2 The Paris Conservatory from its Origins to Demessieux’s Time, 1933-1941

My technique is coming along:
all I lack is a little stability in my fingers…
a successful entrance audition to the Conservatory is in sight.
—Letter of May 22, 1933

Readers of biographies of nineteenth-century French musicians may be familiar with passing mention of the “Paris Conservatory”—as France’s national music school is generally known—but fail to appreciate how radically it differed from present-day conservatories and music schools in North America. Knowledge of the Conservatory’s origins and idiosyncrasies contributes to understanding Jeanne Demessieux’s experiences there. This chapter will outline some of the history and nature of the Conservatory, and features of piano, composition, and organ study there during Demessieux’s time.

Located in the capital city, the Conservatoire national de musique et d’art dramatique, as it was formally named during the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, was then France’s only institution for training the most advanced of young musicians.¹ It accepted singers, instrumentalists, and composers under age 30 who had already received training and were aiming to undertake music professionally. In pursuit of the highest calibre of musician for each individual area of study, the Conservatory required prospective students to compete for a limited number of places in each discipline. As can be gathered from reading Demessieux’s 1932–1933 letters to her sister Yolande, the level of competition for entrance to a Conservatory piano class was extremely high: despite her diploma in piano from the Montpellier Conservatory Demessieux needed to study privately with one of the Conservatory’s eminent performer-teachers, Lazare-Lévy, for a year before he deemed her ready to compete for entrance. This gave acceptance to the one class, not to a program of music courses. Then, because Demessieux wanted to pursue composition at the Conservatory, she studied harmony privately, prior to entering the competition for admission to a class in that subject.

Acceptance of students to individual disciplines rather than to a curriculum of music courses reflected the origins of the Paris Conservatory in two predecessor institutions, each of which was like a trade school.² One was Paris’s Royal School of Singing, created in 1784 during the reign of Louis XVI. Young men and women were instructed in singing, instruments, accompanying, dancing, declamation, and music composition, in support of the city’s opera houses and theatres, and the royal court.³ The School was directed by an esteemed composer of opera, symphonies, and choral and chamber music, François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829). The other, the National Institute of Music, was created during the Revolutionary period, in 1793. This was a renaming of the Free School of the Paris National Guard; it had grown out of a military band formed to provide music for the French Revolution’s outdoor festivals—events meant to bolster the patriotism of the Republic’s citizens. The National Institute of Music taught brass, woodwinds, and percussion to young students and was directed by the original founder of the band of the National Guard, the military officer Bernard Sarrette (1765–1858). Though a non-musician, Sarrette was a very capable leader and administrator. In 1795, the French government united the School of Singing and the National Institute of Music to form a national Conservatory of Music with the continuing mandates of providing musicians for Paris stages and for outdoor patriotic festivals. Gossec was appointed to a committee of “inspectors of teaching,” which oversaw standards of musical education and consisted entirely of French composers well-known for their operas.⁴ Sarrette became the administrative head of the Conservatory, a role he would retain until the 1814 restoration of the French monarchy.

That the Conservatory was born of two schools, one for opera and one that began as a military band, explains two features of the Conservatory, to be discussed next, that Demessieux experienced in the 1930s and 1940s.

Virtuosity

Charged with forming musicians for Paris opera houses, in the training of soloists the Conservatory aimed for the technical display desired by audiences made up of the average opera- and concert-goer.⁵ The syllabus for Demessieux’s piano class during her first academic year at the Conservatory, 1933–1934, illustrates this focus.⁶ It begins with a group of pieces meant to build technique:

Chopin, Études
Liszt, [La] Leggierezza [concert étude]
[Gabriel] Pierné, Étude symphonique
[Joseph Christoph] Kessler, Études
Czerny, École de la main gauche

The syllabus continues with pieces by nineteenth-century composers well known to twentieth-century French audiences:

Beethoven, Sonata, Op. 109
Schumann, Carnaval
Liszt, Concert paraphrase on the Songe d’une nuit d’été of Mendelssohn
Bach-Liszt, Preludes and Fugues
Beethoven, Concerto No. 3
Chopin, Ballade No. 2 in F major

Elimination Exam:⁷
Beethoven, Sonata, Op. 101 (Adagio and Finale)
Schumann, Novellette No. 8
Chopin, Prelude No. 16

