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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works for piano and organ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choral works

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

In summary

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

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

Grande pièce symphonique 

* Communion (in A-flat)

* Pièce funèbre

Douze pieces pour orgue ou harmonium sur des noëls français

Adagietto (L’Orgue moderne)

Sortie fuguée (L’Orgue moderne)

Marche religiuese

Entrée solennelle, Fughetta

Offertoire en fa majeur

Offertoire sur deux Noëls en si b majeur

* Symphonie en ré mineur 

Adoremus (et laudate)

Élévation

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

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

Notes

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

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

3. Pellecer, Pierre Kunc. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With his health now much stronger, Ibert was allowed to enlist in the navy in May 1917 and was appointed an officer based upon his skill in mathematics, in which he had excelled for his baccalaureate. He was first sent to Sète along the Mediterranean Sea and then to Dunkerque along the Atlantic, serving for eighteen months and participating in the destruction of numerous enemy positions. During his free time, Ibert visited churches in villages along the coastline and liked to play their organs. These experiences inspired him to write four short works for organ between 1917 and 1919. The first was a Musette in 1917, followed by a Fugue and Choral in 1918, and finally the Pièce Solennelle in 1919, the latter as a gift for his bride on their wedding day.³ 

Genesis of the Choral

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

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

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

Style

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought and Legacy of Charles Tournemire, edited by Jennifer Donelson and Stephen Schloesser. Church Music Association of America, P.O. Box 4344, Roswell, NM 88202 (musicasacra.com), 2014, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-9916452-0-6, 456 pages.

Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen by Stephen Schloesser. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8028-0762-5, 572 pages.

These two new books present the results of academic research on Charles Tournemire and on the life and works of Olivier Messiaen. Through the efforts of Jennifer Donelson, the guiding light behind the academic outreach of the Church Music Association of America and the managing editor of Sacred Music (the official publication of the CMAA), there have been two conferences on Tournemire, the first in Miami in 2011 and the second in Pittsburgh in 2012. Mystic Modern is a reproduction of the papers given at the Miami and Pittsburgh conferences. Stephen Schloesser, author of Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen, is a Jesuit priest and professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago, and also the author of Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. 

Mystic Modern was published in the summer of 2014 in time for the annual CMAA Colloquium in Indianapolis. Schloesser’s Messiaen book was also published in July 2014, coinciding with the American Guild of Organists’ national convention in Boston. Beyond the coincidence in publication dates, what is remarkable about the two books is the relationship between Tournemire and Messiaen. Tournemire influenced Messiaen to a much greater extent than is normally assumed; but Messiaen eclipsed his mentor by gaining greater fame during his lifetime. Book after book has been written about Messiaen, while Tournemire has remained in relative obscurity until fairly recently.

A first glance at both of these books reveals that there is much more to understand about Charles Tournemire and Olivier Messiaen than one can know only through a study of their musical scores. This “much more” element encompasses knowledge of the personal lives of the two men and the personal relationship between them. It also focuses on how history, culture, theology, literature, symbolism, and aesthetics affected them both. Mystic Modern and Visions of Amen are a must read not only for scholars or devotees of Tournemire and Messiaen, but for those interested in liturgy, music, and theology. Fortunately both books can be read in small sections, slowly and with the help of excellent indices. In the case of Visions of Amen, Messiaen’s important duo-piano work from 1943, a link to an audio recording of a live performance is included in the text.

Tournemire was certainly a modern composer who influenced Messiaen, Langlais, and many other 20th-century French composers. The extent of his “modernism” led many to dismiss his music as obtuse, and his mysticism certainly was another reason that many dismissed his music as unapproachable. Stephen Schloesser explains Tournemire’s “modernism” in his 2005 book, Jazz Age Catholicism:

Tournemire imagined the musical devices representing ‘passion’—chromaticism, polytonalism, and the perceived resulting ‘dissonance’—as the most appropriate material carriers of the ‘eternal’ and unchanging Latin forms. Images of dress abounded in ancient chants were imagined to be ‘clothed’ in ‘modern’ musical fashions.¹

The main Tournemire scholarship consists of a doctoral dissertation by Ruth Sisson, a picture book of photos by Ianco Pascal, and the notated catalogue of his works by Joël-Marie Fauquet from 1979.² Stephen Schloesser devotes a large part of Jazz Age Catholicism to the study of Tournemire. Lastly, Marie-Louise Langlais has published on the Internet portions of Tournemire’s Memoires that specifically address music (http://ml-langlais.com/Tournemire). The French journal L’Orgue is in the process of issuing the complete Tournemire Memoires. The editors of Mystic Modern had access to the complete version and quoted extensively from it in their essays, The Composer as Commentator: Music and Text in Tournemire’s Symbolist Method and How does Music Speak of God.

Charles Tournemire (1877–1939) died in the same year that I was born, and perhaps for this coincidence, I felt a special connection to this man. My first exposure to the “mystic modern” Tournemire was during the 1950s, in hearing my first organ teacher Paul Sifler play some of Tournemire’s music on several recitals. I remember the music sounded strange and exotic, like the music of Olivier Messiaen that Sifler played, which I, as a teenager, did not understand. It was later, as a pupil of Jean Langlais in Paris during the early 1960s, that I came to know Tournemire’s music in a different way. Langlais often played Tournemire’s music at Sainte-Clotilde on the organ that Tournemire knew and loved and often played the Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani from the Sept Paroles of Tournemire. This blind teacher taught me the first movement and the last movement (Consummatum est) at Sainte-Clotilde during late Wednesday evenings in a dimly lit, empty church with the incomparable sounds of the Cavaillé-Coll organ. And he spoke about Tournemire as someone he knew well—little things about how he taught, how his personality was particularly quirky and unpredictable. He encouraged me to meet Tournemire’s second wife, Mme. Alice Tournemire, in her apartment—the apartment where her late husband had lived and taught. She read portions of his Memoires regarding the Symphonie-Choral, which I was planning to perform at Sainte-Clotilde. The more I played and heard Tournemire’s music, the more fascinated I became with it. His music was not instantly appealing; rather, it permeated my being slowly and compellingly.

