Transcribing for organ: A historical overview

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

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

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

 

His inspiration to become an
organist and initial training

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

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

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

 

Musical training in Paris

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

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

 

First three church positions in Paris

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

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

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

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

 

A pioneer in early French music
interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

 

Installation near Dole

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

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

 

From Saint-SОverin to the Royal Chapel in Versailles

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Organ professor

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

International concert artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Yves Margat contributed articles to Guide du Concert. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30. Eugène Borrel, op cit., p. 150. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

45. John Abbey II (1843–1930).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ennis Fruhauf

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.

Larry Palmer

Recital programming: Program notes

Seated one day at the harpsichord, I was weary and ill at ease because the mid-July deadline for this column was approaching too rapidly, and my mind, in its summer mode, seemed frail as a lily, too weak for a thought as I searched for a topic. And then, a miracle: the printed program from my harpsichord recital at the 2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival fell out of a score. Rereading it brought not only a wave of nostalgia, but also a sense of continued satisfaction at both the balance and variety of the chosen pieces, selected painstakingly to present contrasting musical styles as well as offering a bit of respite to the ears of the festival participants who heard a number of organ recitals each day.

Some vignettes about the unusual logistics required to present this program at Trinity Episcopal Church in Longview on my 74th birthday may be found in The Diapason’s Harpsichord News column published in February 2013 (page 20). If any readers are curious, I refer them to that issue, which also contains Neal Campbell’s thoughtful commentaries on the entire 2012 festival. What follows in this month’s column has not appeared previously in The Diapason. These are my “notes to the program.” I present them now as examples of brief word pictures intended to aid a listener’s understanding of music that, for many, was probably being heard for the first time. As for the selections, I specifically tried to choose at least some works by composers who might be familiar to organists, while offering a variety of musical styles, durations, and tonalities both major and minor. 

 

The program notes

Introduction to the Program: The Italian composer Giovanni Maria Trabaci wrote in the Preface to Book II of his Pieces ‘per ogni (all) strumenti, ma ispecialmente per i Cimbali e gli Organi’ [1615]: “the harpsichord is the lord of all instruments in the world and on it everything may be played with ease.” [“il Cimbalo è Signor di tutti l’istromenti del mondo, et in lui si possono sonare ogni  cosa con facilità.”]  

While I am not totally convinced of the ease of playing offered by some of these contrasting selections from the contemporary and Baroque repertoires, I do suggest that each one of them has musical interest. The pieces by John Challis and Duke Ellington are probably unique to my repertoire since they remain unpublished.

 

The program

A Triptych for Harpsichord (1982)—Gerald Near (b. 1942). In addition to writing a wonderful Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings for me to premiere at the American Guild of Organists national convention in the Twin Cities in 1980, Gerald responded to my request for a new work to play at a recital for the Dallas Museum of Art’s major El Greco exhibition in 1983. The three brief contrasting movements suggest bells (“Carillon”), an amorous dance (“Siciliano”), and a homage to the harpsichord works of Domenico Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla (“Final”). 

Sonate pour Claveçin (1958)—Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). During the final year of his life, in response to a commission from the Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer, Martinů composed this compact, but major, Sonate. Essentially it is a piece in one movement with three sections: the first and last are kaleidoscopic, filled with brief colorful musical ideas; the second is gentle and nostalgic, as the homesick expatriate composer makes short allusions to two beloved iconic Czech works: the Wenceslaus Chorale and Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. While quite “pianistic” in its demands, the Sonate also allows brilliant use of the harpsichord’s two keyboards in realizing both Martinů’s magical sonorities and his occasional use of bitonality.

“Chaconne in D Minor” (Partita for Solo Violin, BWV 1004)—Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), arranged for harpsichord solo by John Challis (1907–1974). One of Bach’s most-often transcribed works, this particular setting for harpsichord by the pioneering American early instrument maker survives only in a manuscript submitted for copyright (on Bach’s birthday in 1944), now preserved in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Challis also was an early advocate of variable tempi in Baroque music, serving as a mentor in that respect to organist E. Power Biggs, who proudly owned one of the builder’s impressive large pedal instruments.¹

