and play, which was a real challenge.

It was a great training. I’m glad I did that, not only because I was working with a great musician, but also it prepared me for Christ Church. Sydney Campbell had enormous respect for Simon Preston, and it was mutual. Campbell was great and quite a character. There was never a dull moment!

Have you been to the United States?

Yes, but it was some time ago. I’ve played at The Riverside Church in New York City, Philadelphia, and Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan.

In the United States, many of our organ departments are declining. Fewer young people believe they can find full-time work in the organ and church music field and are choosing other paths. I don’t know if that correlates to the system here, but I’m interested in your views.

Even here in Cambridge there is that correlation. There are so few organ positions at the choral foundations that the chance of really getting a decent job is quite slim. The jobs don’t open up very often, and the pay isn’t that good. Cathedrals are missing potential talent, and the students are going on into a school or other music-related opportunities.

When I was organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln for fourteen years, there were a lot of administration and meetings to deal with. Nowadays I’m very happy to go to the organ loft, close the door, and play.

Do you encourage young people to go into organ and church music?

Yes and no. Yes, if I think they have a future. I don’t think it’s fair to encourage them if they don’t have the musicality or character to pull it off.

That’s a skill we don’t teach much. We sometimes do a little bit about clergy-musician relationships, but it’s not enough.

Yes, there is never enough time to learn all we need to do all the job entails. We keep at it, both teachers and students, doing what we can each day.

Thank you for the delightful conversation today.

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.

Robert McCormick has been organist and choirmaster of Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia, since 2016. Previously he held similar positions at Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C., and at Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City. He is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series (Matthew Glandorf) may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 (Mary Beth Bennett) in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13; and Part 3 (Jason Roberts) in the July 2023 issue, pages 16–17.

Introduction

We continue our series focusing on American organist-improvisers with a name familiar to many—Dorothy Papadakos. I first met Dorothy more than two decades ago, when I was director of music at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Times Square, New York City, and she was cathedral organist of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The first time I ever heard Dorothy play live was at the seating of the Right Reverend Mark Sisk as Fifteenth Bishop of New York in 2001. Dorothy began the first hymn on the celebrated State Trumpet, and off we went. “We’re about to have church,” I thought, and we certainly did. It was a marvelous and memorable liturgy, hardly least due to Dorothy’s glorious playing.

Dorothy surely must be one of the most multifaceted and versatile persons in our profession: she is not only an organist, but also a jazz musician, musical theater composer, and author. She also may well be one of the warmest and most joyful among us. In addition to interviewing Dorothy via email, I have just had the privilege of seeing her for the first time in over a decade over lunch in Philadelphia, alongside her delightful husband, Tracy McCullen, and marvelous fellow organist Peter Richard Conte. After an extraordinary shared meal, two hours later, I walked back to my church refreshed and full of Dorothy’s infectious happiness.

Writing this article, seeing Dorothy in person, and pondering her inspiring responses reminded me yet again of music’s power to stir, heal, and renew. Dorothy is a wonderful example of a life devoted to making the world a better place through the art of music. How many people has she inspired through her musical gifts? (Countless numbers, of course.) Case in point: I have been prompted again to seek to rediscover and recapture a sense of childlike joy and awe in music making. Like many of us, especially being an absolute perfectionist, I spend much of my time focused on the minutiae of music making. Without question, for any of us to practice our art at the highest levels, we must do this. Yet it is so easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of music making as a result, for our perspectives to become skewed.

In a church context, the goal of music is to glorify God and to inspire the people who hear it. How many times have I finished a service unable to think of anything other than whether or not I played a difficult passage cleanly enough, or why did I take such-and-such a turn in an improvisation when another would have been better, or whether the choir tuned as well as they could in a particular motet, only to have a congregant share heartfelt appreciation for the beauty of the music offered? (The answer, of course, is virtually all the time!)

Improvisation is perhaps the most personal way to make music. With that in mind, let us now hear directly from Dorothy Papadakos herself.

Discussion

When, how, and why did you start playing by ear and inventing your own music? Did it coincide with your early music training?

If it had not been for a fourth-grade crush, music and I may have never met! I was nine years old in Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, “going steady” with a boy taking piano lessons. Our mothers decided it would be cute if we played duets together, so they started me with his piano teacher, Loren McNabb, a hefty Scottish jazzman with a white goatee who moonlighted playing Reno’s nightclub circuit. To my surprise, I took to the piano instantly. I love math and science, and this was ultimate math and science to me. I enjoyed experiencing how my brain and fingers learned more and more technical pieces. And I loved the feel in my little hands of playing scales, amazed at what my fingers could do, especially when I stopped thinking about them and let them do their thing skiing up and down the keyboard like natural athletes!

After each half-hour lesson I begged Mr. McNabb to play me “his music:” Ellington, Gershwin, Porter, Broadway. Two years in, at age eleven, I went on strike! I refused to practice “that boring classical music” and insisted he teach me “his music:” jazz! I wanted to read lead sheets and chord changes. They were the gateway to a mysterious world, to musical freedom. Mr. McNabb complained to my mom about her problem child; she told him to teach me whatever I wanted if it kept me practicing! (Go, Mom!) I took to jazz like a bird to the air. In just a few years I could read any lead sheet and was playing jazz gigs for local events by age fifteen.

Enter the men who changed my early life and music forever: Liberace and blind British jazz pianist George Shearing. I got to meet Liberace several times backstage at John Ascuaga’s Nugget when he performed in Reno, because my mom knew him from her Hollywood days. I assiduously copied Liberace’s recordings note-for-note to learn his style and to get inside his stunning technique. (How did he do it with all those rings on?) Then the George Shearing Quartet came to town and blew this kid “outta da water!” His album Light, Airy, and Swinging changed my ears and tonal imagination. I knew then and there all I wanted to do was to improvise and compose “cool jazz.”

Tell us more about how you employed improvisation in childhood.

Those first jazz gigs at around age fifteen were for fashion shows in Reno and some Reno High School theater work. Then a turning point came: Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno (now Trinity Cathedral) asked me to join their folk ensemble since I’d been taking guitar lessons and sang in their youth choir. The next thing I knew, I was lead vocalist and guitarist of the ten-piece band playing the 9:00 a.m. service! This was the era of Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and 1970s folk and pop. It was musical heaven for me, until my dear Mr. McNabb died suddenly. I was 16, devastated, lost, a ship without a rudder. My mother tried everything to find me a new teacher. Of course, no one could measure up. She even took me to the University of Nevada-Reno’s head piano professor for whom I improvised on Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. Mom and I were so proud of my audition; I nailed every note and nuance! But this piano professor just shook his head, clicking his tongue saying, “It’s too bad she doesn’t play classical.” Mom, furious, grabbed me by my arm saying, “Come on, Dorothy Jean! We’re getting out of here!”

That next Sunday in church my ears heard the organ as if for the first time (a three-manual 1967 Allen). That’s when I approached Mr. James Poulton, Trinity’s wonderful 11:00 a.m. organist and choirmaster, who agreed to give me organ lessons. As with the piano, I’d never given the organ a moment’s thought, but I was so lost without Mr. McNabb, I thought, “Why not organ? It’s a stack of synthesizers!” (Yes, that’s how my sixteen-year-old brain saw the organ.) I now know that if it weren’t for death and grief, the organ and I may have never met—and fallen in love. My scientific mind went crazy for the stops, pistons, 32′ pitches, pedals, the whole tonal palette. I felt like a one-woman orchestra!

I noticed, too, I could “noodle” around on the organ, but no one else I knew noodled (in public), so I assumed this was simply not done. My first organ piece with Mr. Poulton was the famous (attributed to) Bach Toccata in D Minor, every sixteenth note’s fingerings and meticulous counting penciled in. To this day, I still use that really worn-out original score at my Phantom of the Opera (1929) silent film performances (my show opener to set the mood) to remember where I come from. And, of course, I now play the Toccata like the improvisation it’s meant to be!

As a child, did you understand the music theory behind what you were doing, or did that understanding catch up later?

Yes, oh yes, I was very fortunate that both Mr. McNabb and my next mentor, Don Rae, the great jazz pianist/arranger for the legendary Las Vegas comedy team Gaylord and Holiday, insisted I master jazz harmony, voicings, and scales, and listen to classical composers to learn how they put harmonies together. They instilled in me the fierce mental discipline that I rely on today. Once I discovered major and minor ninths, thirteenths, and Burt Bacharach, I was hooked. But when I discovered how just one harmonic shift, or one simple, sexy jazz chord could change the key and slip my improv into a brand-new musical world, it ignited the composer in me.

At age eleven, I learned the circle of fifths and how to read complex charts. It was fun, hard work yet easy to memorize, and it laid the groundwork for reading figured bass when I started playing Baroque continuo. I spent thousands of hours at my stepfather’s Steinway grand piano and couldn’t wait to get home from school to play through a new fake book or disco tunes Don Rae brought me. Don’s big improvisation game changer was teaching me the Blues. In losing Mr. McNabb, I understood gut-wrenching loss and grief, but I didn’t know how to get there musically, how to turn anguish into beauty. Don had me prepare a new improvisation weekly by memory in all twenty-four keys, major and minor, over twenty weeks, on anything I wanted. I remember that first time I played one of my improvs for him, it was about four minutes long. Nervous as I was, I let myself go in it. When I finished, he was silent. I turned and saw him, his jaw open. I remember it so well. That’s when he knew I had a gift; me, I wasn’t so sure. I thought I was a copycat, just imitating Duke Ellington and George Shearing. I still didn’t feel original or unique because I worked so hard to emulate others.

