Our Music Director’s thoughts on the French Connections Concert Programming

"As an organist, I've always felt very "connected" to French music and to the great organ masterworks that have come out of the formidable French Romantic organ tradition.  Names such as César Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire and Marcel Dupré immediately come to mind.  What a glorious discovery to encounter some of the magnificent choral works created by some of these very same composers!  Other luminaries who are represented either vocally or instrumentally in this fascinating symphony of unique sounds and textures are also no strangers to organists and lovers of the "King of Instruments".  Composers such as Maurice Duruflé, Henri Mulet, Jean Langlais, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen all lend their distinctive flavor to this glorious musical feast. 

The connection to Belgium is very close as well, not only because a few of these composers (César Franck, Joseph Jongen and Flor Peeters) were actually born there but also because of the very fertile creative cross-pollination that exists between these two neighboring countries.  In both traditions, color and spaciousness are the indispensable characteristics inherent in every piece, whether played or sung, and we have an extraordinary "space" in the Washington National Cathedral.  It is an acoustic I have known since the age of eight when I first became a member of the Cathedral's Junior Choir.  It is a space I have come to truly savor over my career both as a concert organist, conductor and, for the past 25 years, music director of the Cathedral Choral Society.  It is here, in the sixth largest Gothic Cathedral in the world, that this music truly comes alive.  I hope you will be with us for this sonic spectacular."

-Reilly Lewis

Program Notes by Robert Aubry Davis

Our first concert for the 2010-2011 season is entirely in keeping with a music director who is also an organist.  The natural affinity Reilly Lewis would feel for a Bach was foreshadowed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for a group of French and Belgian composers who brought the organ back to its original use, as the organizing principle for the celebration of sacred music.

Let us begin with the linking figure who ties the entire concert together: Charles-Marie Widor.  Born in Lyon in 1844, he studied organ in Brussels with the great Bach specialist Jean-Nicholas Lemmens. Thanks to lobbying by Saint-Saëns and Gounod, in 1870 he got the job as organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and for over six decades held the position as teacher and composer. He was, for example, Albert Schweitzer’s teacher and collaborator on the great Bach organ editions, stressing the sacred context of Bach’s organ works. The Symphony No. 5 in f minor for Organ is from 1879, and its final movement, a toccata, was then (and is now) a "greatest hit": there are over a million Facebook hits for various performances of this challenging masterpiece. Widor's shadow and heritage define our program.

The overarching Belgian figure is César Franck, whose cultural importance in the newly-founded nation of Belgium was a source of national pride, and whose influence was as great as the contemporaries who attended his funeral in Paris in 1890: Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, and Widor, who took over Franck’s position at the Conservatoire in Paris. Natively more comfortable at the piano, Franck was also inspired by Lemmens not only to study more Bach, but also to recognize that there was also the extra-literary consideration for all these composers: a steady organist job also meant a steady paycheck (no less a consideration then as now!). Franck redoubled his efforts, became the organist and chapel master at Sainte-Clotilde in 1858, and by the 1880s was producing a body of tone poems, chamber pieces, and symphonic works that defined his lasting fame. The 1884 Psalm 150 (Louez le Dieu—O Praise God in His Holiness) is from this rich period.

Gabriel Fauré was only nineteen when he turned to one of Jean Racine’s 1688 translations from the Roman Breviary, the Ambrosian hymn for Tuesday Matins, Consors paterni luminis  (the Cantique de Jean Racine). In fact, the side-by-side presentation of the concise Latin, the elegant French of Racine, and the clinky-clanky Victorian English of Chadwick and Chambers, makes a short lesson in the hazards of translation:

Latin:
Consors paterni luminis,       
Lux ipse lucis et dies,
Noctem canendo rumpimus:
Assiste postulantibus.

French:
Verbe égal au Très-Haut, notre unique espérance,
Jour éternel de la terre et des cieux,
De la paisible nuit nous rompons le silence :
Divin sauveur, jette sur nous les yeux.

English:
O Light of Light, O Dayspring bright
Co-equal in Thy Father’s light,
Assist us as with prayer and psalm
Thy servants break the nightly calm.

Louis Vierne studied with both Franck and Widor at the Conservatoire. Nearly blind, he followed the great tradition of blind master organists that include the greatest Italian composer of the fourteenth century, Francesco Landini, the brilliant Golden Age Spaniard Antonio de Cabezón, the carillonneur, recorder virtuoso and organist at the Cathedral of Utrecht Jacob van Eyck, and dozens of other masters. Despite great personal struggles, Vierne taught the next generation of composers whom we will hear as well—Marcel Dupré, the Boulanger sisters—and when he had a massive stroke on the evening of June 2, 1937 at his 1750th recital at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, falling onto the low “E” pedal of the organ (making his lifelong dream of dying while playing at Notre Dame a reality), Maurice Duruflé held him as he died.