Mystic Modern

The contents of Mystic Modern are divided into three sections, which develop the theme of Tournemire’s legacy as liturgical commentator, music inventor, and littéraire. In the preface, “Tournemire the Liturgical Commentator,” Donelson discusses Tournemire’s role as organist in the Roman Catholic Church and especially his place in the long line of composers incorporating Gregorian chant into both their composed works and their improvisations. 

The liturgical commentator

“The Organ as Liturgical Commentator—Some Thoughts, Magisterial and Otherwise” by Monsignor Andrew R. Wadsworth, begins with Wadsworth’s recollections of Messiaen’s improvisations during a Low Mass at La Trinité and then discusses the liturgical norms with an historical overview of the documents pertaining to them. He implores organists to follow Tournemire’s example in L’Orgue mystique: to improvise on the chants proper to each Sunday’s liturgy.

“Joseph Bonnet as a Catalyst in the Early-Twentieth-Century Gregorian Chant Revival,” by Susan Treacy, explains Bonnet’s decisive role in encouraging Tournemire to write L’Orgue mystique. Through explanations of Bonnet’s work as a liturgical organist in churches where he served, Treacy explains why Bonnet did not write any chant-based organ music. Although Bonnet was an abbot in the Benedictine order and was devoted to the propagation of Gregorian chant, he made a distinct difference between his published secular pieces for recital use and his improvised chant-based pieces for the liturgy. As a pupil of Charles Tournemire and fellow native of Bordeaux, Bonnet’s relationships with Dom Mocquereau and Justine Ward were also important in the founding of the Gregorian Institute. Even Bonnet’s church wedding, with a schola from the Gregorian Institute and with Tournemire as one of the organists, reflected his devotion to the propagation of Gregorian chant.

In “Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique and its Place in the Legacy of the Organ Mass,” Edward Schaefer gives an exhaustive summary of the development of the organ Mass, its specific usage in various countries, and the ecclesiastical documents governing organ Masses. A number of charts give illustrations of the use of the organ at the various parts of the Mass. There is a long list of the ecclesiastical ceremonials governing the use of music in the Mass and a chronological list of organ settings of the Mass. Schaefer concludes that with the renewed interest and practice of the Extraordinary form of the Mass, the practical use of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique is possible. This was demonstrated during the first Tournemire symposium. Some of the material is based on Schaefer’s dissertation from Catholic University.³

“Liturgy and Gregorian Chant in L’Orgue mystique of Charles Tournemire,” by Robert Sutherland Lord, was originally published in 1984 in The Organ Yearbook, edited by Peter Williams. The seminal importance of this article lies in Lord’s identification of all the chants from L’Orgue mystique and their origin, Tournemire’s original plan for the composition of the work, and the ways in which the composer departed from his plan in the choice of chants. The chants from the Liber Antiphonarius (Solesmes, 1897) were the sources of most of the chants that Tournemire used for the Elevation. This volume of chant is out of print, but Lord obtained a copy from the former assistant organist at Notre Dame, Paris, Pierre Moreau. Lord includes copies of these chants in the article.

In “The Twentieth-Century Franco-Belgian Art of Improvisation: Marcel Dupré, Charles Tournemire, and Flor Peeters,” Ronald Prowse discusses differences in techniques between written compositions and improvisations in the works of Dupré, Tournemire, and Flor Peeters and cites musical examples from the chant Ave Maris Stella. Using works by those three composers, Prowse deftly compares the techniques that all three of them used in treating the same chant. He often cites his own experiences studying improvisation with Pierre Toucheque, who had been a pupil of Peeters. He often quotes Tournemire, from his book on improvisation, Précis d’exécution, de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue, stating that a master improviser creates illusions.⁴ The issue of the difference between written composition and improvisation echoes throughout this collection of essays and remains in some ways an unanswered question.

The musical inventor

Prowse’s essay leads logically into the second section, “Tournemire the Musical Inventor,” which deals with Tournemire’s musical language, including his choice and sense of tempo—as well as his compositional process and impact, not merely on the Sainte-Clotilde school, but on modern French organ repertoire in general. 

In his essay “Performance Practice for the Organ Music of Charles Tournemire,” Timothy Tikker describes his lessons with Langlais and Langlais’s reports of his study with Tournemire. Tikker’s account matched what I had learned from Langlais, including the story of Langlais’s meeting with Tournemire and the invitation to become the latter’s successor at Sainte-Clotilde. The two works Tikker analyzes in detail regarding interpretation (No. 7 from L’Orgue mystique, Epiphania Domini, and Mulier, ecce filius tuus, Ecce Mater tua, from Sept Chorals-Poèmes, op. 67) were pieces that I also had studied with Langlais, and I agree with his conclusions. Tikker gives detailed graphs with measure numbers indicated and, in some places, metronome markings. Of particular interest in this essay is Tikker’s extensive discussion of the Sainte-Clotilde organ. Tournemire’s specific registrations in L’Orgue mystique include the use of sub couplers and the term petites mixtures, which indicates soft mutation stops such as gamba with a nazard. It is interesting to note that Tournemire played all of L’Orgue mystique on his nine-stop house organ, regrettably never at Sainte-Clotilde. Tikker quotes this specification from Tournemire’s Précis. One of Tikker’s particularly insightful points is his comparison of German Romantic organs and their influence on the compositions of Reger and Karg-Elert, which used the full organ in the lower registers, and Tournemire’s use of full organ that was based on the “treble-ascendant voicing for its success.”⁵