I must add here a pivotal moment almost every successful person I’ve met has experienced. It happened at the end of my freshman year at the University of Nevada, Reno. Remember the piano professor my mother stormed out on? They assigned him to teach me organ! Oh no! He was no organist, and I knew this would be bad. At our last lesson he dismissed me in no uncertain terms: “Missy, I suggest you give this up. You don’t have what it takes to make it in music.” In that instant I thought of Liberace, George Shearing, Mr. McNabb, Don Rae, Duke Ellington, my improvs. (I also thought of words that are unprintable here!) He was wrong, and I knew it. But what was I to do, having been told, “Don’t come back”? Well, the gods were listening!

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to become a professional organist and church musician?

Yes! Enter Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, New York City, and Robert K. Kennedy, organist and master of the choirs at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, Long Island. One springtime Sunday morning in Reno before church I serendipitously caught the TV broadcast of the 9:00 a.m. contemporary service at Saint Bartholomew’s with guitars, drums, organ, handbells, a big choir, and congregation singing amazing jazz church music!

I froze, mesmerized in total disbelief. Oh, the joy in their music! I knew I was meant to be there. I packed up and drove across the country to live with my dad in Saint James, Long Island, and started commuting on Sunday mornings to St. Bart’s as a choir member and guitarist in the 9:00 a.m. band. At the same time, I began organ lessons as a sophomore at SUNY Stony Brook traveling to Garden City to work with the brilliant, warm, and wonderful Kennedy, who gave me the “You get serious or else!” talk. He whipped me into shape like a real organ teacher. The Bach-Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor always makes me think of Robert. I credit him with helping me decide to become a professional organist and believing I could do it if I gave everything to my craft. So I did­—everything. I dove into repertoire and completely forgot about jazz and improv. I told myself they were no longer of any use. At this point I still had no idea anyone improvised on the organ, even though Robert was teaching at the same time his astonishing protégé Peter Richard Conte, my dear friend and improvisation colleague!

Beyond Robert Kennedy, who were your principal teachers and influences in organ and organ improvisation? How did you learn from them?

At Saint Bartholomew’s I met the great conductor and organist Dr. Dennis Keene, who was at the time St. Bart’s assistant organist, while finishing his doctoral degree at Juilliard. Dennis would become pivotal in my organ education.

St. Bart’s by now had hired me as their Christian education secretary, and one night working late I heard Dennis practicing two pieces on St. Bart’s glorious Aeolian-Skinner organ: Messiaen’s Le Banquet Céleste and Duruflé’s Scherzo. I stopped my work. I quietly snuck out to a partially opened chancel door and listened and watched him play in that sparkling, golden Byzantine mosaic space.

Le Banquet Céleste brought tears to my eyes. What on earth was this exquisitely inexpressible music? And this playful scherzo! Who on earth wrote this jewel of pure spontaneous magic? Both were jazz but not jazz; earthly yet other-worldly. Duruflé and Messiaen became my repertoire gurus. Soon Dennis was teaching me French Romantic and contemporary repertoire on the organ in St. Bart’s side chapel. (Organist Jack Ossewaarde prohibited anyone but Dennis and him from touching the great organ, especially newbies like me!) When Dennis became organist and choirmaster downtown at the Church of the Ascension, our work continued, and he trained me up for Juilliard and Eastman auditions. Those years studying with Dennis and the thousands of painstaking hours of blood, sweat, and tears formed my technique into what it is today. I have Dennis to thank for not letting me get away with anything less than excellence. And he gave me a front row seat as organ-page-turner at some of the finest choral and orchestral concerts in the world presented by his Ascension Music. I have lifelong gratitude for all he gave me, especially the privilege of hosting Madame Duruflé in my cathedral apartment (because Je parle français) for a week at Saint John the Divine— wow—il n’y a rien à dire! (There are no words!) She and I remained dear friends for many years after and shared unforgettable visits in France. Now there was une grande improvisatrice! And with such petite hands!

May I digress and share with you the thrill of a lifetime? On a visit to Marie-Madeleine’s lovely stone house in Cavaillon in Provence where she was on holiday with her dear sister Elianne, we were having tea in her living room when I commented on the lovely old brown upright piano against the far wall, a candle mounted on each end, fine lace lying across the top. She told me, “That’s where Maurice composed his Messe Cum Jubilo.” I started to cry as I so love that gorgeous work. I can still feel that hot Provence August afternoon with her and smell the fragrance of her giant rosemary bushes infusing that cool stone living room.

While studying with Dennis, I won the New York City AGO organ competition, and to my joy and astonishment got into Juilliard for fall 1983 to pursue my dream of studying Messiaen’s works with Messiaen’s protégé, the sublime artist Dr. Jon Gillock. What a world Jon brought me into; what an extraordinary friendship we built. Messiaen’s harmonies, registrations, birdsongs, and Hindu rhythms blew my mind. Through all this, improvisation took a back seat until three things happened at once: first, Dennis gave me Marcel Dupré’s two improvisation books; second, I began studying improvisation at Juilliard with my dear friend and colleague, the legendary improviser “Uncle” Gerre Hancock at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (that’s an article all its own!); and third, I heard Paul Halley’s iconic improvisation album Nightwatch on the great organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where he was organist and choirmaster.

If there was a seminal person, moment, place, and organ in my improvisation career, this was it: Paul Halley at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the mind-blowing Aeolian-Skinner Opus 150-A, “Miss Scarlett,” housed in the cathedral’s astounding eight-second acoustic (now nine seconds since the 2001 post-fire restoration!). Paul Halley’s organ improvs exploded my mind, ears, and musical imagination. In his playing I heard jazz improvisation like nothing I’d ever heard; he used the organ in ways I never imagined possible, especially the strings. I memorized Paul’s album, tried to replicate his sophisticated progressions, his sonic palette, his tricks with acoustics. I worked my butt off learning this extraordinary new thing: jazz-infused improvisation on a pipe organ, wonder of wonders! My four improvisers (two hands, two feet) found their home. This is when I made the commitment to find my voice and forge my own style.

My “second childhood,” as I call my twenty-three years at Saint John the Divine, began prior to my Juilliard studies, as a Barnard College junior in 1980. One autumn Friday I was unexpectedly called in as a last-minute sub to play for the cathedral’s weekend sleepover-in-the-crypt youth program, Nightwatch. It went so well that I was invited back on many Friday nights when Paul Halley was on tour with the Paul Winter Consort. Nightwatch and I would continue together for the next nine years, and it became my weekly “improv lab” to try out new ideas! Can I even begin to describe what it was like to be in that vast, dark cathedral on those marvelous cold winter Friday and Saturday nights, improvising in the dark and speaking to thousands of kids visiting from across the country about the great organ, showing off its cool sounds and taking them on a grand sonic ride they still to this day write to me about?

While at Juilliard in 1983, I found my courage to write Paul Halley asking if he’d consider taking me on as an improv student, knowing he didn’t teach because of his heavy touring and cathedral schedule. But, oh my goodness, he asked me to come in and play for him! He’d heard about my subbing at Nightwatch, and I’ll always remember that audition: afternoon light in the great organ loft, me seated on the bench, terrified in awe to be in Paul’s presence as he opened the hymnal to a Gregorian chant, one I would soon come to cherish, Conditor alme siderum.

I don’t remember what I improvised; I do remember thinking I made a total hash of it! I finished, waited in silence, then turned. Paul was relaxed, leaning back, arms stretched wide along the organ loft railing. With that great smile of his, he nodded saying, “Yes, I’ll work with you.” I thought I would die. My spontaneous squeal of joy echoed through the cathedral! What a privilege to become Paul’s improvisation protégé. And what a challenge: I never worked so hard in my life, never felt such a drive to excel, to prove myself and to achieve my dream of becoming a great improviser. And in all those years of study, Paul never charged me for a lesson.

In January 1984 Paul asked me to substitute for him in my first ever Paul Winter Consort gig at the Princeton University Chapel on their colossal organ. Thus began my nearly forty-year friendship and life-changing work with my dear friend and musical guru Paul Winter. Here was an entire band of world-class improvisers who welcomed me with open arms. And who knew one could improvise with humpback whales, timber wolves, or canyon wrens? Again my sonic world exploded! In 1986 Paul Halley named me cathedral organ scholar and trained me up on how to devise choral accompaniments and hymns in the English Cathedral style. In 1987 he and the dean appointed me cathedral assistant organist and then in 1990, when Paul left the cathedral, I was appointed cathedral organist. I remember once asking Paul why he hired me, and I’ve never forgotten his answer: “Because you’re great with kids (the Cathedral Choristers), you’re an accomplished woman organist (an endangered species in 1980s New York), and you read Samba charts (unheard of for an organist!).” Wow. There it was: all my years of improvisation and jazz landed me the coolest job on planet Earth.

A funny side note to this: at Juilliard my dear teacher Dr. Jon Gillock fully supported my improvisation work with Paul Halley. Jon deeply revered the great French organ improvisers and wanted me to give my improv and repertoire studies equal effort like the French do. But Juilliard found out and threatened to expel me for studying with a teacher outside the school, even though I had Dr. Gillock’s blessing. So, I assured the powers-that-be that I would stop—and of course, I didn’t! Never in a million years could I have imagined when I graduated from Juilliard with my master’s degree in organ at age twenty-five that in four short years I would be appointed the first woman cathedral organist at Saint John the Divine, because of my improv chops!

How does improvising in concert settings differ to you from liturgical settings?

There is quite a difference for me, like two alternate sonic worlds with very separate harmonic languages, techniques, themes, timings, feeling, purpose, audience, energetic intent, all of it. In accompanying silent films, my job (as I learned in reading my hero Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography) is to provide the emotional subtext of every scene: to improvise music that provides the emotional counterpoint to the action to enhance, not compete with, its drama, comedy, and conflict, and also to prepare the audience for what’s coming in the next scene. The music is the narrator. It must be subtle yet blunt, amorphous yet cued, often with specific timed “hits” (like a crash or surprise), and it is very much about surrendering to the three-way micro-millisecond relationship between oneself, the audience, and the actors. It’s a powerful and very real energetic triangle, and when you give yourself over to it, that’s when the magic happens, when the audience gets lost in the film and forgets you’re there.