Competition:
Chopin, Ballade No. 3 in G Minor

Clearly Demessieux was required to learn piano works that are still considered among the most demanding by each composer. Beethoven’s Sonatas Op. 109 and 101 count as two of the most challenging of the 32 sonatas, and the Concerto No. 3 is one of the more virtuosic of his five piano concertos.⁸ Schumann’s large-scale piano works are all very strenuous for the performer, with Carnaval being among the most difficult of all and No. 8 of the Novelletten being the longest of the set.⁹ Chopin’s Ballades Nos. 2 and 3 and the Prelude No. 16 are three of the most thorny of the composer’s works.¹⁰ As for the Bach-Liszt and the arrangement from Mendelssohn, like all of Liszt’s piano compositions, they show the composer to have broken new ground in piano technique and piano effects.¹¹

Knowing the repertoire that Demessieux tackled during her first year in a Conservatory piano class also casts light on comments about her piano playing in letters to her sister—as when she wrote, “The notorious passage by Liszt that I couldn’t manage, well, I worked on it for a good half-hour, and I can now play it very well” (September 29, 1933).

Bureaucratic administration

The second feature experienced by Demessieux derives from the Conservatory’s origin in a school run by a military officer: it was created with, and continued to have, a bureaucratic administration that enforced strict discipline upon instructors and students in observance of government-decreed regulations.¹² On two occasions, Demessieux found herself stymied by Conservatory regulations or bureaucracy. In 1934, when the piano teacher with whom Demessieux desired to work, Lazare-Lévy, sought to have her moved to his own class from the one in which she had been placed in 1933, the intransigence of her current teacher, Santiago Riera, caused the rule that balanced the number of students in each instructor’s class to be rigidly maintained. As a result, Demessieux was consigned to remain with a teacher with whom she felt uncomfortable.¹³

In a later skirmish, after an authorized year’s leave of absence (1941–1942) from her composition class, Demessieux wrote to the teacher, asking him to accept her complete withdrawal from the class.¹⁴ First there was no response, then Demessieux was perturbed to receive a stern note from France’s Academy of Fine Arts declaring her withdrawn from composition unless she resumed the class by a set date—apparently, she had not gone through the proper bureaucratic channel to remove herself.

There were two other attributes of the Conservatory that Demessieux encountered during her studies, and that were original to the institution as founded in the late eighteenth century: its philosophical approach to musical style and its method of developing the highest calibre of performers.

A conservative approach to music

As implied by the name “Conservatory,” the school that Demessieux attended was meant to conserve all that was best in music and eschew innovation for its own sake.¹⁵ This conservative slant was strategically maintained. One way was by the appointment of the most venerated of well-established French composers as the institution’s composition instructors. Another, during the nineteenth century, was designating these instructors as the institution’s inspectors of teaching, overseeing the work of all other teachers. Moreover, a pattern developed when the government repeatedly chose the overall administrative director of the Conservatory from among the most musically traditionalist of composers. Following Sarrette (definitively ousted at the end of 1815), a harmony teacher, François Louis Perne, served as director of the Conservatory (1816–1822); he was known for his ability to write complex fugues and for publishing a textbook on harmony and accompaniment.¹⁶ Subsequently in the nineteenth century, the director was always chosen from among the school’s composition teachers; they themselves were laureates of the Conservatory and successful composers of French opera, though none were composers that would become internationally known.¹⁷

During Demessieux’s time, 1933–1941, the director was ultraconservative composer Henri Rabaud (1873–1949). He came to the post as a composer of opera and instrumental music, an opera conductor, and a former director of the Paris Opera.¹⁸ During the years Demessieux was in a composition class (1939–1941), both instructors teaching that subject—Henri Busser (b. 1872) and Jean Roget-Ducasse (b. 1873)—had begun their careers in the nineteenth century. So had other musicians Rabaud typically chose to serve on juries evaluating student compositions. In her diary entry of January 30, 1941, Demessieux noted the following as jurors for that day’s composition exam: Philippe Gaubert (b. 1879), Henri Rabaud (b. 1873), Henri Busser (b. 1872), Marcel Samuel-Rousseau (b. 1882), Georges Hüe (b. 1858), and Marcel Dupré (b. 1886). Since the average age of the jurors was 66, the majority of them had formed their musical tastes before the turn of the twentieth century. Therefore, it is not surprising that the violin sonata Demessieux presented for this composition exam in early 1941, which used dissonant harmony and angular melody, received almost nothing in the way of approval.¹⁹