“Catalogue of Charles Tournemire’s ‘Brouillon’ [Rough Sketches] for L’Orgue mystique BNF, Mus., Ms. 19929,” by Robert Sutherland Lord, is the result of Lord’s studying the 1,282 pages of rough sketches of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique found in the Bibliothèque Nationale after Lord had written an extensive article on this seminal work of Tournemire. From these sketches Lord was able to determine the exact date of each office and how Tournemire departed from his original plan. Lord’s conclusion stated: 

After having completed the manuscript catalogue, we can verify that the “Rough Sketches” document—in sharp contrast to the “Plan” considered in my 1984 study—is far more than a mere framework for L’Orgue mystique. The “Rough Sketches” provide the harmonies, the rhythms, and the paraphrases for forty-two of the fifty-one offices. The BNF Ms. 19929 remains the only evidence we have of Tournemire’s musical preparation for any organ work he composed.⁶

From the harmonic and rhythmic details of Tournemire’s plan for L’Orgue mystique, Bogusław Raba’s article, “Creating a Mystical Musical Eschatology: Diatonic and Chromatic Dialectic in Charles Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique” continues the discussion of the conflict between the diatonic and chromatic dialectic in Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique. Raba uses the term dialectic as follows: 

Tournemire’s musical poetics in L’Orgue mystique are constructed by means of a dialectical process of diatonic and chromatic textures. This procedure (along with its symbolic functions) seems to be inherited from the Romantic Liszt-Franck tradition and is used in the service of a large narrative formal structure.⁷

Raba equates diatonicism with “eternal peace” and chromaticism with emotional “passion.” For Raba, the melding of these two elements creates pandiatonic textures, which he believes are Tournemire’s legacy to Messiaen. Finally, Raba confesses that Tournemire’s style goes beyond any structural system, and he calls this a “mystical musical eschatology.” Raba makes interesting parallels between Tournemire’s use of dissonance and that of Scriabin and earlier composers such as Frescobaldi in the Elevations from his organ Masses.

Raba’s observations on dissonance from the numinous leads into the next essay, “From the ‘Triomphe de l’Art Modal’ to The Embrace of Fire: Charles Tournemire’s Gregorian Chant Legacy, Received and Refracted by Naji Hakim” by Crista Miller. Miller’s article locates Middle Eastern elements and Arabic improvisation (taqasim) present in Hakim’s organ works with common elements with Tournemire’s Sitio (I thirst) from the Sept Paroles and Hakim’s Embrace of Fire. Miller compares these techniques with Langlais’s Soleil du Soir. She also probes the creative process of these composers. Were they aware of the techniques that they were using? In interviews with Hakim, she explains that Hakim claimed that his process was “subconscious”—in other words, he was not consciously aware that he was using a particular technique, so much was it a part of his psyche.

I had also asked this question regarding synthetic and octatonic scales with both Langlais and Daniel Lesur, both of whom reported that they were unaware that they were using these scales. The question of awareness is one that pervades our study of these composers’ works and is especially relevant to their improvisations. Miller also examines the specialized use of the Vox humana in works by Tournemire, Langlais, and Hakim.

Miller and Vincent E. Rone both discuss the use of octatonic and synthetic scales in their complementary writings. Rone’s essay “From Tournemire to Vatican II: Harmonic Symmetry as Twentieth-Century French Catholic Musical Mysticism, 1928–1970” focuses on the means by which Tournemire, Duruflé, and Langlais expressed Catholic musical mysticism and, in the case of the two younger composers, the ways in which they did so in response to their frustrations during the period of the Vatican II council. Rone concentrates on the use of octatonic and whole-tone scale patterns in the three composers’ music; he uses examples from the final pieces in Tournemire’s Nativitas and Resurrectionis offices. As examples of post-Vatican II disillusionment, Rone cites Duruflé’s Messe ‘Cum Jubilo’ and Langlais’s Imploration pour la croyance, referring to the former as privileging the Ordinary’s “transcendent and eschatological imagery through harmonic symmetry and stasis, combining a synthetic scale with subtle linear unfolding of two whole-tone collections, third-related, and bitonal harmonies.”⁸ In the latter, however, the expression is pure anger. Rone refers to Ruth Sisson’s dissertation and the discussion of the “Tournemire chord,” which employs a C#-major triad with a G-major 6/3 chord over it. The musical examples are particularly helpful to the reader in understanding these compositional and aesthetic concepts. 

The littОraire

The final section, “Tournemire the Littéraire,” deals with the literary aspect of Tournemire’s music and dwells on the relationship of the symbolic character of Tourmemire’s musical “commentaries” (and the legacy of this role in Messiaen’s oeuvre). It also includes Charles Tournemire’s obtuse and convoluted language in his biography of Franck. Finally, it analyzes Tournemire and Messiaen’s shared inspiration, drawn from Ernest Hello’s writings and Tournemire’s eschatological reading of history. The editors took great care with the ordering of the essays to provide cohesion to the book, and the end of each essay includes a summary. 