In liturgical settings it’s all about surrender, again, but this time it’s surrender to what is ineffable, wonder-filled, and sacred inside each person in a holy gathering. Here we are, friends and strangers gathered in worship in a once-in-a-lifetime gathering that’ll never be repeated in all of time, with all our burdens, sorrows, challenges, and joys. I’ve found that yearning is at the core of everyone’s worship—our deep yearning for divine intervention, divine comfort, for the sublime, for answers, transformation, the soul aching to be heard and held. Organ music can express and even meet this yearning like nothing else. Whether it helps people cry and release, or is a cradle of peace, or uplifts them in an ecstatic experience of the divine, it is a sacred honor and opportunity we organists are entrusted with.

The very first thing I do in any performance is “take the temperature” of the room. Even thirty feet up and three hundred feet away hidden in a cathedral organ loft, you can feel a congregation’s mood. It’s hard to describe, but it’s palpable. It’s a vibration that imbues the space. I use this as the starting point of my prelude improv, the launch of any Sunday morning’s spiritual journey in which we organists are the first soul to express our yearning. Gradually the congregation joins us in hymn singing, joins the clergy in prayer, and together we go on the journey.

My musical goal in any liturgy is to shift the mood from what it was at the start to something entirely new and different by the end. My liturgical harmonic language is completely different and more contemporary than my silent film language. Silent films tend to dictate what harmonies and progressions work so you don’t “take the audience out of the film.” In a liturgy, I find there’s room for broader expression and risk-taking, especially in a big acoustic on a big instrument with lots of toys onboard. My liturgical improvs are infused with jazz and French Romantic harmonic worlds and massive rhythm. I’m talking massive; rhythm is everything! It’s the heartbeat of any improvisation, loud or soft, fast or slow.

Paul Halley taught me this. It’s what thrills and soars and tingles and creates awe. You could vamp on plain old C major with a killer rhythmic pattern, a few textural shifts, a 32′ Bombarde, and it’ll make your congregation stomp and cheer! I aim for one thing in my liturgical improvs: to continually lift up, even in somber Lenten modal mysterious improvs. I constantly let myself let go—this keeps the journey lifting and wondering (versus wandering!) for whomever I’m playing. If I’m surprised, they’ll be surprised; if I’m moved, they’ll be moved. I tell my students that improv is sheer blind trust; it’s surrender to divine channeling. It’s losing one’s conscious thought, so time stands still and you can’t remember what you played. And that’s when they really go on the ride with you. That’s when you come out of it thinking, “Wow, what just happened?” That’s when your congregation knows you gave yourself to them. I never, ever forget this maxim: “You can’t fool an audience.” They just somehow know if you’re holding back or are bored, scared, unprepared, not into it, or not giving your all—they know when there’s no lift off!

Do you consider yourself to have your own distinct musical language? Is there anything distinctly “American” about your improvising?

My musical passion is world music. I love combining ethnic sounds, especially Greek, Brazilian, Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Asian. I love stretching where the organ can go, seeing what part of the world it can travel to through a culture’s musical voice. That’s what I loved at Saint John the Divine in those golden years under the visionary leadership of our global-minded dean, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton. One minute I’d be playing Tibetan music for the Dalai Lama, then Eritrean hymns at a Coptic funeral, then Sakura for a Japanese tea ceremony, then “Hava Nagila” at a Jewish-Christian wedding, then New York, New York on the State Trumpet celebrating a Yankees-Mets Subway Series! If you see our magnificent country as the great melting pot of immigrants, then yes, my improvs and compositions are highly “American” in that I embrace all our ethnic styles. In terms of my own style, I don’t know how to describe it. I just know it as me and that it’s ever evolving. I’m often told by people, “Oh, Dorothy, I just knew when I walked in it was you playing—I’d know that sound anywhere!” I always wonder to myself, which sound(s) gave me away?

Tell us more about your jazz background and how it informs your improvising at the organ.

In addition to what I described above, I’d add two things: the legendary jazz pianist Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny Group, with whom I had the tremendous privilege of studying jazz composition, told me, “Dorothy, if I ever hear you cadenced with plain old V–I, I’ll call the jazz police!” And Lyle also said, “The greatest musicians on the planet are jazz players. They can improvise in any style because they get inside the style, they don’t just copy it.” I’ve bided by Lyle’s words throughout my career.

Do you ever imitate specific composers or historical styles?

Oh yes, of course! We all stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before us, and we borrow from our contemporaries, too. No musicians, especially improvisers, are creative islands unto themselves. Day and night we unconsciously take in shards of music, hooks, and tunes we’re not aware of. They lodge and cook in our musical psyche, then days later pop out in a gig or writing session, and we’re like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” I borrow rhythmic hooks from Bartók, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Ravel; toccata patterns from Cochereau, Vierne, and Dupré; and every day I listen on BBC Radio 1 to the hottest pop, chill, dance, and cutting-edge tracks. I relax to Indian ragas and cook to electronic soundscape artists like Aurah. It all informs my improvs, my music theater scores, my organ and choral works. In fact, I’m listening to Aurah while writing this: it’s “I Decree Peace” on their Etherea Borealis album. Check it out!

How does improvisation differ from composing to you? Do you prefer one or the other?

To me improvisation is spontaneous composition, and composition is repeated improvisation until you find something you want to save and write down. They are equal in fertility and joy to me. I’d say the great gift that improvisation brings to a composer is to know if you don’t like something you wrote, you can improvise a hundred other ideas to replace it with! Composer-improvisers trust the unlimited flowing fountain of ideas inside of them. It’s unfailing, and the perfect idea is always just an improv away. Improvisation is ultimately just about trusting the unknown yet to be revealed in you. Each of us is a creative giant we have this lifetime to get to know, so from me to you I say, “Go for it, and rock da house!”

Reflection

I hope readers are as fascinated and stirred by Dorothy’s words as I am. She reminds us, if I may use a tired cliché, not to neglect the trees (as Dorothy clearly has done her homework, thoroughly learning music theory and technique, inside and out), but truly to see and appreciate the whole forest. I’m not sure about each of you, but that’s a reminder I needed at this moment. May each of us heed Dorothy’s advice to “go for it.” ν

Dorothy Papadakos’s website: dorothypapadakos.com

Experience Dorothy’s artistry at our website: thediapason.com/videos/dorothy-papadakos-plays-phantom-opera

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 March 2023, Sally was the guest editor of the British Harpsichord Society’s e-magazine Sounding Board, No. 19, devoted entirely to the memory of Huguette Dreyfus. You can download the magazine here:  https://www.harpsichord.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/SB19.pdf.

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.

She was life itself in her way of being and in her playing.²

Most of our colleagues—and we agree—consider Huguette Dreyfus the best harpsichordist of our time since Wanda Landowska. Why? . . . She is above all an artist, a musician who plays for pleasure. It is the way she has of expressing herself—with precision, ease, elegance, variety, and spontaneity. . . . She has a very great attribute: inasmuch as she takes what she does very seriously, she never seems to take herself too seriously.³

This press review was written in 1967, only five years after Huguette had given her first solo recital in Paris. Later that year, another critic referred to her as “the great lady of French harpsichordists, as she is called.”⁴ In that relatively short period, her concerts and recordings had catapulted her to the top of her profession in France.

Huguette’s life could have turned out quite differently. She and her family, being Jewish, lived in France’s “free zone” during the occupation by the Nazis until 1942. When it became necessary to leave, they crossed the Swiss border in December, most likely having traversed the mountains on foot as so many others did. The trip was made in glacial temperatures, for that winter would turn out to be one of France’s coldest in the twentieth century.⁵ She had just turned fourteen when she and her family sought shelter in Switzerland with relatives.⁶ After the war, they settled in Paris.

In 1953 Huguette was granted a scholarship at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena to study with Ruggero Gerlin, who would be her only harpsichord maître, for a total of six summers. In September of that year, Huguette played in the annual end-of-term concert in the Sala Bianca of the Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, which housed the Accademia. A critic was in the audience and spoke briefly of her performance in an Italian newspaper, using words like “grand perfection,” “great agility,” and “always brilliant.”⁷ There was another positive review the following year, when she performed again in the palace. However, she tumbled from her cozy nest in Siena when she participated in the Geneva international competition in October 1958.⁸ The only contestant remaining by the second round, she gave a public concert on October 1,⁹ receiving her first tepid review:

The young French harpsichordist has a very polished technique and animates her playing with an agreeable rhythmic cadence. Yes, all very proper—controlled and musical. Yet given the very impersonal character of the harpsichord, it should be forced to shake things up in a certain manner to be convincing. Yet Miss Dreyfus treats her instrument with very great respect.¹⁰

The reporter criticized her frequent registration changes as being distracting for the audience; Huguette had made five in each movement of the Bach partita, for example. For the third round, Huguette gave a concert in Geneva’s Victoria Hall on October 3, for which she received another lukewarm review, describing her playing as “prosaic.” However, Huguette took the criticism to heart and less than four years later, she received reviews like the following regarding her first solo recital in Paris:

Truly Miss Dreyfus is attached to her instrument, which she plays with exquisite art according to her nature, which is uncommon. What’s more, she captures, with her acute intelligence, the articulation of the phrases. . . .¹¹

This young harpsichordist has a way of playing that is very captivating! A balanced playing, precise, vigorous, as musical as you would wish for! . . . . Huguette Dreyfus knows the resources of her instrument. She exploits it wisely with rare talent, serving musical expression and formal clarity. Thus, the name of Huguette Dreyfus merits being remembered.¹²

In 1964 when the distinguished English musicologist Lionel Salter reviewed one of her Rameau LPs recorded in April 1960 and released in 1963, he praised her choice of registrations:

Huguette Dreyfus gives a whole string of admirable performances, never putting a finger wrong, with an unhurried sense of style and with every ornament convincing and clean as a whistle: her playing has vitality and strong rhythmic control, without ever becoming inflexible, and above all she has excellent taste. Her phrasing is musical, her touch varied, and her registration, while subtly varied, is an object lesson to harpsichordists with fidgety feet or who are afraid to let the music speak for itself. She uses 16-foot tone extremely sparingly, and then in entirely appropriate places.¹³

Never again would “prosaic” be used to describe her! Reviewing a concert she gave in Rome, an American newspaper there reported:

The vitality of Mlle. Dreyfus’s playing was, fortunately, equal to all tests, and she kept her audience in the palm of her hand to the very end. . . . Mlle. Dreyfus’s timing is as keen as that of a trapeze artist, and the arch of her phrase can be as breathtaking as his line of flight. Consequently she has no need of gaudy, tricky registrations. . . . Playing of this caliber is very rare.¹⁴

By the mid-1970s Huguette was on an equal par with the best musicians in Europe and was spoken of as “undoubtedly the greatest French harpsichordist”¹⁵ of her generation. It is evident from a review in 1976 that her personality was clearly integrated into her artistic persona:

. . . Huguette Dreyfus, always great. This musician is a model of sincerity and enthusiasm. She would not know how to be opaque and vague . . . .¹⁶

Parisian harpsichord-maker Reinhard von Nagel remembers:

Huguette on stage: certain harpsichordists have to win the heart of their public during a recital. Not Huguette! The few dancing and buoyant steps she took from coming offstage to the harpsichord on stage gained the audience’s attachment even before she touched the first note. And this even in the dark. In the summer of 1974, a concert was scheduled in Faro. The Portuguese dictatorship had ended several weeks earlier. Well, the night of the concert, an electrical black-out deprived the city of light. Never mind. Huguette played the sonatas by Seixas by heart, in the dark.¹⁷

A critic also spoke of the warmth she communicated to her audience:

Marvelous Huguette. When she sits at the keyboard, you feel her presence and availability immediately. . . . Huguette Dreyfus is warm and at ease from the beginning, which quickly puts the audience on her side. In action, she becomes totally a part of the instrument and a certain “aura” surrounds her, you feel her being a musician from her head—a pretty profile—to the tips of her fingers. Her style? Voluptuous, like her silhouette.¹⁸

For a lady of large renown, Huguette was small of stature, attractive and (bon vivant that she was) voluptuous in youth, plump in later years. She was immaculately groomed and stylishly dressed, often wearing clothes tailored for her. Although highly intelligent and cultured, there was nothing arrogant in her manner: she was confident, yet modest. Meeting her, the first thing that drew you to her was her luminous smile and the cheerful warmth in her eyes. Huguette inspired trust. She was entirely present when you spoke to her—focused, direct, engaged. Her keen wit was accompanied by an infectious laugh, which sometimes burst through her words before she could finish a sentence. She was even subject to uncontrollable giggles on stage, as described here by a British diplomat:

Eduard Melkus gave a most successful Bach evening with his cheery chum Huguette Dreyfus. The papers said how nice to go to an old music concert where the players were obviously enjoying making the music—we had a violin/harpsichord sonata, an unaccompanied violin partita, and two harpsichord concerti—with one instrument to each part instead of a whole orchestra—most enjoyable. The Dreyfus has very nimble fingers and appears to be an infectiously happy person: she soon had us all loving her. . . . Melkus broke a music stand when trying to make it higher: the Dreyfus got a fit of the giggles and the whole audience did.¹⁹

Huguette’s frequent performance partner, harpist Marie-Claire Jamet, recalls her having to leave the stage momentarily during a concert Huguette was giving with Marie-Claire’s husband, flautist Christian Lardé, and baritone Jacques Herbillon. She was on the brink of an uncontrollable fit of laughter, probably due to something Jacques, an impenitent prankster, said or did. Another time, when she and Marie-Claire were traveling by car, they laughed the entire way until they reached their concert venue.²⁰

Matthew Dirst, an American concert artist, teacher, and former student, remembers:

Huguette’s generosity and wicked sense of humor often worked in tandem: I enjoyed many a ride back to Paris in her car after a long day in Rueil-Malmaison, during which she would regale me with stories. Much laughter would ensue, and more than once we had to slow down so she could compose herself before continuing down the road. I also learned more than my fair share of off-color French slang during these commutes, thanks to her lively tutelage.²¹

Huguette loved to travel. It suited someone with her unquenchable curiosity and intense interests. After she acquired a car, she would take a month off to drive through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on her way to Siena for Gerlin’s classes. With her foot on the gas (and she did like to drive fast),²² Huguette would tour the countryside, visit places of interest, see friends along the way. She made detailed notes in her tiny diary of everything from appointments, travel expenses, and phone numbers to recipes and fragments of melodies.²³

A self-proclaimed “chatterbox,” Huguette spoke quickly, her words tumbling out with enthusiasm. Her focus was clearly on her companions and on the outside world. She followed what other musicians were doing, which is why in May 1955 she travelled to the Netherlands just to attend a concert by Janny van Wering. Huguette’s energy seemed to know no bounds. From the beginning of her adult life, she rehearsed, performed, and taught during the day, then saw friends or attended concerts in the evening. If she was ever tired or sad, she did not let it show. As light as her demeanor was, however, it cloaked character traits of a tougher nature. As harpsichordist Jill Severs remembers:

When I first heard Huguette play in class, I was struck by her confidence and competence, and during the following magical years that we spent at the Accademia Chigiana in Ruggero Gerlin’s harpsichord class, it was clear that she possessed a steely ambition. Huguette had a keen wit and was always a kind and helpful friend.²⁴

Friendship occupied a very important place in Huguette’s life.²⁵ No matter how busy, she always maintained correspondence with friends and former students all over the world, often writing letters, postcards, and Christmas cards by hand. She kept up her friendships with classmates from the 1950s, i.e., Kenneth Gilbert, musicologists and radio producers René Stricker and Myriam Soumignac. Other friends included performers with whom she had worked from the early 1960s onwards: Eduard Melkus, Jacques Herbillon, Christian Lardé, Marie-Claire Jamet, Alfred Deller, Luciano Sgrizzi, and Luigi Fernando Tagliavini. Close friends she could see less frequently were Zuzana R˚užiˇcková and her husband, Victor Kalabis. When the Soviets marched into Prague, she offered them a sanctuary, imploring them to come live with her, saying everything she had was theirs, but Zuzana and Victor did not want to abandon their native land. Zuzana never forgot this kindness:²⁶

How could I not remember Huguette, charming, cheerful, and friendly Huguette Dreyfuss [sic], another great artist and friend. How many evenings we spent chatting over a glass of red wine in a cheese place in Paris at the corner of “rue de Londre,” how many competitions as the jury members we have suffered through with the help of mutual support, her wonderful sense of humor, and her generous musicianship. And then came August of 1968: “Come, come together with Viktor, everything will be provided—the apartment, piano, harpsichord.” Perhaps there is nothing to add, this speaks for itself about our Huguette, whom even my students (whom I love to send to her) adore as well as perhaps anybody who has gotten to know her.²⁷

Mstislav Rostropovich, who had moved to Paris in 1978, was another close friend of Huguette’s.²⁸ Sylvia Spycket, a harpsichordist and classmate in Paris and Siena, introduced her to her brother Jérôme and to her sister Agnès, whom Huguette would see frequently.²⁹ Jérôme, a singer in Nadia Boulanger’s ensemble for a time, was a musicologist and the biographer of Clara Haskil, Nadia Boulanger, and Kathleen Ferrier. Agnès was a distinguished author and archaeologist, specializing in the Orient. Sadly, Sylvie, who had also studied with Dufourcq and Gerlin, passed away in her 40s in 1960.

A singular and touching friendship was one that Huguette experienced with a French-Canadian Catholic priest, Abbé Pierre Raymond, whom she had met at a concert in his parish, Saint Boniface, in Manitoba, in February 1963. She was on tour for the first time, playing with the Paul Kuentz orchestra. Abbé Pierre was a cultured, attractive, and articulate man. During the 1960s he was known for his gifts in literature, music, and drama, in the exercise of his role as a teacher and also as an inspector of the schools in his region. He was a fervent supporter of classes being given in French and vigorously campaigned for the survival of the French language in Manitoba. The priest initiated a correspondence with her that would last until 1970.

In the summer of 1964, on a trip to Lourdes, he went to Paris where he had lunch with Huguette and her family in their apartment on the Quai d’Orsay by Pont Alma. Although they were repeatedly invited to visit him in Manitoba to explore the province and stay with his sister Noëlla, who was a nun, teacher, and organist, they never did. In a letter dated August 23, 1965, Abbé Pierre compared the life of an artist with the life of a priest:

I am not unaware that your life as an artist demands the utmost from you. When you have been breathed on by genius and want to make the most of yourself for the happiness of others, it means total dedication, the giving of yourself without half measures and without repentance. Truly a priesthood, neither more nor less. . . . it is music that brings man closest to the ideal, which is cohesion of the hearts of all living beings.

In October that year, he would write to her, the “dear little sister of his soul:”

Take care of yourself, be prudent. But continue to transmit your smile and that of your art. The blessing of the artist has something of that of the great priest! She has a mission to warm the earth by the most profound Love there be!³⁰

In the school year of 1966–1967, Abbé Pierre obtained his master’s degree in theology from the University of Strasbourg. In his letters he expressed his hopes to be transferred to Vienna, but his request would be denied. There are no letters after 1970 in Huguette’s archives, and it seemed at the end that she was trying to discourage their friendship; as he became more and more solicitous about her work pace, she was slower to respond. He would remain thereafter in Manitoba.