Competitive training

As Demessieux recounts in her diaries and letters of the 1930s and 1940s, Conservatory students in her time were examined each January and May. But a diploma in the specific discipline was not awarded on the basis of a successful examination, nor were all diplomas equal in value. They were referred to as a “First Prize” or “Second Prize,” and the annual spring or early summer events at which qualifying students vied for these awards were literally “competitions.”²⁰ Competitions in the various instruments and singing, and the announcement of winners, were also open to the public at the time. The judging of entries in harmony, fugue, composition, organ, piano accompanying, and orchestral conducting occurred behind closed doors, but prizes in these disciplines, reported to the public, carried the same prestige.²¹

Demessieux would also have been aware that the number of First or Second Prizes that could be awarded for a discipline in one year was limited, at least notionally, adding to their value. Most importantly, First Prize winners were automatically viewed as members of the cultural élite and, in a sense, potential public servants: the highest diploma in a musical discipline was, theoretically, accreditation for an entry-level post as an opera singer, orchestral musician, accompanist, or conductor in France. Alternatively, First Prize winners would qualify for a position as a branch conservatory teacher, teaching assistant to a Paris Conservatory class, or teacher of a Paris Conservatory solfège class.

A student could not necessarily expect to win a prize the first time he or she competed. But there was always hope for at least a First or Second “Mention” (accessit), and that in subsequent years their standing would be bettered. In pursuit of a First Prize, ambitious students could continue in the same class for as many years as they were eligible (the upper age limit in Demessieux’s time was twenty-nine) and had sufficient financial support. Nevertheless, Demessieux hoped for immediate success. According to her diary entry for June 28, 1934, she was upset upon achieving only a Second Mention the first time she competed as a pianist.

Piano study at the Conservatory²²

When Demessieux arrived in Paris in 1932, with the intent of preparing to compete for a place in a Conservatory piano class, she was eager to study with the eminent performer and Conservatory teacher Lazare-Lévy (1882–1964). To that end, this section will begin with a short history of piano teaching at the Conservatory, to explain how Lazare-Lévy’s approach to piano-playing differed from that of his Conservatory colleagues in 1932.²³ It will then briefly describe the approaches of other piano teachers with whom Demessieux studied from 1932 to 1938—Lélia Gousseau (1909–1997), Santiago Riera (1867–1959), and Magda Tagliaferro (1893–1986).

The history of French pianism begins with the founding of the Conservatory in 1795. Though after 1800 it discontinued harpsichord as an instrument of instruction and began to teach piano only, the style of keyboard technique that had been used for harpsichord playing persisted. By the mid-nineteenth century, the French style of piano performance contrasted that of eastern Europe in both manner of interpretation and technique. According to Charles Timbrell, the Conservatory’s tendency to engage its own graduates as teachers assured the French style, built upon the “clarity, elegance, and sobriety of expression” associated with the French harpsichord school of the eighteenth century “in opposition to the interpretive ‘excesses’ of the Liszt and Rubinstein schools.”²⁴ Technically, the French style came to involve

fast, super-articulated playing; light, transparent sounds produced with minimal wrist and arm motion. The fingers were high, but they never really felt the bottom of the keybed.²⁵

This style of keyboard technique was also compatible with nineteenth-century French-built pianos by Pleyel, Érard, and Gaveau.²⁶

Emphasis on finger technique in French pianism persisted into the early twentieth century via the famous pianist-composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921, not a Conservatory teacher) and pianist, harpsichordist, and Conservatory teacher Louis Diémer (1843–1919), who taught at the Conservatory during the period 1887–1919.²⁷ It was also taught by other performer-teachers who had begun their tenure at the Conservatory as piano instructors prior to 1905, among them Antonin Marmontel (taught 1901–1907) and Isidor Philipp (taught 1903–1934).²⁸

I can only speculate on what style of pianism Demessieux learned from her sister or from Léonce Granier in the south of France in the 1920s and early 1930s. Yolande Demessieux is said to have studied with Philipp.²⁹ If so, she may or may not have been influenced by Philipp’s emphasis on finger technique.”³⁰ On the other hand, I wonder whether Montpellier teachers Yolande Demessieux or Léonce Granier had heard the playing, or been influenced by the teaching, of Blanche Selva (1884–1942), who was aware of the Russian school of piano playing. She adopted “weight-playing, ‘free fall’ of the arm from the shoulder, rotary action of the forearm, and related ideas.”³¹ Selva supposedly had students not only in Paris but in cities in southern France, including Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Nîmes, and Valence.³²