A Single Petal of a Rose (1965)—Duke Ellington (1899–1974), edited in 1985 by Igor Kipnis and Dave Brubeck, and by Larry Palmer in 2012. Edward Kennedy Ellington responded to Antoinette Vischer’s request for a piece by sending her a piano transcription of his A Single Petal of a Rose, a work already dedicated to the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II. When American harpsichordist Kipnis asked if I could point him to Ellington’s unique work for harpsichord, I referred him to the facsimile of Ellington’s manuscript published in Ule Troxler’s book Antoinette Vischer, which details the works to be found in the Vischer Collection at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. (See “The A-Team,” The Diapason, February 2017, pp. 12–13.) Years later, Kipnis sent me his one-page transcription for harpsichord, an arrangement made in collaboration with his friend, the jazz great Dave Brubeck. To fit my hands and harpsichord I have made some further adjustments to their arrangement of this lovely, gentle work.²

La D’Héricourt; La Lugeac—Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799). These are two of the most idiomatic of French harpsichord works from the eighteenth century, and none is more so than the one honoring M. l’Abbé d’Héricourt, Conseiller de Grand’ Chambre. With the tempo marking “noblement,” this composition stays mostly in the middle range of the harpsichord, a particularly resonant glory of the eighteenth-century French instruments. In contrast, the boisterous, “music-hall” qualities of La Lugeac suggest that it may be named for Charles-Antoine de Guerin, a page to King Louis XV. Known subsequently as the Marquis de Lugeac, the former page became secretary and companion to the Marquis de Valery, the king’s representative to the court of Frederick the Great. The American harpsichordist and conductor Alan Curtis, who edited Balbastre’s keyboard works, noted that “few Italianate jigs—Scarlatti not even excepted—can match the outrageously bumptious and attractive La Lugeac.”

“Lambert’s Fireside,” “De la Mare’s Pavane,” and “Hughes’ Ballet” (from the collection Lambert’s Clavichord, 1926–1928)—Herbert Howells (1892–1983). The composer was the next to youngest person pictured in a 1923 book of Modern British Composers comprising 17 master portraits by the photographer and clavichord maker Herbert Lambert of Bath. As a tangible expression of gratitude for this honor, Howells requested 11 of his fellow sitters each to contribute a short characteristic piece to be presented to the photographer. All acquiesced, but one year later, only Howells had composed anything for the project, so he wrote the additional 11 pieces himself. Issued in 1928 by Oxford University Press, Lambert’s Clavichord was the first new music for clavichord to be published in the twentieth century. Several questions regarding names found in the titles as well as a few printed notes that were suspect led me to schedule a London interview with the composer during a 1974 trip to the UK, a meeting that led ultimately to my commissioning the Dallas Canticles, as well as a respectful, unforgettable friendship with the elderly master.³

Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914—J. S.
Bach. The shortest of the composer’s seven toccatas for harpsichord, the E Minor consists of an introduction (with an organ-pedal-like opening figure insistently repeated six times); a contrapuntal   “poco” Allegro; a dramatic recitative (Adagio); and a driving, perpetual motion three-voice fugue. Musicologist David Schulenberg (in The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach; Schirmer Books, New York, 1992) noted the close similarity of the fugue’s opening and some subsequent passages to an anonymous work from a Naples manuscript ascribed to Benedetto Marcello. While it was not unusual for Baroque composers to borrow from (and improve upon) existing works, the amount of pre-existing material utilized in this particular fugue is greater than normal; however, as Schulenberg concludes, “[Bach] nevertheless made characteristic alterations.” I would add that in no way do these borrowings detract from the visceral excitement of Bach’s propulsive and dramatic conclusion.

 

Heads up: Registration for the 2017 ETPOF

According to the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival website there is still an opportunity to register (at discounted prices) for the star-studded programs planned for this year’s festival. But do not delay: the opportunity for savings expires on September 15. Visit: http://easttexaspipeorganfestival.com.

 

Recent losses 

Elizabeth Chojnacka (born September 10, 1939, in Warsaw) died in Paris on May 28. Celebrated for her virtuosic keyboard technique, Chojnacka was known primarily as an avid and exciting performer of contemporary harpsichord music. Her renderings of all three of the solo harpsichord works by Ligeti are highly lauded, and the composer honored her by dedicating the third, Hungarian Rock, to her.

