Boyvin. De Grigny. Clerambault. Widor. Franck. Durufle

Among the names connected with the development of French organ music of the 17^th century, that of Jacques Boyvin (1653–1706) is one of the most prominent. The composer’s Deux livres d’orgue, each of which includes eight suites, bear witness to his enthusiasm in researching the new possibilities of the recently constructed organ with four manuals.
Boyvin’s Fourth Tone Suite is a sequence of contrasting – but not conflicting – pieces written in one of the eight church harmonies or tones. The organ suites, which have no specific secondary title other than “suite in the first tone, second tone…”, were intended for performance during the Magnificat. The Magnificat or “Glorification of the Virgin Mary” became part of the Catholic Church’s evening mass. During the liturgy the organ did not accompany the choir – in the French mass its role is more decorative than “declarative”. And so those parts of the service where the German organist would play what was subsequently repeated by the choir the French organist would improvise, as if tuning the choir to a certain harmony. Then the composers would make up a suite cycle from their improvisations and short pieces and have them published.
The names of the sections of Boyvin’s suite (Grand Prelude, Trio, Tercet, Duet, Tercet in Tenor, Dialogue and Fugue and Fourth Tone Prelude) are linked by a specific form, performing style and register. The suite’s music may appear simple, but this simplicity is deceptive: to the ears of Boyvin’s contemporaries the suite did not sound entirely typical, partly because of the inclusion of timbres imitating wind instruments – the cornet, trumpet and trombone.

The work of Nicolas de Grigny (1672–1703) forms one of the highpoints of the 17^th century French organ tradition as it summarises the experience and skill achieved by his predecessors. The composer inherited the musical characteristics of his predecessors – there had been many musicians like de Grigny. In the course of his short life he studied the organ under Nicolas Lebègue in Paris, worked as the organist at the famous cathedral of Rheims where the Kings of France were crowned and wrote an organ mass and five versions of Christian hymns that made up his first and only Livre d’orgue. Nicolas de Grigny’s works are known today thanks to the composer’s wife who succeeded in having this book republished in 1711. This was roughly when Johann Sebastian Bach came across the Livre d’orgue, which he copied out in his own hand to study.
The basis of the hymn Ave maris stella, which adulates the Virgin Mary, is founded on a Gregorian chant. The hymn consists of short pieces arranged in the manner of a suite. De Grigny’s attempt at the genre of the hymn was a means to create a vivid and contrasting composition. This work stands apart not just for the complexity of its counterpoint (for example, the second piece is a five-voiced organ fugue which was de Grigny’s innovation), but also for its generosity of melody and the refined and almost melancholy imagery.

The name of Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986) – an outstanding organist of the 1920s – remains to this day “widely known in narrow circles”. That should come as no surprise: in comparison with his contemporaries, he wrote staggeringly little – a mere fourteen works, among them seven pieces for organ, two for orchestra, four for chorus and one for a chamber ensemble. Duruflé received a wonderful education at the Paris Conservatoire under Charles Tournemire, Eugène Gigout and Paul Dukas. In 1943 he began to lecture at the Conservatoire as Marcel Dupré’s assistant in organ studies and as a professor of harmony. According to the memories of Duruflé’s pupils, he was a rather reserved man yet, at the same time, very sensitive. There are legends about his skills as a teacher. About his own work the composer openly admitted that writing music in a period of flourishing modernism commanded by new techniques and styles was no easy task for him. However, this did not prevent the renowned Swiss organist Lionel Rogg, for example, from bestowing great praise on Duruflé’s contribution to world music. He wrote that “Maurice Duruflé occupies a position in the world of organ music that may be compared with that of Maurice Ravel and the piano: his writing is exceptionally clear and the harmony to refined and so unique and individual, the innate sense of the possibilities and the limits of the instrument characterise their art, which is imbued with refined sensitivity.”
The Suite Op. 5, written in 1932-1933, bears the dedication “à mon Maître Paul Dukas” – “to my Master, Paul Dukas”. Duruflé’s cycle consists of three contrasting sections: the first is slow and immerses the listener in the tense expectation of a Prelude; the second is melancholy, a vague kind of Sicilienne in terms of genre; and the third is a Toccata.

Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676–1749), despite his natural talent, worked hard before becoming a Court musician of Louis XIV: he had studied the violin and harpsichord under his father, the organ under the acclaimed André Raison and composition and singing under Jean-Baptiste Moreau; for a long time he worked at various churches in Paris. But true fame as an organist came to Clérambault also thanks to his position as music director at the Saint-Cyr boarding school for girls, for the choir of which he wrote numerous secular cantatas on mythological subjects.
In Clérambault’s Second Tone Suite from the first Livre d’orgue there is a clear Italian influence, which comes through in the means of the thematic development, the use of unexpected harmonies and multi-coloured counterpoints. However, if Clérambault’s violin sonatas are still full of blind imitation of the Italian composer Corelli, then in his organ music the French composer intertwines the Italianisms into a French-style suite.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) is known, first and foremost, for the fact that together with his pupil Albert Schweizer he prepared all of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works for publication in France. Having graduated from the Conservatoire de Bruxelles in the organ class of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens and the composition class of François-Joseph Fétis, he took up the position of organist at the Église Saint-Sulpice and worked there for more than sixty years. In the 1890s Widor became a professor of organ studies at the Conservatoire de Paris and started teaching composition there. Widor’s pupils included such major French and international figures as Darius Milhaud, Louis Vierne and Edgard Varèse. The installation of new organs made by the Cavaillé-Coll firm in Paris stimulated organists to create a new repertoire that corresponded with contemporary musical practices and a new kind of instrument – the symphony organ. The new sound possibilities of this kind of instrument gave Widor the basis to call his works organ symphonies.
Widor’s Fifth Symphony is extremely popular today. Its premiere took place in 1880 during the inauguration of the Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Église Saint-Franзois-de-Sales in Lyon. In the five-part cycle one can distinguish features of suite music, even regardless of the presence of forms typical of the symphony genre – variations and the form of the sonata allegro. The toccata that concludes the Symphony is often performed as an independent piece which provides an effective ending to organists’ programmes. This is a “perpetuum mobile” for organ, where the bass figure created by the right hand and the accompanying chords in the left are set off by the immense two octave speeds in the pedals.

The typically French state of exaltation was alien to César Franck (1822–1890), a Belgian by birth. He was drawn more to German “self-intensification”. Nevertheless, living his entire life in Paris, gradating from the Paris Conservatoire, working there for almost twenty years and training such musicians as Vincent d’Indy and Ernest Chausson among many others, Franck’s name was to be forever linked with French culture. In his art the composer turned to various genres: from brief piano works to symphonic poems, operas and oratorios. In the two centuries of the history of original French organ music, Franck was the creator of the first French works for organ not connected with Church ritual. Three of his organ books Six pièces (1859–1863), Trois pièces (1878), written especially for the inauguration of the Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ at the concert hall of the Trocadéro, and the Trois chorales (1890) represent a new kind of French concert organ music.
Written by Franck in one breath towards the end of his life, the Trois chorales were to be the composer’s spiritual legacy to future generations. They are not, however, connected with the model of the 17^th century chorale – canonical psalms that were sung by the entire congregation. These are romantic instrumental poems, vast and individual in terms of their form. Chorale No 2 in B Minor from the Trois chorales draws our attention to Christ’s suffering. The music invokes associations with Bach’s choral preludes and with his Mass, also written in B Minor. Two themes form the basis of the chorale. The first theme develops according to the laws of the passacaglia: subjected to variation, it becomes transformed, now into a dramatic recitative, now into a lyrical fugato.
The second theme – the theme of the chorale – is not consciously subjected to variation by the composer. Its function lies in that it should embody unshakeable values amid a raging sea of passions.

Anna Khomenya