It was through Selva and other leading French performers that, during the early decades of the twentieth century, the nature of French pianism gradually changed. Most influential of all during the first decades of the century were performer-teachers Édouard Risler (taught at the Conservatory 1907–1909), Swiss-born Alfred Cortot (taught 1907–1923), Belgian-born Lazare-Lévy (taught 1923–1941 and 1944–1953), and Yves Nat (taught 1934–1956).³³ All four were Conservatory laureates who had earned their First Prizes under Diémer but were subsequently open to other influences. Risler studied in Germany with three of Liszt’s most important students.³⁴ Cortot, who took lessons with Risler, gained a German perspective when he studied conducting in Germany.³⁵ Lazare-Lévy and Nat, too, remade their techniques to incorporate much more arm weight and more legato than Diémer taught.³⁶ Lazare-Lévy’s former student Lélia Gousseau (who became his teaching assistant and would go on to teach a Conservatory piano class in the 1960s and 1970s) has described his technique as “certainly different from the older school in France. You might say that it was Russian-like, but really it was his personal blend of arm use, a relaxed body, and firm fingers.”³⁷

Lazare-Lévy alone of the influential four was teaching at the Conservatory when Demessieux arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1932. It is not known how he and Demessieux connected that autumn, but it may have been Montpellier Conservatory director Maurice Le Boucher who recommended them to each other.³⁸ According to Demessieux, to prepare her to audition at the Conservatory, Lazare-Lévy assigned her to work under his assistant Lélia Gousseau for the building of her technique and repertoire.³⁹ It is logical to assume that Gousseau taught the same approach to piano technique as Lazare-Lévy. He, himself, gave Demessieux occasional lessons, and was very encouraging of her progress.⁴⁰

When in 1933 Demessieux auditioned for entrance to the Conservatory as a pianist, there were five piano classes, including Lazare-Lévy’s. Three of the five instructors were associated with the nineteenth-century style of French pianism: Isidor Philipp (who in 1934 was succeeded by Yves Nat), Victor Staub (taught 1909–1941), and Marguerite Long (taught 1920–1940). A fourth instructor was Spanish-born Santiago Riera (taught 1913–1937). According to Riera’s student Daniel Erincourt,

Riera . . . was an excellent teacher of an advanced class. . . his emphasis was very much on interpretation—color, emotion, dash, and the overall effect of a work. He had a hot Latin temper and no patience with unprepared students. . . I studied with him for three years, but I never heard him tell a student that he needed to relax or to use more forearm or shoulder. And neither did Falkenberg [Paris Conservatory teacher of a preparatory piano class]. What they taught was primarily high finger articulation.⁴¹

Contrary to what Demessieux would have hoped for after her successful audition, it was not Lazare-Lévy’s, but Riera’s class that had openings and into which she was placed. As a result, Demessieux spent four years studying under Riera, by which point, in 1937, she had advanced to winning a Second Prize. That year, the set piece by which all 45 participants in the women’s piano competition were compared was the Allegro movement from Saint-Saëns’ Concerto No. 3.⁴² According to Trieu-Colleney, Demessieux not only learned music of Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, and Schumann for Riera’s class, but also studied some Russian repertoire and music of Ravel.⁴³

As Timbrell points out, in the Paris Conservatory tradition, piano students performed in two different classes, that is, with two teachers, each week.⁴⁴ In addition to the class with the main teacher, there was a class for building piano technique taught by an assistant teacher called a répétiteur (répétitrice in the case of a woman). The assistant with whom Demessieux worked while she was in Riera’s class is never specifically named in the letters and diary. However, ongoing mention of “Mademoiselle Gousseau” or simply “Mademoiselle” in letters from this period suggests that Demessieux continued to study with Gousseau after joining Riera’s class. For instance, in a 1935 letter to Yolande, Demessieux’s mother reports, “Mademoiselle was happy, Monday, with the Chopin sonata: Jeanne is progressing in strength,” then adds, “From now on, all the Saturday classes will be for exercises, four Czerny études, a Bach prelude and fugue, which will make three classes per week . . .” (October 20, 1935).