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini (born October 7, 1929, in Bologna) died in that Italian city on July 11. Organist, harpsichordist, scholar, and instrument collector, Luigi was well known to us in Dallas, having been a guest at Southern Methodist University on several occasions. Most memorably, he was part of the so-designated “Haarlem Trio” organized by Robert Anderson as a week-long postscript to the 1972 American Guild of Organists convention in Dallas. The three major European visiting artists for that event—Marie-Claire Alain, Anton Heiller, and Tagliavini—each gave daily masterclasses for the large number of participants who remained in Dallas for a second week of study with these annual leaders of the Haarlem Summer Academies in the Netherlands, resulting in what may be the only time in Southern Methodist University history that the organ department achieved a financial surplus rather than a deficit!

Two vignettes from that stellar week have become an unforgettable part of   Dallas’s musical history: Luigi’s chosen workshop topic was the organ music of Girolamo Frescobaldi, and he had assigned to the prize-winning finalists from the AGO Young Organists’ Competition all of the pieces contained in that composer’s liturgical settings for organ, known as Fiori Musicali. One of the finalists who had not won an AGO prize left Dallas in high dudgeon. Unfortunately, this participant had been assigned the very first piece in this set of “Musical Flowers.” Professor Tagliavini began his afternoon class with a brief overview of the work’s history and importance, and then peered over his glasses as he announced, “And now we will hear the first piece, Frescobaldi’s ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’.”

The total lack of response became embarrassing; there was no respondent. So our guest teacher moved on to the next piece. And thus it was that each afternoon session began with the same question from Luigi: “And who will play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’?”—always followed by total silence. A stickler for completeness, on the fifth and final day of the course Luigi made his same query, again to no avail. So with his usual smile and slight lisp he intoned, “Then I shall play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’!” And so he did with total mastery and grace. And all was well within the Italian Baroque solar system,  for Frescobaldi’s magnum opus was, at last, complete in Dallas!

The second vignette, equally Luigi-esque, occurred when Dr. Anderson, always volatile and energetic, and I were awaiting Tagliavini’s arrival to play an evening organ recital for the workshop audience. It was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. and by five minutes before that hour Dr. Anderson was pacing the corridor near the door to the Caruth Auditorium stage. With less than two minutes to spare, Luigi ambled down the hallway. Bob called out, “Luigi, hurry!” To which the unflappable Italian stopped walking, carefully placed his leather briefcase on the floor, and, with his characteristically kindly smile, said, “Why, Bob? Has the recital already begun?” ν

 

Notes

1. For further information see my essay, “John Challis and Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor,” in Music and Its Questions: Essays in Honor of Peter Williams, edited by Thomas Donahue (Organ Historical Society Press, 2007); and my CD recording of the Bach transcription on Hommages for Harpsichord (SoundBoard 2008).

2. Concerning Lambert’s Clavichord, see my chapter on Herbert Howells in Twentieth Century Organ Music, edited by Christopher Anderson (Routledge, 2012).

Larry Palmer

The 2012 inaugural meeting of the new Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA), formed by the merger of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society (SEHKS, founded 1980) and its slightly younger sibling, the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society (MHKS, organized 1984), was an historic event in itself. The late March gathering in Cincinnati included both the seventh iteration of the Jurow Harpsichord Playing Competition and the eighth occurrence of the International Aliénor Composition Competition, plus scores of scholarly presentations and short recitals, loosely organized into ten sessions, each with a general connecting theme.  

For my contribution to Session Seven (The Old Made New) I attempted to craft a title enigmatic enough that it might pique the curiosity of a few potential auditors, but with the higher goal of providing information about some of the earliest and relatively obscure “new” compositions for harpsichord from the early 20th-century. I hoped, as well, to underscore, at least by implication, the major stimulus for a continuing creation of new repertoire that has been provided by the Aliénor’s prizes, performances, and publications since its inception in 1980. 

 

Woodhouse plays Cecil Sharp

As early as July 1920, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, the most prominent and gifted of early 20th-century British harpsichordists, recorded three of folksong collector Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Tunes. Thus Sharp’s 1911 piano versions of the tunes Newcastle, Heddon of Fawsley, and Step Back serve as the earliest “contemporary” music for harpsichord committed to disc.¹

These were followed, in 1922, by recorded performances of two more Cecil Sharp transcriptions, Bryhton Camp and the evocatively titled Gathering Peascods.² While the 1920 recordings were already available in digital format, courtesy of Pearl Records’ Violet Gordon Woodhouse compact disc,³ I had never heard the 1922 offerings. Peter Adamson, an avid collector of these earliest discs, assured me that he could provide the eponymous work listed in the title of this article. Both of us were surprised to find that Gathering Peascods was never issued in the United Kingdom, but Peter was able to send me some superior dubs from the original 1920 discs, as well as a few seconds of authentic 78-rpm needle scratching. Combining this acoustic noise with Sharp’s keyboard arrangement, quickly located online via Google search, made possible the restoration of Peascods to the roster of earliest recorded “contemporary” harpsichord literature. It is equally charming, though perhaps less historically informed, when performed without the ambient sound track. 