In Paris, Huguette and harpsichord maker Claude Mercier-Ythier (1931–2020) sustained a professional relationship for forty-five years that benefited them both. They enjoyed a constant and amical friendship for a total of fifty-four years. Huguette first called on his services in 1962, the year that Claude, a native of Grasse in Provence, opened his store and workshop, A la corde pincée, 20 rue Vernueil, on the west bank of Paris, the first of its kind since the French Revolution. Building, restoring, and renting harpsichords, he also represented the Neupert company when Pleyel stopped making harpsichords. He maintained Huguette’s harpsichord, and since she did not travel with hers, he supplied her with instruments for recordings, concerts, and masterclasses, including an original harpsichord by Henri Hemsch (1754), her favorite, that he had restored.

Being able to play and record on a historic instrument at a time when copies of historic harpsichords were not yet being produced in France was a definite advantage that Huguette had over her rivals. It also helped place her at the forefront of the revival of early music, as did her tendency not to rely on printed editions but to consult original manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. After Huguette’s death, Claude wrote a tribute to her:

I was proud to have known Huguette. We worked together for 45 years and toured France. How many people discovered the harpsichord thanks to these tours? . . . In certain places, the French were discovering this instrument for the first time. How many beautiful instruments did we discover in fabulous places—castles and convents? And how many unknown artists, composers of past eras, did she bring back to life? She was a woman with an iron will: I saw her give a concert at Saint Paul de Vence with a high fever. She didn’t give in. She had signed a contract, she owed a concert.³¹

The person to whom she was most attached was her brother Pierre, eight years her senior and a surgeon. When he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-six in 1967, it was a hard blow that took years for her to get over. Later that same year, her mother, aged only sixty-five, passed away. She and her cousin, Nicole Dreyfus, began to see more of each other, eventually becoming very close. When Huguette was eight years old and Nicole twelve, they played piano duets every Sunday. As Huguette described it:

My mother and I went to her house because Nicole had lost her father when she was very young. She was taking piano lessons too. My other great pleasure was playing duets, to improvise completely. . . . Nicole preferred the bass part; me, I was up in the high notes. For us, it was a magnificent pleasure.³²

When Nicole and her mother moved to Nice in 1937, their paths separated. Nicole would become a famous lawyer in France. Once reunited, she and Huguette were often together and took their vacations in exotic places.³³ Nicole accompanied her to the Villecroze summer sessions and was a welcome guest at dinners and parties hosted by Huguette’s friends and students.

Huguette does not appear to have socialized with her first early music teacher, Norbert Dufourcq (1904–1990), but she did stay in touch with him and often attended his organ concerts and seminars. As for Ruggero Gerlin (1899–1983), their relationship remained friendly but formal over the years. He was very reserved, but still, in 1960, the first year since 1953 that she was absent from his class in Siena, he wrote to say that he missed her a lot. They did see each other often in Paris once he resided there.³⁴

The teacher with whom Huguette did develop a close friendship with was Alexis Roland-Manuel, born in 1891. He was very sociable, often inviting his students to his home. When he died on November 1, 1966, his wife asked Huguette to play at his funeral. When her friends passed away, she felt the loss deeply, as was the case with Luciano Sgrizzi (1910–1994), a “walking encyclopedia” according to Claude Mercier-Ythier. It had been an important friendship to her:³⁵

One of the things I appreciated the most in Luciano Sgrizzi was his immense culture. He had an extraordinary knowledge of literature, and you could speak with him on any subject. He always had something to bring to the conversation. I think that when you are a musician, you have to avoid only caring and speaking about your instrument.³⁶

As for Huguette’s preferences in music,

I’ve loved Italian opera since I was young. I’ve always had a special liking for singing—the voices of others, of course. I would have liked to have been able to sing, but that was a gift I wasn’t given.

Huguette especially enjoyed music by Rossini, who she said had the same “visceral joy of living” as Scarlatti did (and as she herself did). She also enjoyed listening to the music of Corelli, Vivaldi, Schubert, and modern music too—“You can’t separate yourself from your own era.”³⁷ She frequently asked her student Maria de Lourdes Cutolo to play Brazilian music for her after class.³⁸ Her favorite composers to play, according to interviews and concert programs, were Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin, and above all, Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.

In July 1985 she was featured in a five-part radio program presented by Rémy Stricker on Scarlatti, whom she described as “life itself.” Huguette felt that his sonatas fell into three periods. In the first, he is “extremely virtuoso, very brilliant. The sonatas are very hard to play and full of pitfalls.” The middle period is a transitional period, where he is “more self-assured in his ideas and there are more slow movements,” and in the last, “we observe that Scarlatti has completely mastered his instrument.” She goes on to say:

While hand crossings are rare, there are still many leaps, which are hard to execute. Scarlatti uses the full range of the keyboard. He wants to bring out the instrument’s richness. The last sonatas, more brilliant, show a quality of ideas that the first didn’t have: the virtuosity of the performer tends to disappear before the virtuosity of the composer.³⁹

In another radio interview, Huguette said:

Domenico Scarlatti was a phenomenon in the history of music. As far as I am concerned, he is not comparable to anyone. . . there are explosions in his music—very often of joy. . . . The fact of being dramatic is also important when you have a lot of vitality. You cannot always live joyfully. . . there are melancholy moments that he illustrates magnificently, and above all, very gay and rapid passages become suddenly gloomy, and then he recovers the joy, which is, after all, very dionysiac. . . . Sometimes he plays with equilibrium. He pretends to come back to a form already used, and then goes off another way.⁴⁰

Huguette’s repertoire included not only music from the Baroque and Classical periods, but also twentieth-century pieces by Bartok, de Falla, Stravinsky, Distler, Poulenc, and Dutilleux. Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) composed a piece in her honor, Les Citations, for oboe, harpsichord, double bass, and percussion—a second part to an existing work (Diptych). In 1991, while teaching at Villecroze Academy in the summer, which harpsichordist Kristian Nyquist attended, Huguette received newly composed pages of the music, a few at a time, from Dutilleux. Kristian observed that she was under pressure to learn it quickly for the premiere, which would take place at the Festival of Besançon on September 9 in the Church of Saint Laurent. Filmed for television and also broadcast on radio, the premiere would be performed by Huguette, Maurice Bourgue, Bernard Balet, and Bernard Cazauran; a recording would follow later.⁴¹ Kristian turned pages for her, enjoying being in the midst of the concert.⁴²

As the curtain came down on the twentieth century, the pace of Huguette’s professional life decelerated somewhat. But her enthusiasm and high spirits did not lessen. She continued to give concerts in France and Europe. In 1994 Huguette resigned from her positions at the principal music conservatories in Lyon and Rueil-Malmaison, but continued to teach at home and in the summer sessions of Villecroze. In 1997 three important CDs that she had recorded came out: Mystery Sonatas, Rosencrantz Sonaten, Sonates du Rosaire (on which Eduard Melkus played violin),⁴³ Le Clavier bien tempéré I,⁴⁴ and Das wohltemperierte Klavier II.⁴⁵

Former students were welcome to come for tea or coffee, cake, and animated conversations on Sunday afternoons; those visiting from other countries found themselves invited to lunch. Huguette continued to travel and attend museum exhibits and concerts. From time to time, she gave concerts and masterclasses, granted interviews, and participated in symposiums. She visited friends in Italy and continued to perform in annual concerts with the chamber orchestra of her old friend Eduard Melkus⁴⁶ in Vienna’s Albertina Museum. No one who knew her could imagine her vibrant current of energy ever diminishing or even vanishing.

To be continued.

Notes

1. “The Queen of Hearts,” title of a harpsichord piece by François Couperin, Pièces de clavecin IV, Ordre 21ème. 

2. André Raynaud, The Sounding Board, Number 19, May 2023, page 7. The British Harpsichord Society.

3. “Cinq minutes avec Huguette Dreyfus,” Musica, Journal Musical Français, Number 154, February 1967, Coupures de presse, BnF VM FONDS DRE 5 (3).

4. Il Informateur Corse, March 14, 1967, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

5. “Trois grands hivers: 1940, 1941, 1942,” Le corps, la famille et l’État, Hommage à André Burguière. Myriam Cottias, Laura Downs, et Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (dir.) Presse universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

6. “The Life of French Harpsichordist Huguette Dreyfus, Part 1,” The Diapason, March 2023, page 18.

7. Newspaper and date unknown. Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit. 

8. “The Life of French Harpsichordist Huguette Dreyfus, Part 2,” The Diapason, April 2023, pages 14–15. 

9. Programs in author’s collection: Concours finals publics, Salle de Conservatoire, 1 October 1958 and Concours finals publics, Victoria Hall, vendredi 3 octobre 1958.

10. La Suisse, October 2, 1958, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

11. Maurice Imbert, Officiel des Spectacles, January 31, 1962, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

12. Claude Chamfray, Journal Musical Français, February 5, 1962, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

13. Lionel Salter, The Gramophone, London, June 1964, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

14. Daily American, Rome. Undated, but according to her concert programs and agendas, the review was most likely written in 1965. Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit. 

15. Jean-Louis Gazignaire, Le Figaro, Paris, July 10, 1976, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

16. George Gallician, Le Meridional—La France, July 15, 1968, Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

17. Reinhard von Nagel, Sounding Board, Number 19, page 7, op. cit.

18. René Geng, Mulhouse, undated but probably written in 1978, since she only performed there in 1958, 1978, and 2009. Coupures de presse, BnF, op. cit.

19. Extract of a letter dated November 22, 1978, from Theo Peters, former Consul General of the British Government at Anvers in Belgium, to Gordon C. Murray, who then sent it to Huguette Dreyfus on March 16, 1979. BnF, Correspondance non classée, 1967–1979, VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (17).