Surviving letters also suggest that even after Demessieux began in Riera’s class, Lazare-Lévy continued to give her occasional lessons.⁴⁵ According to Trieu-Colleney, the latter continued until 1937 to advise Demessieux on interpretation.⁴⁶

Demessieux studied with yet one more piano instructor in Paris: when Riera retired in 1937, his class was taken over by Brazilian-born Magda Tagliaferro (1893–1986). It was under her that Demessieux won her First Prize in piano in 1938, when the set piece was Chopin’s Fantaisie.⁴⁷ From a younger generation than Lazare-Lévy and Riera, Tagliaferro was still in the prime of her performing career during her short tenure at the Conservatory (1937–1940). Most importantly, following her First Prize in piano under a Conservatory teacher of the old school of French piano playing, Antonin Marmontel, she took private lessons with Cortot.⁴⁸ Thereafter, Tagliaferro dedicated herself to “improving and leveraging the technique she had assimilated from Cortot,” to use the words of Tagliaferro’s Japanese student, Asako Tamura.⁴⁹ In 1997, Tamura published a short book on Tagliaferro’s technical method, detailing “exercises that allowed pianists to develop flexibility and lightness of movement in the arms and in the hands, extremely important conditions in order to obtain the desired sonority in their performances.”⁵⁰ Similarly, Tagliaferro student Germaine Mounier reported, “She taught us to play with relaxation in the arms, using rather exaggerated movements to free them up and get real souplesse.”⁵¹

It is impossible to determine whether Tagliaferro’s influence on Demessieux had more to do with technique or interpretation. Nevertheless, the impact of Tagliaferro’s teaching is suggested by an undated film clip posted online by France’s Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA).⁵² Following an interview segment, it shows Demessieux performing an excerpt from a piano piece, using, in slow passages, large arm movements and great flexibility of the wrist.

Composition study at the Conservatory during Demessieux’s time (1939–1941)

Since early childhood, Demessieux had enjoyed penning her own pieces in the style of composers whose music she played.⁵³ Therefore, she was as eager to study composition at the Conservatory as piano. Through her solfège course at the Montpellier Conservatory, Demessieux had also developed the music-dictation and score-reading skills needed to enter the Conservatory’s composition stream of courses. This stream began with a class called harmony, and in November 1934, in preparation for acceptance to that class, Demessieux began studying this subject privately with Paris composer and Conservatory instructor Noël Gallon (who would later be the instructor of her Conservatory class in fugue). According to Trieu-Colleney, in just one year of private lessons Demessieux mastered an entire harmony treatise (unnamed), and in October of 1936 she passed the entrance exam in harmony.⁵⁴

Demessieux was then placed in a class consisting largely of students in their second, third or fourth year of study, taught by composer and choirmaster Jean Gallon.⁵⁵ In preparation for examinations and the harmony competition, she and her fellow students worked exercises in adding three voices to a given melody or a given bass line. This may sound familiar to modern readers, but, as illustrated by an exercise that she completed (which is preserved in a collection published in homage to Jean Gallon), it does not fully describe what Demessieux was practising under Gallon.⁵⁶

Donning my glasses as a music theorist, I have included an in-depth musical analysis of the “given melody” exercise and Demessieux’s working of it below for the benefit of readers who wish to understand something of the harmonic language she was taught.

The given melody (the style of which is consistent with given melodies on Conservatory harmony exams from the 1930s I have examined):⁵⁷

• is notated in soprano C-clef, with a key signature of no sharps or flats.
• is 39 measures long.
• is conceived in an instrumental rather than vocal style, as it employs a wide range, flowing rhythm, many skips and leaps, and frequent chromatic passages that move either in half steps or skips and leaps.
• is punctuated by short silences every three to five measures that define its rhythmic motives, as well as its phrase structure.
• opens with an upward octave leap from A4, and in the next two measures circles around A5 and A4, avoiding motion from G-sharp to A, thereby implying A as a modal, rather than tonal, centre.
• avoids throughout any melodic motion that is clearly from a leading tone to its tonic and might imply functional harmony; the only exception is a hint of G-sharp to A that occurs four measures from the end.
• is conceived such that in some places its apparent pitch centre fluctuates so rapidly that a sense of tonality is suspended.
• is, throughout, unified by a small number of rhythmic motives and contour motives.
• has an overall shape governed by: a return, ten measures from the end, of the motive from the opening one-and-a-half bars; a climax on B5 five measures from the end; and an outline of an A-minor triad three measures from the end, concluding on E5.