Vierne began his reserved and stately Solemn Mass in the summer of 1899, soon after his marriage. As we hear a portion of this unfairly neglected work (happily getting more performances on disc and in concerts like this), cast your mind back to the premiere performance at the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin on December 8, 1901 at Saint-Sulpice:  in this work for voices with two organs, Vierne was joined by his beloved master Charles-Marie Widor.

Henri Mulet was also a Widor pupil, and the ten Byzantine Sketches from his creative work during World War I happily escaped his decision in 1937 to burn most of his manuscripts and retire to the beautiful twelfth century Cistercian Abbey le Thoronet in Draugignan in Provence. He lived for three decades in seclusion, tended by the silent monks who are the keepers of any other compositions that may have been written by this still and introspective figure. Tu es Petra refers to Christ’s words to Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

Marcel Dupré took over the job at Saint-Sulpice from Widor in 1934, and held it until his death in 1971. He had also studied with Vierne, and taught both Langlais and Messiaen.  Dupré had written a series of pieces for his fallen countrymen during World War I, and the Poème Héroïque is a special tribute to those who fought at Verdun. It was completed in the 1930s, later reworked at the end of World War II to include triumphal brass, and dedicated to another generation of French warriors who also fought defending their homeland.

Lili Boulanger was the beautiful and tragically short-lived sister of the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, whose many pupils, including our own Reilly Lewis, define Washington’s own choral renaissance. While both women studied with Vierne and Fauré, Lili was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome (although she collapsed during her performance). The Psalm 24 is also a World War I work (1916), “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof/The world and they that dwell in it.” The two young women worked tirelessly for the soldiers in the war; Lili died in March 1918 at age twenty-four. Nadia lived until 1979.

Maurice Duruflé’s short Gregorian setting of the Tu es Petrus is only a glimpse into the wonders of this exacting craftsman.  Vierne had recommended him for the job as assistant at Notre Dame in 1927, and he famously premiered the Poulenc Organ Concerto in 1939 (Nadia Boulanger conducted). One could hear every note of his published choral music in less than two hours: But it would be two hours of lapidary perfection, and incomparable beauty.

Having alluded to Francis Poulenc, let’s consider two composers: the openly gay Dadaist bad boy of musical revolution, and after his visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Rocamadour in 1936, a deeply introspective composer of devotional sacred works. Critic Claude Rostand famously called these two selves of Poulenc “the monk and the punk” (“le moine et le voyou”), but it probably helps to know that at all times Poulenc was a warm and enthusiastic friend, very charitable, quick to laugh, quicker to sympathize with the plight of others, and generous to a fault. The Ave Maria for women’s voices is from the second scene, Act II of Poulenc’s tribute to bravery and faith, the opera The Dialogue of the Carmelites.

Jean Langlais also studied with Dupré, and was yet another in the tradition of great blind organists. In 1945 he took César Franck’s old job at Sainte-Clotilde (which he held until 1988), and worked extensively for young people denied sight.  The original ninth century hymn imagining the Virgin Mary as the Star of the Ocean is at the magnificent Swiss Monastery of St. Gallen.

The same generation and teachers give us the figure of Olivier Messiaen. He began studying organ with Dupré. When he started as his student in the fall of 1927, he sat for an hour in front of the intimidating instrument, and told Dupré he had never seen the organ keyboard before. The master showed him some of the basic points of organ performance for an hour or so, and a week later Messiaen came back and had learned Bach’s Fantasia in c minor to play for his teacher. From there he was given into the hands of the great Widor, and when a position came up at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité two years later, his teachers recommended him highly. Messiaen’s sixty-one years at Sainte-Trinité (or any of his other actual jobs) can reveal any of the world’s pains and joys that flowed in his music: Hindu tonalities, imprisonment by the Nazis, the knotty serialism, the songs of birds, the mysticism, the physical agony. His choral setting of Thomas Aquinas’ celebration of the Blessed Sacrament O sacrum convivium (“O sacred banquet! In which Christ is received”) is from 1937.