20. Marie-Claire Jamet, interview with author, November 6, 2022, Flayosc, France.

21. Matthew Dirst, December 22, 2022, Sounding Board, Number 19, March 2023, page 23, op. cit. 

22. Eduard Melkus, interview with author, Baden, Austria, February 2022. 

23. Agendes, BnF, VM FONDS DRE-3 (5).

24. Jill Severs, video interview with author, January 18, 2023.

25. Huguette Dreyfus, interview with Valentina Ferri, Symphonia—I concerti per clavicembalo, April 1998.

26. Zuzana Ružicková, interview with author, February 2017, Prague, Czech Republic.

27. Královna cembala, page 106, Zuzana R˚užiˇcková with Marie Kulijevyová, Zentiva, Czech Republic. This extract was translated from Czech into English by Kamila Valkova Valenta.

28. Laurent Soumignac, telephone interview with author, October 6, 2022.

29. Agendes, BnF, op. cit. 

30. Letters from Abbé Pierre Raymond to Huguette Dreyfus from 1964 to 1970, BnF, Correspondance non classée, 1944–1969, VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (16). 

31. Livre d’or, Clavecin en France, https://www.clavecin-en-france.org/spip.php?article288. 

32. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Marcel Quillévére, “Les Traversées du Temps,” part 1, France Musique, March 7, 2012.

33. Having mentioned to students that she liked elephants after seeing them on a trip, Huguette ended up with a huge assortment of plush and ceramic elephants in all sizes that covered her pianoforte entirely.

34. Ruggero Gerlin, letter to Huguette Dreyfus, August 4, 1960, BnF, Correspondance non classée, op. cit.

35. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Valentina Ferri, op. cit.

36. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Myriam Soumignac, “Huguette Dreyfus: Portraits en musique,” France Musique, June 9, 1988, INA.

37. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Myriam Soumignac, op. cit. 

38. Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, interview with author, May 13, 2018. 

39. “Domenico Scarlatti, 2/5: La vie en Espagne 1720–1757,” presented by Rémy Stricker, Radio France, July 9, 1985, INA.

40. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Myriam Soumignac, op. cit.

41. Huguette’s complete discography is available at www.sallygordonmark.com and www.dolmetsch.com.

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

43. Codex (Archiv Produktion), 453 173-2

44. Denon CO-75638/39, 1997

45. Denon CO-18037/38, 1997

46. The Capella Academica Wien, which Eduard Melkus in his 90s still conducts.

47. “My dear Miwako, Here I am back from an excellent stay in Hong-Kong with memories of a marvelous trip to Japan, in part thanks to you. I warmly thank you for your great kindness, both in the preparation of my voyage and during my stay. I especially appreciated your going out of your way to remain in Kyoto the last night. You facilitated the task of departure very much. Here, I am plunging immediately into a sea of work, running late and with problems of every sort, but that’s par for the course. My little Miwako, I wish with all my heart that your future will happen according to your desires, but I advise you to be alert and very prudent. That doesn’t prevent optimism at all. Keep your head high and be full of courage. With an affectionate kiss, Huguette Dreyfus.” (For more about the trip to Japan, see part 2 of this series, The Diapason, April 2023).

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 March 2023 Sally was the guest editor of the British Harpsichord Society’s e-magazine Sounding Board, No. 19, devoted entirely to the memory of Huguette Dreyfus. For more information: www.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.

“I was very attached to her, as one is to teachers who allow you to make huge strides in little time.” —Judith Andreyev²

By the 1980s, it had become customary for harpsichordists and organists from all over the world to come to France or the Netherlands to study and perfect their technique with Huguette Dreyfus, Kenneth Gilbert, and Gustav Leonhardt. Huguette’s concert tours and recordings had brought her international renown. She had a great gift for teaching, and with foreign students she could speak English, German, and Italian fluently. “Huguette has an absolutely fabulous sense of teaching, and she can communicate what she knows with enthusiasm.”³ Many of her students who had succeeded professionally continued to play for her before concerts, recordings, and tours. But Huguette would say in an interview late in life that her students did not need her as much as she needed them.⁴ Her students who became concert artists include harpsichordists Olivier Baumont, Emer Buckley, Jocelyne Cuiller, Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Gaby Delfiner, Yves-Marie Deshays, Matthew Dirst, Elisabeth Joyé, Yannick LeGaillard, Laure Morabito, Pamela Nash, Kristian Nyquist, Mariko Oikawa, Joël Pontet, Christophe Rousset, Heather Slade-Lipkin, Noëlle Spieth, Ann Cecilia Tavares, Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, Blandine Verlet, Jory Vinikour, Ilton Wjuniski, as well as organists Philippe Bardon, Véronique LeGuen, Frank Mento, and David Noël-Hudson.

Huguette began teaching when she was only fourteen years old, during her family’s stay in Switzerland with relatives after they had fled France over the Alps in December 1942. This was after she had received a first prize in her piano exam at a superior level from the Conservatory of Clermont-Ferrand. When she entered the Conservatory of Lausanne, she enrolled at the virtuoso level and was allowed to pass her final exams in Clermont-Ferrand when the war ended, winning another first prize. After settling in Paris in 1945, she taught privately while she pursued her own studies at the Paris Conservatory, the Ecole Normale de Musique (she also received top prizes at the two schools),⁵ and in Ruggero Gerlin’s two-month summer harpsichord course at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. Teaching would remain very important to her all her life, even when she became one of the most important French harpsichordist of her generation. 

It is not commonly known that her earliest protégé was Blandine Verlet, whose individual and distinctive way of playing would have found sustenance in Huguette’s tendency to encourage her students to think for themselves and find their own interpretative styles. Blandine took private lessons with her regularly beginning in 1958, when she was enrolled in Marcelle Delacour’s class at the Paris Conservatory, until as late as 1969 (although less frequently once her own career took off).⁶ It is clear from Huguette’s agendas and documents that she gave her particular attention. On September 16, 1962, Blandine’s father, the distinguished Dr. Pierre Verlet, chief conservator of the Louvre Museum and renowned art historian, wrote: 

Please allow me to express our gratitude to you for all you have done for Blandine. You were a mother to her in Siena, from which she returned this morning, delighted.⁷

In 1963 Blandine was awarded a unanimous first prize from the judges as well as a special prize at the International Competition of Munich. Huguette not only coached her for the competition, but would promote her career in general by introducing her to her own mentors, Alexis Roland-Manuel and Norbert Dufourcq, inviting her to programs on which she was featured, proposing she study with Gerlin in Siena, and inviting her to play on a recording of the Bach concerti in 1965.⁸ In 1969 Dr. Verlet would write regarding a radio program on which Blandine had appeared with Huguette, after having returned from studying with Ralph Kirkpatrick at Yale University:

How to thank you too for the place that you gave to Blandine in the [radio] program. A little secret: in a quick word, two days after her arrival home she said: “I’ve already taken the piece to heart again. . . . Mademoiselle Dreyfus has magnificently made me work. . . .”  Again all my admiration and my gratitude.⁹

In later years, the two women would become estranged, and as a result, Huguette’s teaching and nurturing of Blandine have been overlooked.

From July 1 through August 9, 1966, Huguette gave harpsichord lessons along with Pauline Aubert and Marguerite Roesgen-Champion during an early music event, “Summer in France,” sponsored by the Paris American Academy of Music in Fontainebleau, at the invitation of Nadia Boulanger, its director.¹⁰ In 1967 she was named professor of harpsichord at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, a position that she kept until 1990. Her students included a young Christophe Rousset, who ended up taking his lessons in her home on Saturdays, because his school schedule did not permit them during the week.¹¹

From 1971 until 1982, Huguette taught basso continuo at the Sorbonne where Olivier Papillon was in her class.¹² When she left there, she asked harpsichordist Richard Siegel to take her place.¹³ During that period Huguette was also the harpsichord professor of what was then a municipal conservatory in Bobigny, just north of Paris. Students in that class included Maria de Lourdes Cutolo and Ilton Wjuniski, who were scholarship recipients from Brazil, Elisabeth Joyé, Joël Pontet, Gaby Delfiner, Renaud Digonnet, and Yannick LeGaillard. In 1982 she was named harpsichord professor at two major conservatories in France: what were then called the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Lyon and the Conservatoire supérieur de région in Rueil-Malmaison. A harpsichord class was created at the latter specifically for her, and also an organ class for Marie-Claire Alain.¹⁴ When it came time to retire, Huguette left the Lyon conservatory in June 1993 (Françoise Lengellé took her place) and then a year later the Rueil-Malmaison conservatory, where Olivier Baumont, a former student and now the professor of harpsichord at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, replaced her.

In addition to her regular teaching positions, Huguette gave annual summer workshops in the Provence region of France, first in Saint-Maximin-La-Baume and then in Villecroze. Claude Mercier-Ythier described how it came about:

An event happened that would be very important for us: the creation of early music classes at Saint-Maximin’s former monastery . . . where there is an extraordinary organ. The young man who should have taught there was Louis Saguer. [However, shortly before he was supposed to start teaching,] he had been invited to give an important series of concerts in Argentina. The organizer, Dr. Pierre Rochas . . . looked desperately for a replacement. So I took him to see Huguette Dreyfus who immediately took on the classes, without knowing that we would spend [15 summers there]. Huguette was a pedagogue without equal, with an international reputation.¹⁵

In 1964, five lecture recitals were held by Huguette. They were so successful that a year later, harpsichord classes were organized.¹⁶ Claude Mercier-Ythier provided the instruments. Her frequent collaborator at the time, Christian Lardé, joined her. He taught flute, and together they gave classes in ensemble playing. The classes were given under the auspices of the French Organ Academy for the Interpretation of 17th and 18th century music (l’Académie de l’orgue français pour l’interprétation de la musique des XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles), which was created not only by Dr. Pierre Rochas, but by a Dominican priest, Father Henri Jarrié, as part of their efforts to save the convent from destruction and restore the famous organ in the basilica. 