Demessieux added three lower voices notated in alto, tenor, and bass clefs.

• In keeping with the style of the given melody, her lowest voice does not function as a conventional bass line, directing functional harmony, but is in the same melodic style as the upper parts. As a result, the effect is of modal counterpoint and, in some places, dissonant counterpoint.
• Demessieux’s setting is unified by motivic consistency and equality of rhythmic and motivic interest in all four voices, with occasional imitation from voice to voice.
• Demessieux accompanies silence in the given melody with flowing motion in two or more of the added voices.
• The larger-scale organizational principles of Demessieux’s solution to the exercise are also contrapuntal rather than harmonic. Her first-to-enter voice, the alto, anticipates by one measure the opening bar of the given melody (soprano). The next-to-enter voice, the tenor, anticipates a melodic idea from measures 11–12 of the given melody. The last-to-enter voice, the bass, imitates the opening bar of the given at another pitch level. Finally, the reprise of the opening bar that occurs in the given melody ten measures from the end is anticipated two and three measures in advance by modified imitations in alto and bass, respectively.
• Demessieux’s concluding cadences—to an A-minor triad (with a bass skip of a downward major third) three measures from the end, and to an A-major triad (with a bass skip of an upward major third) in the final measure—employ dissonant chords that, nonetheless, give a modal effect.

Having examined the given melody and listened to Demessieux’s setting of it, I would argue that in her course with Jean Gallon, Demessieux was applying a quasi-impressionistic style of harmony and practising counterpoint just as much as harmony.

Before continuing to the next course in the composition stream, a student needed to earn a prize in harmony. In a 1920 essay explaining to Anglophones how the Paris Conservatory operates, Isidor Philipp described the scene of a harmony competition. Demessieux and other female students would have experienced similar circumstances:⁵⁸

The harmony competition takes place in privacy. Each competitor is locked up, some Sunday in June or July, at six o’clock in the morning, in one of the classrooms, where he remains until his work is done, at the latest until midnight. He is prohibited from having any communication with the outside world or with his fellow competitors, and he is watched so that no message can be carried to him by a restaurant waiter at meal-time, for his meals have to be eaten incommunicado by the student. When he reaches the class-room he is given the text of the composition he is to write; a bass and a song [a melody] of some forty measures. His work is to write, while he is segregated, the three complementary parts of the text given him, without consulting music, examples, harmony books, piano, etc.⁵⁹

The jury would then listen, in private, to the anonymous entries performed on piano, and vote on Prizes and Mentions to be awarded.

The next course to be completed by Demessieux focused on fugal writing. The aim was to be able to create, for any given melodic subject, a four-voice composition that employed all the features and contrapuntal devices of a scholastic fugue. A modern reader might wonder why ability to compose a genre of music that had become purely academic was required of those wishing to be composers in the 1930s and 1940s. This prerequisite was based on the notion that ability to control the reasoned-out, systematic requirements of the fugue—where it was impossible to rely on instrumental colour, words, or dramatic musical gestures to create interest—was a necessary counterbalance to the imagination and inspiration needed to compose in other genres. In fact, fugue composition was believed to be as essential to composers of music as drawing was to painters.⁶⁰

Demessieux earned a First Prize in fugue in 1939, which made her eligible to join a class called composition. That autumn she was placed with Henri Busser (1872–1973), whose class, compared to the prior year, was decimated because ten former students who were male were on leave “due to the war.”⁶¹ The four returning participants, joined by Demessieux and two other new students, worked on composition projects in a variety of vocal and instrumental genres. For the January 1940 exam, Busser’s students presented the following work:

Valérie Hamilton (third year)—first movement of a Quintet for Piano and Strings;

Paul Constantinesco (Romanian national, third year)—a set of Chants de Noël for piano;

Rolande Falcinelli (second year)—three songs on poetry of Théophile Gautier and “Suite Fantaisiste” for Violin and Piano (six movements);

Eliane Pradelle (second year)—no pieces listed;

Jeanne Demessieux (first year)—two preludes for piano and “Barques Célestes” for three-part women’s chorus and orchestra;

Jacqueline David (first year)—first movement of a string quartet and a song for solo voice (unnamed);

Claude Pascal (first year)—piano pieces: Anglais, Polonaise, Française, and a song for solo voice on poetry by Verlaine: “Pauvre Jeune Berger.”

Each composer would have performed their own pieces, with the assistance of instrumentalists and vocalists who were fellow Conservatory students, for the assembled jury.