 

Thomé

New harpsichord music composed for the earliest Revival harpsichords⁴ actually predates any recording of the instrument: Francis Thomé’s Rigodon, opus 97, a pièce de claveçin, was written for the fleet-fingered French pianist Louis Diémer, and published in Paris by Henry Lemoine and Company in 1892.⁵

 

The first 20th-century harpsichord piece?

There are currently two contenders for “first place” in the 20th-century modern harpsichord composition sweepstakes. The first may be Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite, originally committed to paper in 1909 during his student years in Florence, then recreated in 1939 shortly after the Italian composer’s immigration to the United States. That version, sent to prominent harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick in 1940, seems to have been ignored by the artist, but it was ultimately published by Mills Music in New York in 1962.⁶

A second contender (dare we call it a “co-first”?), which is, thus far, the earliest published 20th-century harpsichord work, is Henri Mulet’s tender and charming miniature Petit Lied. Mulet is most often remembered, if at all, for his ten Byzantine Sketches for Organ, a set that ends with the sometimes-popular toccata Tu es Petrus (Thou art the rock). Comprising a brief seventeen measures, Mulet’s “Little Song” is dedicated to fellow organist Albert Périlhou, who was characterized by his more famous contemporary Louis Vierne, as “a composer of the 18th century.” So perhaps this delicate, nostalgic work, published in 1910 “pour claveçin [ou piano]” was intended to pay homage to Périlhou’s antiquarian tendencies.⁷

 

Busoni

1916 saw the publication of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1915 Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae pro Clavicimbalo composita⁸—a strange, but ultimately satisfying keyboard work that, with some imaginative editing, is playable on a two-manual harpsichord, which one assumes the composer did, since he was also the proud owner of such a 1911 Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument.⁹   

 

Delius

Often described as “unplayable,” the very original Dance for Harpsichord (for piano) by Frederick Delius came into being in 1919, inspired by the artistry of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Kirkpatrick included it in a unique program of 20th-century harpsichord music presented at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961¹⁰ and Igor Kipnis recorded it in 1976.¹¹ I have occasionally enjoyed playing Delius’s purple-plush harmonies in a shortened version arranged by Baltimore harpsichordist Joseph Stephens. Each time I play the work I find fewer notes to be necessary, and decide to omit more and more of them, often an approach that best serves these piano-centric harpsichord refugees from the early Revival years. Since Delius surely ranks among the better-known composers who attempted to write anything at all for the harpsichord, it seems worth the effort to forge an individual version that serves to bring this quite lovely piece to the public.

 

Grainger

Inspired by the recent anniversary year (2011) of the beloved eccentric Percy Grainger (he died in 1961), it seemed fitting to rework another of my own arrangements, that of his “Room-Music Tit-Bits,” the clog dance Handel in the Strand, particularly after coming across Grainger’s own mention of the harpsichord’s influence on his compositional career. In a letter to the pianist Harold Bauer, Grainger wrote:

 

. . . the music [of my] Kipling Settings . . . [is] an outcome of the influence emanating from the vocal-solo numbers-with-accompaniment-of-solo-instruments in Bach’s Matthew-Passion, as I heard it when a boy of 12, 13, or 14 in Frankfurt. These sounds (two flutes and harpsichord . . .) sounded so exquisite to my ears . . . that I became convinced that larger chamber music (from 8-25 performers) was, for me, an ideal background for single voices . . .¹²    

So why not present Grainger’s Handelian romp edited for one player, ten fingers, and two manuals? Grainger’s own arrangement (“dished-up for piano solo, March 25, 1930, [in] Denton, Texas” according to the composer’s annotation in the printed score) provides a good starting place.¹³

 

Persichetti and Powell

Two major solo works from the 1950s composed for the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti deserve more performances than they currently receive: Vincent Persichetti’s Sonata for Harpsichord (now known as that prolific composer’s Sonata No. One), still, to my ears, his most pleasing work for our instrument, and Mel Powell’s Recitative and Toccata Percossa—another wonderful work included on Kirkpatrick’s contemporary music disc.¹⁴