Father Jarrié’s contribution to the early music revival in France seems to be unknown; his story is worth telling. Born in 1924, he began his theology studies in the Saint-Maximin monastery. A musician, he had taken piano lessons from the age of six and also composed music. Among the many artists and intellectuals who visited Saint-Maximin was André Coeuroy, a musicologist and critic, who took a look at his compositions and encouraged him. Then at the music festival in Aix-en-Provence, he met Louis Saguer, also a composer, and arranged to study musical analysis and composition with him. In 1952 he received the unusual post of “Chaplain to the Artists” in Nice, coming into contact with Cocteau, Picasso, and Matisse, among others. Then in 1961, Père Jarrié was named parish priest of the village of Saint-Maximin. 

The Dominican order was preparing to sell the monastery there, which they had already left. Father Jarrié and others formed a group to safeguard it, and by the end of the 1960s it had become a cultural center. Father Jarrié inaugurated a series of concerts in the cloisters that became the first festival to focus on early music; at the time, the only music festival that existed in France was in Aix-en-Provence. The Dominican priest and Dr. Pierre Rochas were also responsible for the restoration of the Basilica of Saint Marie-Madeleine’s historic eighteenth-century organ built by Frère Isnard and the creation of the Academy, which together with the concert series would be important not only for Huguette’s career, but also for the international dissemination of early music. For fifteen years, Huguette went there every summer to teach and concertize. Eventually Eduard Melkus joined her and Christian to teach violin. In 1971 Jarrié left the priesthood to consecrate his life to music and teaching:

There were so many students who frequented my courses during 15 years. They came from all over the world and then spread the knowledge that they had acquired in their own respective countries.¹⁷

There were many lighthearted moments that eased the intensity of the lessons. Among Huguette’s archived documents is a Certificat St Maximin: “The Jury certifies that Mlle Huguette Dreyfus and Christian Lardé took the Viennese Waltz class in the performance course at the 15th Summer Academy of St-Maximin. Ed. Melkus.”¹⁸ A participant, harpsichordist Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, remembers playing Brazilian music for Huguette, which she loved, while Eduard improvised on the violin.¹⁹

Maria de Lourdes Cutolo and Ilton Wjuniski were two young Brazilian harpsichordists whom Huguette had met in São Paôlo, then the capital of Brazil, on the occasion of the “Course-Festival of Harpsichord Interpretation” held in São Paôlo’s major art museum (MASP) from October to December 1975. The courses were taught by Helena Jank, Maria Helena Silveira, and Felipe Silvestre. New works for solo harpsichord were commissioned from composers Souza Lima, Osvaldo Lacerda, and Almeida Prado. Huguette was invited to give classes and recitals from October 3 through 26. During her stay, she flew to Rio to meet Roberto de Regina, an important harpsichordist, teacher, and the first to build a harpsichord in Brazil.²⁰ He also created the first early music group there.²¹

Huguette’s teaching influenced several pupils profoundly. “Stimulated by this contact, some young artists pursued training with the harpsichordist in France, such as Ilton Wjuniski, Maria Lucia Nogueira, and Maria de Lourdes Cutolo.”²² They were awarded scholarships by the festival sponsor, the Secretary of Culture, Science, and Technology, to come to France.²³ A decade later, Ana Cecilia Tavares, another Brazilian artist, would also go to study with Huguette at the Rueil-Malmaison conservatory near Paris.²⁴ Harpsichordist, teacher, and author Marcelo Fagerlande credits Huguette with the surge in interest for the harpsichord in Brazil after her stay there.

Maria Lourdes de Cutolo wrote to Huguette several times in early 1976 to solicit her help in finding lodgings in Paris and a spinet to use. Huguette sent her information on spinets, but in the end, moved her own spinet into a spare bedroom, where Maria could practice every day if she liked.²⁵ Huguette often helped students with practical concerns as well as with personal problems, at the same time guarding a professional distance. She maintained the reserve between people of different positions, or those who do not know each other well, that prevails in European culture: the maestro or maestra is treated with respect, and familiarity would be inappropriate. Her students were invited to address her by her first name, but never would have thought to address her by the familiar “tu.”

Another country important to Huguette was Japan, where she made lifelong friendships. She met a Japanese student, Miwako Shiraï, at Saint-Maximin where the flautist was studying with Christian Lardé. When Huguette was invited in 1979 by Mariko Oikawa, a former student in France, to play concerts in Japan and record an album with the group, Tokyo Solisten, of which Mariko was the harpsichordist, she called upon Miwako to accompany her and act as translator. In Japan, Huguette was welcomed by the father of another of her students, Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, who had come to France in 1976. Her father, wanting to introduce the ever-curious Huguette to Japanese culture, invited her to an “exceptional restaurant where there is Shiki-botyo, the knife ceremony, which was performed in the past by the cook to the Japanese court. The cook prepares fish without touching it with his hands.”

Huguette returned to Japan in 1981. During Huguette’s free time, Mariko and her husband Shigeru, with their daughter Reine, about three, took her on visits. Yasuko came from France to stay for a week at the urging of her father who, grateful that Yasuko had won first prize at the Festival Estival international harpsichord competition in Paris in 1979, wanted to honor Huguette. He presented her with a stay at a traditional Japanese hotel. Yasuko went with Huguette and Mariko to Nara Park (Shigeru had to take Reine back to Tokyo), where thousands of deer run free and it is possible to feed and pet them.²⁶

In 1983 Huguette spent nearly a month in Japan from October 8 through November 4, recording for Denon and performing in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto. In her free time, she went sightseeing often with the Oikawa family:

The trip that left the biggest impression was our voyage to Kyoto. We visited Nara Park the day before her concert in Kyoto. She found herself surrounded by deer and she said that she was astonished that the most easily frightened animals in the world would eat out of the palm of a man’s hand. She spent a good amount of time playing with them. We also went by car to Hakone. Descending Mount Hakone, we encountered the historic Daimyô procession. We watched it and then walking in the city of Odawara, we visited the chrysanthemum festival.²⁷

Huguette would return to Japan in the future, but sadly, Mariko would not be there to welcome her. Only thirty-nine-years old, she passed away from cancer on July 25, 1988, leaving behind two children, Reine, and a boy, Kentaro,  born in 1984. Fifteen years later, Reine would become a harpsichordist herself and come to France intermittently to study with Huguette at Villecroze and in her home on Quai d’Orsay in Paris.

In 1979 Huguette left the Academy in Saint-Maximin. In 1983 she joined the Académie de Musique Ancienne in Villecroze to give summer masterclasses, which she did until 2008. Claude Mercier-Ythier, who had loaned his historic 1754 Henri Hemsch, Huguette’s favorite instrument, for the Saint-Maximin sessions, continued to supply it and other harpsichords for the classes at Villecroze. At both academies, friends, including Melkus, Lardé, and his wife, harpist Marie-Claire Jamet, joined her to concertize and give instrumental and chamber music classes. In Villecroze classes were held in the morning, and afternoons were free, when students practiced and swam in the pool. Sunday was a day off, and there were group outings organized for them, such as boat rides and sightseeing. It was “paradise on earth,” according to one of the students, Kristian Nyquist.²⁸

In addition to masterclasses in France during the summer, Huguette was invited regularly to give them all over the world. She also sat on juries for harpsichord exams at conservatories and for harpsichord festivals. For at least twenty-five years, there was a biennial international harpsichord festival in October in Paris, the Festival Estival. Huguette was often on the jury, and in February 1990 she was invited to write a page for the brochure celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its creation on March 7 that year.²⁹ Often she sat on juries with friends, former students, and other distinguished colleagues, such as Colin Tilney, Zuzana Ružicková, Rafael Puyana, Gustav Leonhardt, Scott Ross, Kenneth Gilbert, and Luciano Sgrizzi.

Three radio programs in 1979³⁰ featured her and some of her students at the Bobigny Conservatory: Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, Christophe Rousset, and Ilton Wjuniski. When asked what she told students who express a desire to pursue a career, she called it a very big responsibility and said she tended to discourage the idea. By discouraging them, she meant that she did not want to “throw rose powder in their eyes and mislead” anyone. She would tell a student, “A career is very difficult even if you are very talented and are supported by your family. Your field has to be well learned, which takes a lot of time. It takes time to launch a career, and it requires a lot of courage.” Huguette herself had suffered big obstacles to her own career and had worked very hard and made sacrifices. But she knew that if the student was possessed “by the demon of music, by the demon of the stage, by the demon of a career,” nothing she said could change his or her mind. “The true, the pure artist will remain.” She recognized that the mere fact of playing before one’s peers in a classroom was already very intimidating, and she took her role very seriously. “The tighter the relationship between student and teacher is, the more the teacher has to pay attention.”³¹

When possible, Huguette gave her students the chance to perform publicly on radio programs where she herself was featured, and a few played on recordings of hers. Among her documents is a letter from a well-known French harpsichordist who was her student in the 1970s, “I know what I owe you, . . . you are the person who counts most in my harpsichord vocation.”³² Her kindness and generosity is still remembered today. She often gave students rides to the summer workshops in Saint-Maximin and Villecroze, which could not be reached directly by train. One of her American students, Ellen Haskil Maserati, remembers their trip to Siena to take Gerlin’s class, “She was really nice when we drove down. We stopped overnight in Lyon. She took me to dinner and had me try all the local food. She was very motherly.”³³

Her genius for teaching resided in her wanting to respond personally to her students, feeling that a teacher should always understand the personality of the student and determine what possibilities there were to develop. During the lessons she was demanding, but she did not ask for obedience. Her intention was not to impose her ideas; she preferred that the student have his or her own. In this approach, it is possible to see the influence of her teachers at the Paris Conservatory. One teacher, Norbert Dufourcq, when grading an essay she had written on the “different manifestations of choral music in the vocal works of Bach,” noted, “You have read many texts . . . to the point where [your essay ends up sounding] a bit like a catalog sometimes. What is lacking is a personal judgment, a thought that is yours and the fruit of your reflections as a good musician.” Also, Huguette’s pedagogy teacher, a Mr. Norpain, had given advice that she clearly had taken to heart, “Before speaking, listen to the student with so much attention that you immediately get a clear idea of his strengths and weaknesses.”³⁴

During a radio broadcast from Ville-croze on November 9, 2000,³⁵ Huguette said in the course of a masterclass: 

As far as I’m concerned, you arrive at technique through the music and not the other way around. . . . When you have something you want to express but you don’t have the technical means to express it, it’s up to you to find exercises that will permit acquiring those means. . . . To learn a sensitive touch, the finger has to feel the plectrum scratch the string. [She felt that “plucking the string” was not an accurate term.] There is an important relationship between the sensitivity of the fingers and the ear, and that’s what you must work on. The ear must hear differences. . . that makes part of the everyday work when you’re doing finger exercises. In fact, it’s musical, and I personally feel that no exercise should ever be done mechanically. You must always be in conversation with the music. Even if you do so-called daily exercises, you can always find these passages in pieces. You have to consider them musically. I always use as a reference the human voice or a wind instrument for understanding how to let the music breathe.³⁶

Huguette was famous with her students for her frequently repeated “proverbes dreyfusiens.” One student, Chiao Pin Kuo, remembered some of these aphorisms in a tribute to her after her death: 

The notes are not the music, the music lies between them.