Marcel Godard may be the unknown name even to those who are organ enthusiasts.  Fr. Marcel took over the musical duties at the magnificent Romanesque Primatiale St. Jean à Lyon, where St. Louis was interred in 1271, and was master there for six decades. He expanded the famous Petits Chanteurs, founded in 799 by Charlemagne’s friend and ally Bishop Leidride—the Ave Maria we will hear was written for these forces--and created a mixed choir in 1960. His Vespers for the Conception of the Blessed Virgin are still sung at St. Jean every December, and on his passing in February 2007, tributes poured in from the choral and organ worlds.

Back to Belgium, Flor Peeters studied at the Jean-Nicholas Lemmens Institute in Leuven. He himself said he modeled his composing style on Marcel Dupré, and the huge Entrata Festiva was written while directing the Flemish Conservatory in Antwerp. By this time, he had abandoned a César Franck-inspired lushness for a more spare (and Gregorian chant-study driven) style he call neo-classical, but this dramatic piece for chorus, organ, brass and timpani often heard in Easter services might fit more with his labor to republish organ works by the great Flemish Renaissance composers he championed in an invaluable effort to bring their work back to light.

Finally, there is the figure of Joseph Jongen.  Also born in Liège, that home of so many incomparable composers, if we hear him at all today it is with the 1926 orchestra and organ masterpiece, the Symphonie Concertante, commissioned for the rededication of the world’s largest pipe organ, the Wanamaker organ at Macy’s in Philadelphia. The Mass, like so many of Jongen’s, has also been relegated to being in the shadow of Franck—a large shadow, naturally enough—but it helps to know that he wrote the work, dedicated “en l'honneur du Saint-Sacrement,” as an act of thanksgiving for his son’s safe release from Buchenwald in 1945 (the Credo was added three years later).

This mass of thanksgiving, like all the works we associate with the Franco-Belgian organ and choral school, exudes serenity, devotion, and the awareness of the organ as an organizing principle in praising the divine.

-Robert Aubry Davis

Robert Aubry Davis is a television and radio producer in Washington, DC. For 25 seasons, he has hosted Around Town, WETA’s Emmy Award-winning weekly arts program. He programs and hosts Symphony Hall, the classical channel on Sirius XM, and is the founder of the folk channel, The Village. He produces and hosts Millennium of Music, now in its 31st season, heard on public radio stations nationwide, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the worldwide classical service of Radio Netherlands. He is a frequent lecturer and commentator for arts institutions throughout Washington, DC.  He serves on boards for several arts and cultural organizations, including the Recording Academy, where for the last four years he has presented the Classical Music (or Latin) awards at the annual Grammy celebrations. For his work in the arts he was made me a Chevalier de L'ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Republic of France, and in 2006, he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold on decree of King Albert II of Belgium.

Our pre-concert discussion with Jeremy Filsell will be held at 2:30 pm in Perry Auditorium on the 7th floor of the Cathedral and may be reached by the elevators at the West End.

Jeremy Filsell is one of only a few virtuoso performers on both the Piano and the Organ. He has performed as a solo pianist in Russia, Scandinavia, USA and across the UK and his Concerto repertoire encompasses Mozart and Beethoven through to Rachmaninov (2nd and 3rd Concertos), Shostakovich and John Ireland. In recent years, he has recorded for CD the solo piano music of Eschmann, Howells, Goossens, Bernard Stevens and Julius Reubke. Due for release later this year is a disc of Rachmaninov’s piano music (Signum). He has recorded for BBC Radio 3, USA and Scandinavian radio networks in solo and concerto roles as both a pianist and organist and has a discography comprising over 30 solo recordings. Gramophone magazine commented that the 12 CD-series comprising the complete organ works of Marcel Dupré in 2000 to be 'one of the greatest achievements in organ recording' . In 2005, Signum released a 3-CD set of the complete organ symphonies of Louis Vierne recorded on the 1890 Cavaillé-Coll organ in St. Ouen, Rouen. This was BBC Radio 3’s Disc of the Week in September that year. He has recently appeared in solo recital across the UK and USA and also in Germany (Landsberg), France (St. Sulpice and Notre-Dame, Paris), Finland (Lahti Festival) and Norway (Oslo Dom).

Jeremy Filsell studied as an Organ Scholar at Oxford University, as a pianist at the Royal College of Music in London and privately in Paris before completing a PhD researching aesthetic and interpretative issues in the organ music of Marcel Dupré at Birmingham City University. Until 2008, he combined teaching posts at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music with a lay clerkship in the Queen's Choir at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. He was appointed Artist-in-Residence at the National Cathedral in April 2010. For further information, please visit www.jeremyfilsell.com