Stephen Schloesser’s first essay, “The Composer as Commentator: Music and Text in Tournemire’s Symbolist Method,” shows the importance of the texts in Dom Guéranger’s L’Année liturgique to Tournemire. So what then is this symbolist method? Schloesser describes it simply as “ . . . an essential relationship between a work and the literary text upon which it is based.”⁹ And he further states: 

For the symbolists, realism, naturalism, and positivism evacuated human existence of any mystery, fantasy, imagination, or dream world. In opposition to the positivists’ exclusive privileging of the visible, Symbolists gave pride of place to the invisible.¹⁰

As has been stated, Schloesser’s research on Tournemire was first published in Jazz Age Catholicism (2005). As a historian with appealing linguistic, writing, and musical skills, Schloesser has a gift of getting behind the events he is describing and going to the heart of their meaning. Here Schloesser shows how the literary texts in Guéranger’s L’Année liturgique directly inspired L’Orgue mystique. Schloesser hand-copied one example from Guéranger’s work—the Introit for the Feast of the Assumption—to demonstrate this important link between the text and the music. (It is possible to study the entire Guéranger work hand in hand with L’Orgue mystique and easily follow the plan for the entire work.) The important point is that the music is a commentary or a paraphrase of the linguistic text. All the tone painting and symbols that Tournemire uses are related to the texts, and it is important to study the texts first. Lest there be any confusion, Schloesser quotes Tournemire’s preface, which clearly states: “ . . . plainchant is, in sum, freely paraphrased for each piece in the flow of the works forming this collection.”¹¹ 

Schloesser then contrasts Messiaen’s straightforward use of textual references in all his organ works and explains how Messiaen was indebted to Tournemire for this example. Schloesser subsequently refers to numerous recital programs of Tournemire in which the term paraphrase is used in the program. The notion of symbolism, for Schloesser, comes from Tournemire’s models, Claude Debussy and Richard Wagner. Evidence of Tournemire’s deep involvement in the symbolist movement is carefully presented in the next six pages. Schloesser documents examples of Tournemire’s extensive use of the Wagnerian style of leitmotif, with the chant Ego Dormivi, the antiphon from Holy Saturday based on Psalm 3, used in ten of the L’Orgue mystique offices. Schloesser goes beyond what others have previously explained regarding Tournemire’s use of this leitmotif, relating the composer’s decision both to personal and professional circumstances. Schloesser refers to other music programs and cites the texts that Tournemire used to plan those programs. Particularly moving is the intent behind his concert at the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in 1932, which opened with a tribute to Leon Boëllmann, the deceased organist of the church. The program is a good example of Tournemire’s manner of presenting an organ recital; it included three selections from L’Orgue mystique with explanations of the importance of the texts behind them. Tournemire’s choice of works by other composers showed his sense of his place in history alongside Bonnet, a musicologist (Bonnet was editor of the multi-volume set of Historical Organ-Recitals), a symbolist, and a truly modern composer. Also touching was Schloesser’s description of the reasons for Tournemire’s choice of themes for the last office of this great work and his four-year struggle to complete it. It is clear in studying Schloesser’s excellent essay that any serious student of L’Orgue mystique must become intimately acquainted with Guéranger’s 15-volume pivotal work, which is available in several English translations.

Again, acknowledging the superb manner in which this book is organized, it is appropriate that Elizabeth McLain’s Messiaen-oriented essay “Messiaen’s L’Ascension: Musical Illumination of Spiritual Texts After the Model of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique” follows that of Schloesser, whose discussion of Messiaen’s early life and influences in Visions of Amen is also covered in this review. McLain’s main point is that Tournemire’s use of commentaries on sacred texts in his compositions profoundly influenced Messiaen, but that unlike Tournemire, Messiaen’s quest was to take music inspired by sacred texts out of the church and into the concert hall. McLain’s essay explains that this early opus of Messiaen had its birth as an orchestral work, premiered in Paris before he had arranged it for organ. McLain gives many musical examples from the orchestral version of the work and clear structural and harmonic analyses of the entire work.

“Desperately Seeking Franck: Tournemire and D’Indy as Biographers” by R. J. Stove is the shortest of all the essays, but it is a fascinating comparison between Tournemire and D’Indy’s biographies of Franck. Anyone who has read any of Tournemire’s own writings can certainly agree with Stove’s description of Tournemire’s writing style as an “exotic jungle.” And further, “His high-flown French is a burden to imitate in any other language, let alone a language which lays as much stress on understatement, irony, and clarity as modern English usually does.”¹² Stove’s critical assessment of the two biographers, themselves students of Franck, explains much about the differences in their personalities and a possible jealousy on the part of Tournemire toward D’Indy, on account of the differences in the successes of their respective careers and their relationship to Franck. D’Indy had known Franck for two decades, while Tournemire had known him for only two years.

In her essay, “How Does Music Speak of God? A Dialogue of Ideas between Messiaen, Tournemire, and Hello,” Jennifer Donelson compares in great depth the approaches to addressing God through music in the writings of Tournemire, Messiaen, and the mystic writer from Brittany, Ernest Hello (1828–1885). She explains how the writings of Hello, particularly his 1872 work L’Homme: La Vie—La Science—L’Art, “encapsulates an understanding that was friendly to the Symbolist and anti-positivist tendencies of both composers.”¹³ Hello’s influences on Tournemire are found in Tournemire’s writings, particularly in his unpublished memoirs and correspondence between the two composers. Donelson explains with great care the differences in philosophy between Messiaen, seeking a perfect expression of the Catholic faith, and that of Tournemire. In conclusion she sums up the answer to the title of her essay in quoting Hello:

In a “clear vision of the role of the Catholic faith in art and culture, Hello saw spiritual realities as more real than material (indeed, as their source) and concluded that, for art to be truly beautiful or ‘sincere,’ the artist must have a clear vision of the world as redeemed by God with the Incarnate Christ at the center of God’s plan for salvation.”¹⁴

Peter Bannister’s essay, “Charles Tournemire and the ‘Bureau of Eschatology’” explains the meaning of eschatology in the historical context of the first half of the twentieth century in France. Bannister quotes frequently from the 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. The author’s reference to “Bureau of Eschatology” refers to Balthasar’s quote from Troeltsch’s dictum, “The bureau of eschatology is usually closed,” explaining that “this was true enough of the liberalism of the nineteenth century, but since the turn of the century the office has been working overtime.”¹⁵ Bannister explains the notion of life as a progression from darkness to light, often quoting from Léon Bloy, the French agnostic who converted to a strict form of Roman Catholicism, and Tournemire’s unpublished memoirs, and symphonies. Bannister laments the paucity of writings about Tournemire, citing the lack of primary source material. Bannister does not mention that this problem will soon be rectified; a forthcoming issue of the French review L’Orgue will be devoted to the difficult and highly secretive diary of Tournemire, Memoires.

I, for one, am not as pessimistic as Bannister when he states: “The likelihood is that for years to come, Tournemire will sadly continue to be regarded as an obscure figure outside the (dwindling) organ world . . . ”¹⁶ The two Tournemire conferences and these essays belie his conclusion. Consider that such composers as Bach, Mendelssohn, Rheinberger, and Langlais were less appreciated during their lifetimes than after their deaths, and certainly today they are not considered as “obscure figures.” 

Tennille Shuster’s cover, a surrealistic picture of the front of the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde with dramatic reddish-brown clouds in the background, reflects the book’s mystical nature. The typeface and illustrations are exquisitely reproduced. 

Drs. Donelson and Schloesser are to be commended on the physical beauty of the book and the depth of scholarship that the book represents.

Visions of Amen

Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen is an esoteric, extremely difficult seven-movement work for two pianists at two separate pianos, and its difficulty lies both in its technical demands (requiring extremes in dynamic range and tessitura) and in its obscure symbolism (which deals with astrology, theology, angels, saints, and birds). In the biographical aspect of this latest book on the early life of Messiaen, Stephen Schloesser develops the themes surrounding the composer’s connections with the mystic Charles Tournemire. 

The driving force behind the book came from Schloesser’s collaboration with pianists Hyesook Kim (Calvin College) and Stéphane Lemelin (University of Ottawa), with whom Schloesser received a $5,000 grant from the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for a project entitled “Olivier Messiaen’s Religious Perspective and Performance of Visions of l’Amen.” In 2004–2005 the two pianists performed the work at a number of locations in the U.S. and Canada, with Schloesser giving lecture notes on the work and Messiaen’s life. Their original plan was to produce a compact disc with liner notes written by Schloesser. The Messiaen centennial in 2008, however, yielded a plethora of new material for Schloesser, and the project subsequently grew into the present book format, with a link to the audio recording on the Internet. A detailed analysis of the work with timings from the recording makes it possible to follow the work without the score.

The title of the book leads one to believe that Schloesser focuses on the early life and music of this composer. But the extent and depth of the material goes far beyond a discussion of Messiaen’s early years. Schloesser examines Messiaen’s entire life, giving explanations of literary, symbolist, surrealist, mystical, and theological forces that inspired his compositions. In many of Messiaen’s biographies and his own writings, the writers Paul Éluard, Dom Columba Marmion, and Ernest Hello are mentioned, but Schloesser goes farther with extensive quotations from these authors, showing their influence on Messiaen’s music. For example, in the discussion of Messiaen’s Nativity of the Lord (1935), Messiaen frequently quotes Marmion’s book Christ in His Mysteries:

But the main reason for keeping alive such feelings within us is our status as children of God. The Divine Sonship of the Father’s only-begotten is of the essence and eternal. But, in an infinitely free act of love, the Father has willed to add a sonship, a childship, of grace.¹⁷ 

Schloesser divides the book into four sections. The first, dealing with Messiaen’s parents, Pierre Messiaen and Cécile Sauvage, covers 1883–1930. This section can be read by itself without reference to Messiaen’s compositions as an introduction to the psychological underpinnings of his personality. Part two, “Budding Rhythmician, Surrealist Composer, Mystical Commentator: 1927–1932,” continues this psychological approach and discusses in some detail his earliest works. The third part, “Theological Order, Glorified Bodies, Apocalyptic Epoch, 1932–1943,” delves into a detailed description and analysis of Visions of Amen. For musicians, a study of Messiaen’s score is helpful, but even without the score, Schloesser gives a detailed analysis of each movement, with timings from the recording in an appendix. Part four, “Legacy, 1943–1992,” includes a discussion of Messiaen’s last work: Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum. Throughout the book, Schloesser’s use of extensive footnotes on the same page as the text is helpful. The appendix of scriptural references is logical and welcomed.

The recording by pianists Kim and Lemelin is of high quality, with a wide range of dynamics and tessituras. This is a work that Messiaen and his second wife Yvonne Loriod played together frequently, and it is dedicated to her. Much of Messiaen’s piano music is extremely difficult technically and demands the utmost in coordination between the two performers here on two pianos. One could wish that a compact disc had been included with the book, so that one could listen to the performance without using a computer.

But even if the reader has no interest in this difficult piano work, composed during the darkest period of World War II when Paris was occupied by the Nazis, there is more than enough material about Messiaen’s personal life and that of his parents to engage the reader. It is well known that Messiaen’s mother was a poetesse; the drama of her life and the struggles she endured with her husband Pierre is explained in great detail. In the introduction, Schloesser explains his approach as a “history of emotion.” In this age of a “confessional” approach to biography, it is impressive how Schloesser combines very personal material with scholarly writing.