 

Duke Ellington

For aficionados of jazz, the 44 measures of Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose comprise three manuscript pages now housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel, Switzerland), available only as a facsimile in Ule Troxler’s invaluable volume documenting the many commissions bestowed on contemporary composers by the wealthy Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer.¹⁵ About Ellington’s unique work, Mme. Vischer wrote to the composer late in 1965: 

 

Just on Christmas Eve I received your marvelous piece . . . I am very happy about your composition and I want to assure you of my greatest thanks. . . . could I ask you the favour to give me the manuscript with the dedication to my name as all other composers are doing for me, with a photo from you who always belong to my collection . . .¹⁶  

 

When Igor Kipnis asked whether I had any idea as to where he might find this score, I shared the citation information with him. Some years later he reciprocated by sending an arrangement made in collaboration with jazz great Dave Brubeck. A damper pedal would certainly make playing even this somewhat more idiomatic keyboard arrangement easier, but the gentle beauties of Ellington’s only “harpsichord” work deserve to find their place in our repertoire. In the spirit of jazz improvisation, I suggest adapting the written notes to fit one’s individual finger span, as well as assuming a free approach both to some of the notated rhythms and repeats, and not being afraid to toy with the tessitura by changing the octave of some notes in order to achieve a more lyrical legato line on our pedal-less instrument.

 

Prokofiev (for two)

In 1936 Sergey Prokofiev surprised the western musical world by forsaking Paris and returning to live out the rest of his days in his native Russia. One of his first Soviet musical projects was the composition of incidental music for a centenary production of Pushkin’s play Eugene Onegin. In this dramatic and colorful orchestral score a dream scene is integrated with the house party of the heroine, Tatyana. 

In his recent book, The People’s Artist, music historian Simon Morrison writes,

 

The party scene opens with the strains of a . . . polka emanating from a distant hall. Aberrant dance music represents aberrant events: much like Onegin himself, the dance music offends sensibility. It sounds wrong; it is a breach. Prokofiev scores the dance (No. 25) for two provincial, out-of-tune harpsichords, the invisible performers carelessly barreling through the five-measure phrases at an insane tempo—a comical comment on the hullabaloo that greets the arrival . . . of a pompous regimental commander. There ensues an enigmatic waltz (No. 26), which Prokofiev scores first for string quintet and then, in a jarring contrast, for the two harpsichords . . .¹⁷   

 

One wonders just how many provincial harpsichords there were in mid-1930s Russia, but this Polka from Eugene Onegin, played at a slightly more moderate pace, has served as a delightful encore for performances of Francis Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre when that enchanting work is performed as a duo with piano standing in for the orchestral parts, just as it was presented by Wanda Landowska and Poulenc in the very first, pre-premiere hearing of Poulenc’s outstanding score.¹⁸   

 

The Old Gray Mare, at last

Having fêted a pompous general with Prokofiev’s Polka, it is time to explain the reference to The Old Gray Mare. American composer and academic Douglas Moore composed a short variation set based on the popular folk tune to demonstrate the culminating amicable musical collaboration between the previously antagonistic harpsichord and piano, a duet that concludes the mid-
20th-century recording Said the Piano to the Harpsichord. This educational production has had a somewhat unique cultural significance as the medium through which quite a number of persons first encountered our plucked instrument. While Moore’s variation-finale remains unpublished, it is possible to transcribe the notes from the record, and thus regale live concert audiences with this charming entertainment for listeners “from three to ninety-plus.” 

Other musical examples utilized in this clever skit include a preludial movement, the mournful Le Gemisante from Jean-François Dandrieu’s 1èr Livre de Claveçin [1724]; the violently contrasting Military Polonaise in A Major, opus 40/1 by Fréderic Chopin, in which the piano demonstrates its preferred athletic and happy music and then goads the harpsichord into a ridiculous attempt at playing the same excerpt, sans pedal. That confrontation is followed by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ever-popular Tambourin, which manages to sound nearly as ridiculous when the piano tries to show that it “can play your music better than you can play mine!”—an attempt heard to be futile when the harpsichord puts that notion to rest by playing it “the way it ought to sound.”