When you play a piece, the listener has to understand everything as if he has the music in front of his eyes.

Without respiration, the music is dead.

To breathe is not to slow down, slowing down is not breathing.

It’s not enough to know how to play, you have to have a wide knowledge of not only harpsichord music but of all forms of art. If you are small-minded, you won’t ever be a great musician.

Practice, listen, converse, and feel the composer speaking.³⁷

Up until now, I have spoken in the third person. But now, as one of Huguette’s former students and friends, I will speak in the first person. It has been nearly a quarter of a century since I studied with her during her last three years at the Conservatoire de Rueil-Malmaison. But she made such an impact on me that I still recall most of her teachings. I had never had the opportunity to study with someone of her caliber before and must have realized that every bit of the experience was precious and needed to be carefully stored away in my memory. I was a middle-aged amateur pianist, and the first chance I ever had even to touch a harpsichord came the year before when I started taking lessons from the American harpsichordist, Jory Vinikour. He was in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to perfect his prior training with Huguette and Kenneth Gilbert. It was Jory who encouraged me to audition for Huguette to enter her class at the conservatory. Despite trembling hands, I played for her and was accepted.

In our class at Rueil-Malmaison, we always celebrated birthdays, especially hers. One year, we threw a surprise party for her in the apartment of her cousin, Nicole Dreyfus (a famous attorney in France). Four students played variations of “Happy Birthday,” squeezed together at Nicole’s piano, I and another improvised a tango, and four held up one of her aphorisms, written out on pieces of paper. Huguette would have all her students over to dinner after the year-end exams, serving chocolate cake she had baked herself. At the conservatory, it was forbidden to eat in the teaching room, but Huguette installed a coffee maker, and we often ate our lunches there and celebrated birthdays and holidays with cake and champagne.

What Huguette taught me did not only concern the keyboard and written notes—it had to do with how to practice, making the instrument sing, acquiring the confidence to play difficult pieces, performing. . . . She said I could go as far as I wanted to in my playing, and I ended up being able to play pieces that I never would have been able to before. Her observations were always accurate, and her comments always constructive; Huguette could also say much with just an evocative gesture. All of this advice enabled me to play in public and be awarded a unanimous first prize in a jury exam, which would have been impossible before I studied with her: 

Listen to the bass.

To feel the beat and speed of a piece, walk ‘round the room, singing the melody.

To perform a piece, it needs to be more than 100% ready.

Be aware of the environment in which you’re practicing at home. When you’re learning a piece, the brain is storing it, not as isolated bits of information, but in its whole context, which will be reproduced when you perform.

Have everything prepared for performance, including the music so there are no loose pages to get lost or fall on the floor.

Listen to what you play all the way to the end. 

When one hand is playing a tricky passage, listen to the other one. (This was particularly effective when I was learning how to play ornaments.)

All that counts is the music.

Learning a fugue, sing each part separately. As you play one voice, add a second one with the other hand. Practice playing one voice while you sing with the other. While you play all the voices, follow each one individually. 

Playing each part hands together strengthens how it’s learned in the brain.

Don’t think about the notes. Imagine the trouble a centipede would have walking if it thought about how it moved!

Huguette rarely noted anything on my music, except to circle rests and add fingering—but only occasionally. More often, she would come by and tap on my shoulders, which had risen up to my ears with tension (terror, because of playing in front of the class, might be the more accurate word!). This recurring at every lesson, she showed me some exercises to relax them. She did not insist about fingering, saying that it was an individual decision, given that hands are different. Giving Glenn Gould as an example, Huguette pointed out that artists could sit or hold their arms in the “wrong ways” and still be brilliant.

Her own musicality was extraordinary. Once when I was playing in class, a woman from the conservatory office came to the door. Huguette told me to keep playing and went to speak to her. Suddenly she interrupted herself to call out to me, “B-flat!” I had made a mistake, and she heard it despite their conversation.

Referring to her practice of going to see something beautiful at a museum before giving a concert, she said in an interview with an Italian reporter, “It’s like giving water to a flower for it to bloom easily.”³⁸ To me, this quote could be a metaphor for her teaching. Once, when I was visiting her in the hospital before her death—some of her other students and I were in touch so as to maintain a continuous flow of visits—a nurse asked me if we were Huguette’s family members. “No,” I responded, “we’re the flowers in her garden,” knowing I’d puzzle her, but not finding any other apt way to put it in my distress. Now that I have gathered testimonials for a commemorative issue, I see that others felt as inspired and nurtured by her as I did, such as Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard who wrote, “She transmitted her love of music to me.”³⁹ Huguette could draw the best out of a student, and in my case, it changed the way I thought about myself and my capacities. Her next step was to help give me the capabilities to play the music I chose. Huguette took me as seriously as she would have if I had been young and a prospective professional. As another adult amateur student said, “Gratitude is the greatest homage that one can pay her.”⁴⁰

To be continued.

Notes

1. “The budding lilies,” title of the first piece by François Couperin in his 13ème Ordre, Troisième Livre. 

2. Email to author, December 7, 2016.

3. Radio interview, “Denis Herlin,” Les traversés du temps, France Musique, March 21, 2012.

4. Radio interview by Marcel Quillévère, “Huguette Dreyfus claveciniste,” Les traversés du temps, France Musique, March 7, 2012.

5. BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (12).

6. Agendes, BnF VM FONDS DRE-3 (5).

7. Letter from Pierre Verlet to Huguette Dreyfus, September 16, 1962, BnF VM Fonds 145-DRE (23). 

8. LP, The complete concerti for harpsichord, J. S. Bach, “A Critère recording,” Paris. Musidisc, France. New York: Nonesuch, HE 73001, 1965. Complete discography of Huguette Dreyfus compiled by the author. dolmetsch.com/huguettedreyfusdiscography.htm. 

9. Letter from Pierre Verlet to Huguette Dreyfus, July 15, 1969, op. cit.

10. Brochure, Paris American Academy of Music, “Summer in France,” 1966. BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (12).

11. Christophe Rousset, in emails to the author between 2016 and 2023.

12. Olivier Papillon, phone interviews with author, December 16, 2016, April 6 and
10, 2017.

13. Richard Siegel, interview with author, November 17, 2016, Paris, France.

14. Susan Lansdale, interview with author, March 23, 2018, Le Pecq, France. 

15. Claude Mercier-Ythier, in tribute to Huguette Dreyfus, Clavecins en France (CLEF) clavecin-en-france.org/spip.php?article288. Translated from French by the author.

16. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview, Les traversés du temps, op. cit.

17. “Toujours jeune, L’Académie d’été, 40 ans déja.” Orgues Nouvelles, No. 15, Summer 2008, Lyon.

18. BnF, VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (12).

19. Maria de Lourdes Cutolo, email to author, March 20, 2022.

20. Marcelo Fagerlande, phone interview with author, October 21, 2022.

21. bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Regina-Roberto.htm. 

22. Marcelo Fagerlande, Mayra Pereira, and Maria Aida Barroso, O Cravo no Rio de Janeiro do século XX. Rio de Janeiro: Rio Books, 2020. 

23. Ilton Wjuniski, tribute to Huguette Dreyfus, 2013.

24. Ana Cecilia Tavares, tribute to Huguette Dreyfus, 2022.

25. Letters from Maria de Lourdes Cutolo to Huguette Dreyfus, January 14 and February 2, 1976 BNF VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (17).

26. Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, emails to author, January 2023.

27. Shigeru Oikawa, letter to author, September 25, 2017, and tribute, January 2023.

28. Kristian Nyquist, interview on April 27, 2017, and later phone calls and emails. 

29. BnF, VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (12). 

30. ‘Musiciens pour demain,” François Serrette, France Musique, February 15 and 22, 1979. 

31. “Musiciens pour demain,” op.cit., radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/les-tresors-de-france-musique/musiciens-pour-demain-avec-huguette-dreyfus-et-christophe-rousset-une-archive-de-1979-4597434.

32. Letter from Noëlle Spieth to Huguette Dreyfus, BnF VM Fonds 145 DRE-1 (17).

33. Ellen Haskil Maserati, interview with author, June 2018, Paris.

34. BnF VM FONDS DRE-3 (1).

35. Villecroze: l’atelier de clavecin de Huguette Dreyfus, Les chemins de la musique,  France Culture, Radio France, broadcast November 9, 2000.

36. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview, L’Académie musicale de Villecroze, November 22, 2000. 

37. Translated from French by the author.  clavecin-en-france.org/spip.php?article288. 

38. Huguette Dreyfus interview, Corriere dell’Umbria, February 18, 1999. Translated from Italian to English by the author.

39. Email to author, January 5, 2023.

40. Pascal da Silva Texeira, email to author, December 2016.