Visions of Amen can be read on two levels: first, theological—the birth of creation, the passion of Christ, angels, saints, birdsong, judgment; and second, as a personal statement of Messiaen’s love for Yvonne Loriod. In general, “Amen” signifies “So be it,” but for Messiaen and other French composers, it was also a code name for an expression of love. This code reference using his second mode of limited transposition is also found frequently in Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony and throughout Messiaen’s oeuvre. 

Notes

1. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 281.

2. Ruth Sisson, “The Symphonic Organ Works of Charles Arnould Tournemire” (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1984). Ianco Pascal, Charles Tournemire ou le mythe de Tristan (Geneva, Editions Papillon, 2001). Pascal knew Madame Odile Weber, the niece of Tournemire’s second wife Alice Tournemire, who shared many of her photographs with him. Joël Marie Fauquet, Catalogue de l’œuvre de Charles Tournemire (Geneva, Minkoff, 1979).

3. Edward Schaefer, “The Relationship Between the Liturgy of the Roman Rite and the Italian Organ Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1985).

4. Charles Tournemire, Précis d’exécution, de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue (Paris, LeMoine, 1936).

5. Tikker, in Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought and Legacy of Charles Tournemire, edited by Jennifer Donelson and Stephen Schloesser (Church Music Association of America, 2014), 131. 

6. Lord, in Mystic Modern, 137.

7. Raba, in Mystic Modern, 186.

8. Rone, in Mystic Modern, 230.

9. Schloesser, in Mystic Modern, 266.

10. Ibid., 267.

11. Ibid., 257.

12. Stove, in Mystic Modern, 312.

13. Donelson, in Mystic Modern, 317.

14. Ibid., 318.

15. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Some Points of Eschatology” in Explorations in Theology, Vol. I: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1964), p. 255, translated by Bannister. 

16. Bannister, in Mystic Modern, p. 352.

17. Stephen Schloesser, Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), p. 230.

Ann Labounsky earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.Mus. from the University of Michigan studying with Marilyn Mason, and a B.Mus. from the Eastman School of Music, studying with David Craighead. She studied in Paris with André Marchal and Jean Langlais on a Fulbright Grant and holds diplomas from the Schola Cantorum and Ecole Normale. Author of the biography Jean Langlais: the Man and His Music (Amadeus Press, 2000), she recorded the complete organ works of Jean Langlais for the Musical Heritage Society (reissued on the Voix du Vent label) and narrated and performed in a DVD of his life based on this biography, a project sponsored by the Los Angeles AGO Chapter. Labounsky is chair of organ and sacred music at Duquesne University, active in the American Guild of Organists, the National Pastoral Musicians, and the Church Music Association of America, and serves as organ artist in residence at First Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh. 

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

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

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

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

Johann Sebastian Bach

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

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

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

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

• changes notes in order to fit into a compass limit

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

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

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

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

Rameau, Daquin, and Balbastre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• abandoning secondary musical elements

• adding new measures in order to get a better crescendo

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nivers in 1665 states that “This style [notes inégales] is applied by personal discretion as are many other things which must be governed by the ear and by wisdom.”² 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ennis Fruhauf holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Michigan (1967, 1968), and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California (1973). He has held occasional church music positions, college and university teaching appointments, and is currently publisher, editor, music copyist, arranger, and composer for Fruhauf Music Publications (since 2004).

Ricercare (Ital.), “. . . ricercare is a verb, meaning to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence . . . testing the tuning, probing the key . . . .” (Johann Gottfried Walther, Musikalisches Lexikon, Leipzig, 1732);¹ and as a noun: “. . . Thus in Bach’s time it served almost exclusively for the title of a strict and, in its polyphonic texture, highly elaborate fugue.”²

Introduction

Ah, well, it is perhaps a tale to be retold yet once more, an instructive yarn well worth spinning anew, offered up here as an autumn fantasy, one with an exceedingly wry afterglow. The occasions and events in question took place some 300 years ago. And in spite of unexpected setbacks that overshadowed the final outcome, the adventure might after all be credited with having led to the creation of an unusual composition for organ, one that might otherwise have never come to light in the same context. 

The tale is of Johann Sebastian Bach’s trip to Dresden in the autumn of 1717, undertaken at the urging of the royal Saxon court chapel’s violinist-concertmaster, Jean-Baptiste Volumier. Bach was charged, in essence, with the mission of upholding the honor of his homeland’s keyboard music tradition against a figurative incursion launched by one of France’s eminent composers, Louis Marchand (1669–1732), Organiste du Roi. Marchand was on an extended leave from Paris at the time, touring Germany with a display of his keyboard and compositional talents, and currently seeking favor from the royal Dresden court. Bach also hoped to win favor and a remunerative purse, while at the same time pitting his skills against Marchand in an international venue. 

The composition in question is Bach’s legendary Pièce d’orgue (thus titled in more than one manuscript source), a three-section work, at the heart of which is a finely crafted extended fantasy for keyboard, presumably for pipe organ with pedals. It is a living time capsule—one of few words and many notes—that offers up a vibrant slice-of-life drawn from the travels of an adventurous composer in his early thirties, who was hard-pressed by circumstances on his home front, while also on a quest for recognition and honor abroad.

