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French Organ Music
An Introduction
Contemporary reports indicate that when Louis-Claude Daquin (1694-1772) played a Christmas recital at Notre Dame he drew crowds in their thousands; the two organ masses of François Couperin (1668-1733) are unsurpassed in scale and invention; and the unique French classical organ as built by François-Henri Cliquot (1732-1790) defines an epoch. Yet this halcyon period for French organ composition was to come to an abrupt end at the foot of the guillotine in 1789.
Revolution was to touch all corners of French life, and it comes as no surprise that one of Daquin’s successors at Notre Dame, Claude Balbastre (1727-1799), was forced to save the cathedral organ from marauding crowds of republicans by improvising on patriotic songs. Consequently, during a so-called “post-classical” era, musical quality fell sharply after the glories of the Grand Siècle and the Church was secularised, her assets seized, buildings were used as storerooms, stables or barracks, and many organs were sold or destroyed.
By the middle of the 19th century, the parlous state of church music in Paris was a source of great controversy. The opening of the Paris Conservatoire in 1795 and the increasing interest in opera and ballet heralded a musical liberation in the city that marked a decline in solemn church music. It was inevitable that the organ would follow the trend – a simpler pianistic style emerged and the Tierce en taille and Plein Jeu of François Couperin were lost forever.
The ascendancy of Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817-1869) reflects the public desire for simple and accessible music. By the 1830s the style of the opera comique was firmly entrenched in the fashionable Parisian churches and organists deficient in both taste and technique were dazzling their congregations with “the barcarolle, the galop, the valse and the polka”! The composer and organist Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) had little time for most of his contemporaries, rebuking them as “musicians without brains, performers without fingers”. Saint-Saëns survived for 20 years at the church of La Madeleine, where he succeeded Lefébure-Wély in 1863, but his august and erudite mentor Alexandre-Pierre-François Boëly (1785-1858) fared less well, and was dismissed from his post at a neighbouring church for playing too many fugues!
Change was inevitable and revolution was not slow in coming. Over the next 20 years, two distinct organ schools emerged, one headed by Saint-Saëns and César Franck (1822-1890), and the other by Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) and Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937). The key elements in both these schools of composition and performance were the great French organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899) and the Belgian organist Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (1823-1881). The majority of the music on this recording is in some way indebted to this revolution.
Saint-Saëns’ passionate attachment to the 18th century and Franck’s love of Bach, Beethoven and Schubert meant that both men were willing to swim against the tide. Both were deemed esoteric, but their influence was pervasive. When French organ art had sunk to its lowest point, Saint-Saëns’ teacher, Boëly, was one of the few musicians to respect contrapuntal idioms and to urge the building of German pedalboards. An admirer of Bach, Haydn, Mozart piano and Beethoven, his tastes were reflected in his pupil’s programming and composition – in the 1860s and 1870s Saint-Saëns performed all Mozart’s piano concertos and promoted the works of Bach, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and Saint-Saëns’ own music is the epitome of balance, clarity and elegance. As professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire from 1872, César Franck exerted a gentle influence over a generation of organists, and his music overflows with a unique mastery of harmony and counterpoint. In addition, Franck often included the works of the 18th century masters in his recitals, and when he opened the new Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Basilica of St Clotilde in December 1859, he finished his programme with Bach’s mighty Prelude and Fugue in E Minor.
The influence of Cavaillé-Coll’s new instruments cannot be underestimated. His reputation was launched by the organ he built in 1841 for the abbey of St Denis, and a succession of Parisian organs, including those at La Madeleine (1846), St Clotilde (1859), St Sulpice (1862) and Notre Dame (1868) followed – all masterpieces in their own right. In 1932 Charles-Marie Widor summed it up: “our school owes its creation – I say it without reservation – to the special, magical sound of these instruments”.
In northern Europe a true tradition of organ playing centred around the music of Bach still survived. The year 1844 saw the first French performances of the works of Bach by the German organist Adolph Friedrich Hesse (1809-1863). In a recital at the church of St Eustache, Hesse carried to France a style he had learned from Rinck, who had been trained by Kittel, who had been taught by Bach himself. Those who were accustomed to organists who played airs and depicted battles found Hesse intolerably boring, but a few found it significant: in the audience was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and leaving the church he felt sure he had glimpsed the future.
When Hesse’s most famous pupil, Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens visited Paris in 1850, Cavaillé-Coll jumped at the chance to entrust to his care two young and very brilliant Frenchmen, Guilmant and Widor. The organ builder’s protégés travelled to Brussels and returned to Paris having mastered a technique that placed them in a different league from all their contemporaries. By the 1860s, Lemmens’ style had begun to be lauded by some as the “pure tradition of Bach”.
So, while minor composers were entertaining their listeners with thunderstorms and depictions of shipwrecks, it took a new generation of composers to exploit the true value of Cavaillé-Coll’s extraordinary instruments. An almost apostolic succession of organist-composers emerged over the next 100 years, but the composer and teacher who did the most to ensure that new structures rose from the foundations laid by Hesse and Lemmens was Widor. Single-mindedly he saw to it that Bach was revered by a line of young musicians, who became masters in their turn.