 

The 2012 Aliénor winners chosen by judges Tracy Richardson, David Schrader, and Alex Shapiro from some 70 submitted scores: Solo harpsichord (works required to emulate in some way the Mikrokosmos pieces by Béla Bartók): composers Ivan Božičevič (Microgrooves), Janine Johnson (Night Vision), Kent Holliday (Mikrokosmicals), Thomas Donahue (Four Iota Pieces), Mark Janello (Six Harpsichord Miniatures), and Glenn Spring (Bela Bagatelles). Vocal chamber music with one obbligato instrument and harpsichord: Jeremy Beck (Songs of Love & Remembrance), Ivan Božičevič (Aliénor Courante), and Asako Hirabayashi (Al que ingrate me deja).¹⁹ ν 

 

Notes

1. Jessica Douglas-Home, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: The Harvill Press, 1996). Discography (by Alan Vicat), p. 329. 

2. Ibid. Matrices issued in France with the catalogue number P484.

  3. Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3. Pearl GEMM CD 9242 (1996).

4. Three newly constructed two-manual harpsichords built by the piano firms Érard and Pleyel, and by the instrument restorer Louis Tomasini, were shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and heard in performances at the event. The modern harpsichord revival is often dated from that year.

5. See Larry Palmer, “Revival Relics” in Early Keyboard Journal V (1986–87), pp. 45–52, and Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A 20th-Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; paperback second edition, 1993), pp. 4–6; page six is a facsimile of the first page of Rigodon.

6. See Larry Palmer, “Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite for Harpsichord at 100.” The Diapason, December 2009,
pp. 36–37.

7. See these articles in The Diapason: Donna M. Walters, “Henri Mulet: French organist-composer,” December 2008, pp. 26–29; Harpsichord News, August 2010, p. 11; and, for a complete facsimile of the original publication, the issue of January 2011,
p. 12. 

  8. Edition Breitkopf Nr. 4836 “for Piano Solo.”  

9. See Larry Palmer, “The Busoni Sonatina,” in The Diapason, September 1973, pp. 10–11; Palmer, Harpsichord in America: “Busoni and the Harpsichord,” pp. 25–26; the first harpsichord recording of this work is played by Larry Palmer on Musical Heritage Society disc LP 3222 (1975). A fine 2002 digital recording, Revolution for Cembalo (Hänssler Classic CD 98.503) features Japanese harpsichordist Sumina Arihashi playing the Busoni Sonatina, as well as Delius’s Dance, Thomé’s Rigodon, and other early revival works by Ravel, Massenet, Richard Strauss, and Alexandre Tansman.

10. The list of included composers is given in Palmer, Harpsichord in America,
p. 146. Kirkpatrick also recorded this program in 1961. 

11. “Bach Goes to Town,” Angel/EMI S-36095.

12. http://www.percygrainger.org/prog not5.htm (accessed 20 October 2011).

13. Published by G. Schirmer.

14. Persichetti’s ten sonatas for harpsichord are published by Elkan-Vogel, Inc., a subsidiary of the Theodore Presser Company, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010; the First Sonata, opus 52 (1951), was published in 1973. The Powell work remains unpublished.

15. Ule Troxler, Antoinette Vischer: Dokumente zu einem Leben für das Cembalo (Basel: Birkhäuser-Verlag, 1976). Published by Schott & Co. Ltd., London; U.S. reprint by G. Schirmer.

16. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 

17. Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist—Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The quotation is found on page 130. I assembled the two harpsichord parts by cutting and pasting them from the orchestral score of Eugene Onegin (his opus 71).  I am unaware of any other published edition.

18. Personally I find the balances for the Poulenc much better in duo performances than in live harpsichord and orchestra ones. Another interesting possibility, at least as demonstrated by a recording, may be heard on Oehms Classics compact disc OC 637, where harpsichordist Peter Kofler is partnered by organist Hansjörg Albrecht and percussionist Babette Haag in a compelling performance, recorded in 2009 in Munich.

19. For more information about Aliénor and its history, consult www.harpsichord-now.org.

 

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of harpsichord editor Larry Palmer’s first published writing in The Diapason: a brief article about Hugo Distler in the issue for November 1962. Since those graduate student days he has taught at St. Paul’s College and Norfolk State and Southern Methodist Universities, served as President of SEHKS from 2004–2008, and is a continuing member of the advisory board for Aliénor. At the Cincinnati gathering in addition to “Gathering Peascods” he played Glenn Spring’s Bela Bagatelles at the Awards recital and chaired the Sunday session devoted to “Swingtime—The Mitch Miller Showdown.” 

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

Steven Young

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.