Bach’s arrival coincided with the day of Marchand’s tests, trials, and demonstrations. Concertmaster Volumier took the initiative of arranging for Bach to overhear portions of these recitals from a concealed vantage point. It has been recorded that by the end of his contest, Marchand had indeed won the day and would continue his sojourn victoriously, having received meritorious and remunerative recognitions.

What might have taken place in the course of the evening that followed is a subject for speculation, perhaps even for imagination. Is it possible that these two notable exemplars of Germanic and French keyboard artistry might have been able to escape the rigors of international diplomacy, that they might have found time to meet in one of the city’s spacious church sanctuaries, one where they might also find a pipe organ installation that would provide a viable proving ground for their dueling skills? Just imagine what could have been . . . .

A Fantasy  

(Extract from an anonymous personal diary, Journals, dated October/November, 1717)

. . . It was already past dusk when the two principal parties of the contest arrived at the door leading up to the organ loft. There were three of us surveying the scene from a distance, gathered together in a tight knot and hidden from view in the shadows of the front chapel. We recognized Concertmaster Wolumyer of Dresden as he entered, followed by Concertmaster Bach, who was accompanied by two of his Weimar students. The French King’s Organist-Composer, Louis Marchand, arrived soon after, in company with two attachés assigned to his visit. Apparently Bach was to launch the evening’s music-makings, and indeed, as we watched he turned to M. Marchand, greeted him cordially, withdrew a vellum music manuscript from his folio and held it out to his elder colleague. M. Marchand graciously received the score, opened it, and proceeded to peruse the contents. Although their conversing tones were lost in the acoustical ambiance of a lofty nave, it was apparent that Bach was to begin the evening’s music-making with his recrafted Pièce d’orgue, written and ornamented in the French manner. We would hear it now with the addition of two outer movements. 

As we watched, the trio from Weimar separated from the others, making their way up to the dimly candle-lit organ loft and taking their places at the console. Bach had been allowed time to familiarize himself with the instrument earlier in the day, and his two flanking assistants were well coached in advance. Soon enough the first notes of an arpeggiated tonic chord broke the silence, ever so light in touch and sounding out on clear stops: we heard a single line of dancing arpeggios and passaggios in a compound triple meter, falling and rising, rippling through the gamut of the keyboard. This was the newly added Très vitement, a sparkling warm-up exercise for the fingers, leading up to the five-voice Gravement. Contrary to the French tradition of a Grand plein jeu registration, tonight the Gravement began on one of the instrument’s gentlest registers. We heard a low tonic pedal note, then a G-major chord in the manuals, with the soprano tonic pitch suspended over to the first quarter-note of the next beat, and four descending scale notes in succession. This motivic pattern migrated from one voice to another, delicately ornamented internally, and at each successive cadential gesture. Also of note, at major cadences a new stop or set of stops would be added by the two flanking registrants. By shifting from one manual to another and progressively engaging manual and pedal couplers, a tightly imitative ricercar with a brief compound motif for a subject was being transformed into a majestic paean, echoing gloriously through the nave’s acoustical environment. This was Bach in his native setting, ‘testing the lungs’ of a church’s instrument as he had done from year to year in the course of his many investigative journeys. In the final line of the Gravement, we heard a new voice enter in the manuals, further intensifying the texture and leading up to an abruptly dramatic pause on an unresolved deceptive cadence. After a momentary silence, the Lentement resumed on foundation stops, beginning with arpeggiations of the Gravement’s closing chord, sounded over a bass line that descended step by chromatic step to an extended dominant pedalpoint and final closing cadence in G Major.

There was a stillness and silence that followed the last chords as they faded into the upper reaches of the nave. We sat quietly, awed and deeply moved by the music we had just heard and calmed by its lingering aura. Within moments it became evident that Bach was preparing registrations for his next selection. Even though we had been advised in advance that he would likely play one of his newest keyboard compositions, a single-movement fantasy in D minor for clavier, nothing could have prepared us for the intense drama that was to follow . . . . 

[End of Journals extract.]

Who could fathom what might or might not have transpired in the course of such an evening? If it had even taken place, who might possibly divine what Bach would have played, or what selections Marchand could have chosen from his repertoire. There is no indication that the two of them resorted to swordplay—whether improvising with epées, or instead on keyboards, each of them with assistants in alert attendance. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Marchand carried an inked copy of Bach’s Fantasy with him back to Paris and the royal library. And if fate had denied Bach an opportunity to perform his recently penned chromatic Fantasy in D Minor³ for Marchand at an organ console, it could well have been included in his harpsichord recitations on the following day.

Varied accounts of Bach’s letter of invitation addressed to Marchand in which he proposed a public contest indicate that the two of them were to meet at the private mansion of Count Joachim Friedrich Flemming for a public display of their musical prowess. Alas for Bach, his competitor—perhaps wisely—chose to bow out of the tentative commitment, traveling on to his next port of call in the early hours of the designated morning. In spite of Marchand’s unanticipated absence, the public hearing was to take place after all: Bach’s impressive solo performance on that day won him royal recognition as hoped, and his meeting with Count Flemming would prove invaluable in the coming years. Alas, his prize purse of 500 talers was waylaid in the course of its delivery. And in the event Bach had traveled to Dresden with a hand-copied score of the Fantasy in G in his possession, it rode back with its composer on the return trip. More importantly though, a doorway had been opened that would offer future return visits, valuable musical associations, activities, and honors.