On New Year’s Eve, 1869, while deputising for Saint-Saëns at La Madeleine with Cavaillé-Coll at his side, the 25 year old Widor learnt of the sudden death of Lefébure-Wély. Within a few days Widor was installed as titulaire of St Sulpice and was to preside over its “amphitheatre” of a console and command the 100 stops of Cavaillé-Coll’s largest masterwork for more than 63 years. Indeed, the instrument had such a profound influence on the composer that he later remarked: “One will never write for the orchestra in the same way as for the organ. But from now on, one will have to be as careful managing tone colour in an organ work as in an orchestral.”
Widor succeeded Franck at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890 and immediately imposed discipline in technique, improvisation and execution upon his students. His first pupils included Louis Vierne (1870-1937) and Charles Tournemire (1870-1939), and over the next 50 years, Widor was singularly powerful and influential. To Widor, Vierne owed his appointment at Notre Dame in 1900. Thanks to Widor, Marcel Dupré, his most devoted disciple, carried off the coveted Rome Prize, pursued a career in America and succeeded Widor as titulaire of St Sulpice in 1934. Alexandre Guilmant owed him his appointment as professor of organ at the Conservatoire; and in 1914, Widor was appointed permanent secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts and directed state money and prestige to such artists as he thought deserving.
When Dupré succeeded Eugène Gigout (1870-1937) as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire in 1926, the Widorian tradition was guaranteed for yet another generation – for Marcel Dupré honoured the “pure tradition of Bach” as “dogma incontestible”! In 28 years, from 1926 to 1954, Dupré produced a prodigious number of international virtuosos – among them Marie-Claire Alain, Pierre Cochereau, Jeanne Demessieux, Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, Jean Guillou, Gaston Litaize and Odile Pierre – putting into practice “the precious methods [he] had been privileged to learn” from Widor. Other pupils, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) and Jean Langlais (1907-1992) found fame as composers.
As a successor to Franck and Tournemire at the Parisian church of St Clotilde, Langlais also felt the magical influence of Cavaillé-Coll’s work. Indeed, the St Clotilde organ was so important an influence that he laughingly called it his “mistress”. “I will never forget the feelings aroused in me the first time I played it. The first chords I played, on the three 8 foot foundations of the swell, were literally overwhelming. For 25 years, each Sunday has brought me a renewal of those feelings”. Even Olivier Messiaen’s music, with its unique mix of bird song, modes, eastern rhythms and plainsong, promotes the Romanticist ideal of Franck and Widor. One could even go further and say that the composer’s obsession with duration has its roots in Lemmens’ teaching, and his suites hark back to the form Widor and Vierne developed. Certainly, both composers demonstrate the fascination french composers have always had for modes, and in their requests for specific timbres, they are fulfilling a tradition which has its foundation in the 18th century classicists and the music of Saint-Saëns and Guilmant – both legendary “colourists”.
With Messiaen’s death in 1992, a tradition came to an end. It was a tradition that is still copied the world over, but nonetheless, in the music of Langlais and Messiaen, it found a level of sophistication which is unlikely to be surpassed. And in many ways the tradition came full circle – Cavaillé-Coll built on the precedent of Cliquot, and Franck, Saint-Saëns and Widor built on the example of the masters of the 18th century. This recording is but a small taste of nearly 150 years of intense creativity.
Andrew Cantrill
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Recorded in the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, New Zealand, on 12, 13 & 15 May 2002
Executive Producer Ross Hendy
Producer Kate Mead
Recording Engineer, Editor and Mastering Neil Maddever
Organ Technician Timothy Hurd
Assistant Richard Apperley
Booklet Notes Andrew Cantrill
Booklet Editor Janey MacKenzie
Design Mallabar Music
The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, Jenny Gibbs, Dr. Margaret Orbell, John Drawbridge, Rebecca Wilson (City Gallery, Wellington).
Gordon Walters (1919-1995) Untitled (1955), gouache on paper, 250mm x 300mm. Private Collection, Auckland. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gordon Walters.
Born in Wellington, Gordon Walters undertook part-time study at Wellington Technical College in the mid-1930s, which was later augmented by a valuable association with the emigré artist, Theo Schoon. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Walters lived and worked in Australia and Europe and by the late 1950s his work was involved with the important themes and images that continued to reappear in his painting throughout his working life. A major survey of his painting was organised by the Auckland Art Gallery in 1983 and was followed more recently in 1994 by Parallel Lines – Gordon Walters in Context. His abstraction is rooted in the patterns of Polynesia, notably the koru motif that is found in much of his mature work of the 1960s and 1970s. His late paintings continued to develop his interest in an art of abstract relationships and his example is important to many artists working in New Zealand today.
John Drawbridge (b.1930) Approach to St André, Artois (1960), etching and mezzotint, 600mm x 497 mm.
Private Collection, Wellington. Reproduced by permission of the artist.
Born in Wellington, John Drawbridge studied at Wellington Technical College Art School and was awarded a scholarship to London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1957. He worked and studied in London and in Paris where much of his focus was on printmaking. The Approach to St André, Artois was completed in 1960 in Paris and demonstrates a successful combing technique – where the landscape is seen to be largely made up of lines which are almost Futurist in their sweeping, symmetrical formation. Since returning to New Zealand in 1963 Drawbridge has lived and worked at Island Bay, Wellington where his studio overlooks Cook Strait. Not only has he been inspired by the colours, forms and rhythms of the coastal environment, he has explored the interior of his beachfront house, its many windows framing figures as well as vistas of the world beyond.
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