Welcome to Blogging the Organ Works of Duruflé!
This blog will be somewhat different than my previous two, on Bach and Messiaen, and not just because this one is on Substack! I’ll be writing about one of Duruflé’s pieces before each of my upcoming six performances of the complete works. With each piece, I’ll explore a facet of the composer’s life – but I’ll also include technical and interpretative notes.
Why Duruflé, and why now? The short answer is that I’ve always loved his organ music, and it feels like a major milestone to digest and perform it all. But I do believe there is something deeper about this repertoire. This music strives, in even the smallest detail, to achieve the utmost beauty. Artistic beauty can be redemptive in many ways. It can offer a sorely needed escape from the ugliness around us, and the banality of everyday life; it can point us toward God (as Duruflé, a devout Catholic, believed); and, through encountering beauty, we can be inspired to offer something to others, making our work and our lives as beautiful as we can.
So it’s far from a waste to practice and perform music while the world is in turmoil. After all, Duruflé himself lived through both World Wars, and he clearly felt that it was crucially important to continue composing, even as his friend Jehan Alain was killed in action and his country was occupied by Nazi Germany. Duruflé’s pursuit of beauty has inspired me over the past year as I’ve lived with his music; I hope that I might inspire someone else through my performances of it.
Everyone who knows the name of Maurice Duruflé knows two things about him: he was an obsessive perfectionist, and he was influenced by Gregorian chant. In this introductory post, I want to explore these well-worn truisms through the lens of Duruflé’s early years as a chorister.
On Easter Day 1912, Julien-Charles-Amédée Duruflé and his wife Marie-Mathilde took their musically gifted ten-year-old son on a trip to visit Rouen Cathedral, and sprung a rather monstrous surprise on him: he would not be going home, but would henceforth board at the cathedral’s choir school, the Maîtrise Saint-Évode. Duruflé’s biographer James Frazier calls this decision “as effective as it was emotionally disastrous,” which seems a fair assessment.
I also attended a Catholic choir school, Saint Paul’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I, too, was deeply shaped both as a person and a musician by my experience there. Now, there were many differences between Rouen in 1912 and Boston in 1996. St. Paul’s wasn’t a boarding school, my parents didn’t abandon me as I cried myself to sleep, and the musical repertoire had changed after Vatican II (more on that in a future post). But still, we sang for daily Mass, and our curriculum and repertoire – which also included Duruflé’s choral works! – was fundamentally rooted in Gregorian chant.
Duruflé was exactly the right age to learn the methods of chant disseminated by the abbey of Solesmes, which were displacing the heavy, slow, and monotonous performances common in the 19th century. Describing those methods, and how they changed over time, would require a doctoral dissertation – which I’m not qualified to write, but which fortunately has already been written. The important thing was the effect produced. Duruflé later recalled, “It was an up-to-date presentation of this marvelous Gregorian chant with all its suppleness, its flight, its mystical radiance.”
The flexibility of rhythm, the complexity contained in a single musical line, the difficulty of shaping it into a living phrase – all this would have rubbed off on the young Duruflé, as it did on me. If you learn, at a formative age, to sing a line of chant – no harmony, no rhythmic support, no instrumental colors – with utmost fluidity, utmost nuance, utmost fidelity to the text, then ever afterwards you will strive to hear this ideal beauty in every line of every piece. When this level of attention is brought to each part in a polyphonic work, like a Victoria motet or Duruflé’s own Requiem, the combination of detail blossoms exponentially, and the effect becomes almost overwhelming.
For any precocious child, this would make an inspiring challenge. The repertoire of chant, and of polyphony based on chant, is so large that one could spend several lifetimes on it and only scratch the surface. The outline of the church calendar, and its annual repetitions, is easily glimpsed, but the deeper one looks, the more there is to learn, and the more dizzying fractal complexity is revealed.
And there is a thorny contradiction that underpins a religious education: one must give one’s very best effort in the world, but still, the greatest human accomplishments are nothing before God. This belief is sometimes spoken out loud, but it is also powerfully implicit in every detail of architecture, stained glass, vestments, incense, polyphony, every bit of evidence that these things matter, and someone applied the best of their talents to them, despite not knowing what the future would bring, even if their effort might never be noticed.
Church musicians can have many different reactions to this situation. Apathy can set in, or routine can take over, or one can cheerfully accept one’s cosmic insignificant and find down-to-earth pleasure in completing one’s daily tasks. But for a certain type of personality, that quest for perfection could become an all-consuming passion. Duruflé was that type of person, and I think the seeds of his perfectionism were sown early.
Stay tuned for the first post about the organ works proper, coming soon!