Discussion

Could it be that the middle movement of the Fantasy, as we know it today, might have evolved from on-the-spot improvisations performed on some of the various church organs Bach visited in his many travels? Could the music of an earlier version of the mid-section have offered an idealized means of “testing the lungs of an instrument”—a ricercare, or a seeking-out—by starting with quiet stops and gradually adding registers at subsequent cadential breaks and convenient moments? It is easy enough to imagine that a far more sophisticated end product, impeccably written in five- and six-voice tightly imitative counterpoint in the manner of a classic ricercata, was eventually honed for solemn occasions and processionals and found its way to ink and paper. An earlier manuscript of the central movement, one with French markings and an abbreviated ending, is cited as a possible compositional byproduct of Bach’s exposure to French keyboard music studied and copied in Weimar’s music library.⁴ Could Bach have added the improvisatorial framing introduction and closing sections (with their French titles) at a later date, in anticipation of his supposed meeting with Marchand? 

The Gravement is written in common meter with alla breve note values (i.e., two half-notes per measure). The quasi-motivic subject that serves to generate 157 measures of tightly knit counterpoint is generically no more or less than a suspended quarter- or half-note, followed by four descending pitches, the two units serving interchangeably as a head and a tail. It is freely imitated in tight succession, as well as in multiple paired overlapping entries. A secondary structural event can be found in the fantasy’s numerous staircase-like scalar progressions of whole-note pitches in the pedal line, employed with dramatically telling effect.⁵ Overall, the Gravement is neither fugue nor fancy, rather it is a one-of-a-kind ricercar-like construction, albeit perhaps an imitative fantasy, but one that is uniquely imbued with un esprit français.

There are additional elements throughout all three movements that hint strongly at Bach’s emulation of a classical hexachord fantasy, a formalized contrapuntal structure emanating from sixteenth-century practices. Hexachordal elements are present freely in the six-note groupings of the Très vitement’s compound meter,⁶ in the six diatonically related keys traversed in the course of the Gravement’s tonal excursions, and finally in the hexachordal arpeggiations of the Lentement.⁷ It is worth noting that the title, Fantasy, would appear to have been applied by cataloguers of subsequent generations, but not by the composer. Above and beyond formalized or traditional concepts, and viewed as a single entity, Bach’s storied BWV 572 is in essence a grand tone poem, a broadly proportioned triptych of three contrasting sections—two linear outer panels framing an impeccably woven central tapestry. 

Coda

In support of a progressive registrational plan for the Gravement, there are numerous authentic and half cadences throughout the contrapuntally textured movement that facilitate the addition of stops and couplers, or shifts from one manual to another.⁸

There is the anomalous presence of a low pedal B-natural (measure 66), a note not normally found on Germanic pedalboards but occasionally present in French manual and/or pedal dispositions. While such an insignificant deviation could easily be glossed over, it is cited here in support of a Francophile leaning and interpretation, one that is already abundantly apparent in the French titles of the opus and its individual movements. 

There is also the matter of a quasi-legendary pedagogical lineage to be considered in the course of these closing words. A multi-generational succession of teachers—one of many that can be traced from Bach into the 20th century—extends from a late Leipzig organ student, Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809, Erfurt), through Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846, Darmstadt), to Adolph Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863, Breslau); and from Hesse continuing through Jacques Nicolas Lemmens (1823–1881, Belgium, Paris), to Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911, Paris), and to Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937, Paris); passed on in turn by Guilmant and Widor to Marcel Dupré (1886–1971, Paris). Notable from Dupré—and relevant to this discussion—is his recorded version of the Fantasy, registered and performed in an accumulative and glorious manner on the Cavaillé-Coll instrument of St. Sulpice, Paris, during his tenure as titular organist.⁹

And now, to end this autumn reverie of what-ifs—much in the same manner as it began—on an inquisitive note: Is it possble that the tradition of a broadly romantic and accumulative interpretation could have been passed on and survived intact in its passage through such a fragile and tenuous teaching tradition, spanning over six generations from 1750 to the latter twentieth century, and onward?

Notes

1. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 330. 

2. Ibid., p. 329.

3. Eventually Fantasy in D Minor, S. 903 (without Fugue).

4. Notably Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’orgue (1699, Paris, reissued 1711), Bach’s hand copy dating from ca. 1713.

5. See Example 2.

6. See Example 1.

7. See Example 5.

8. See  Examples 3 and 4.

9. See http://www.marceldupre.com/ CD: Mercury Living Presence recording of Marcel Dupré: Bach (Six Schübler Chorales, Fantasy in C Minor, Fantasy in G Major) Saint-Sulpice, 1959, available in CD reissues.

A Selected Bibliography

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, ed. The Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1945, 1966.

_____________. The New Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Gaines, James R. Evening in the Palace of Reason. New York: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins Publishers, 2005.

Gardiner, John Eliot. Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Geiringer, Karl. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Culmination of an Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Griepenkerl, Friedrich Conrad, and Ferdinand Roitzsch, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Orgelwerke, Vol. IV. New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1950.

Widor, Charles-Marie, and Albert Schweitzer, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Complete Organ Works, Vol. III. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1913.

Wolff, Christoph. Bach, Essays on His Life and Music. Cambridge (MA) & London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

____________. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

An apologia and acknowledgements

In order to provide a degree of continuity and to avoid undue interruptions in the flow of the text, end notes have been kept to a minimum. All details and factual accountings have been extracted from the sources cited above; they are often repeated in more than one source, sometimes with degrees of variation that have required editorial pruning. The Journal entry is a fictitious creation, a work of imagination. In his Evening in the Palace of Reason, James R. Gaines offers an exemplary format for overlapping multiple perspectives and layers of narration, and for combining recorded facts with speculative premises and intuitions to produce an animated account of historical events. His model has provided a structural guidepost for the essay featured here, offered informally as an example of speculative musicology. There are sure to be lacunae great and small in these words, for which all due apologies are offered.