Students who aimed for careers as composers had their eye, of course, on a First Prize in composition, but they aimed also to compete for an even higher prize, the Rome Prize in music composition. An annual award in existence since 1803, it was so-called because winners received funding for three to five years (the length varied from time to time), spent composing, and soaking in the culture, in the eponymous Italian capital city, renowned for its art. The award was administered and voted on by the country’s Academy of Fine Arts, one of the academies of the French Institute.⁶² Candidates who made it to the final round of the competition for the Rome Prize were given a month in seclusion to compose two works: a fugue on a given subject, and a cantata with orchestral accompaniment setting a given dramatic text. The fruits of their labour were then performed, with duo pianists taking the orchestral parts, before an audience consisting of all members of the French Institute, Conservatory instructors, and eligible students. As Demessieux describes in her letter of July 2, 1939, as many as three Rome Prizes might be awarded in one year. These were a First Prize (the “Grand Prize”), as well as a “first Second Prize” and a “second Second Prize,” depending upon how many candidates were thought worthy by members of the Academy of Fine Arts.⁶³

Organ study at the Conservatory during Demessieux’s time (1938–1941)

In 1935, the organist and composer Maurice Le Boucher, whom the Demessieux family knew as director of the Montpellier Conservatory, urged that once Jeanne had completed her Conservatory study of piano and harmony she undertake organ instruction with Paris organist Marcel Dupré.⁶⁴ This was a logical recommendation given that since 1933 the teenage Demessieux had been serving as a church organist.⁶⁵ Moreover, Le Boucher would have been well aware that Dupré was one of France’s most eminent organ teachers, attracting students from all over the country and abroad.⁶⁶

What is unclear is whether, when Demessieux took the step of auditioning for Dupré at his home in October 1936, she had any intention of aiming to enter the Conservatory organ class, let alone becoming a concert organist. Regardless, according to a letter to her sister describing this meeting, Dupré was so impressed after hearing about her background, and listening to her piano playing, that he chose to accept Demessieux immediately for personal instruction. She quotes Dupré as saying, “From this point onward, I am taking this child under my artistic protection” (October 8, 1936). Demessieux and her parents agreed to this instruction, even though her Conservatory study of piano and harmony were still underway. Two years later, in 1938, when Demessieux had First Prizes in both harmony and piano in hand and was likely urged to do so by Dupré, she auditioned for and entered the Conservatory organ class, taught by him.⁶⁷

Demessieux attended the class for three years, 1938–1941, but wrote little about it in her early diary and surviving letters. The diary she began in December 1940, however, frequently comments briefly on the success of some of the improvisations she played in the organ class.⁶⁸ The predominance of references to classes in which Demessieux improvised is explained by the greater challenge presented by this activity and the fact that two out of three classes a week were devoted to it. Dupré, who had inherited the Conservatory’s approach to organ instruction established in the nineteenth century, paid much more attention to training organists to be improvisers than interpreters of composed organ music. The reason was that, when the organ class had been established in the early nineteenth century, the most accomplished of church organists in Paris typically improvised the organ interludes and short pieces needed in a service.⁶⁹ As Dupré wrote in the appendix of his 1925 treatise on improvisation:

The organist of the great organ [grand-orgue] in a Catholic church is compelled to be an improviser: he must frequently play short interludes and often does not know, when beginning, how much time he is allowed. This is why it is preferable to improvise, rather than stop in the middle of a piece as required by the service.⁷⁰

Judging by the organization of Dupré’s improvisation treatise, however, he considered ability to spontaneously create original pieces of music not just a practical skill needed for service playing but part of what defined being an organist. Between an introductory chapter on organ technique and the short appendix about service playing, Dupré’s treatise comprises eight chapters. They go into elaborate detail concerning basic materials of music composition and all standard musical genres, forms, and procedures from the history of Western art music.⁷¹ Furthermore, as a concert organist Dupré frequently improvised a piece of music on a submitted theme at the end of a recital program of organ repertoire, demonstrating that he believed improvisation had an artistic as well as practical function. In other words, the importance he attached to improvisation meant that every organist in his class needed to be a composer and extemporizer of music in traditional forms.⁷²

An essay by organist Pascale Mélis describes the master’s organ class in the 1930s.⁷³ She notes that the eight to twelve participants met from 1:30 to 3:30 PM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Mondays were devoted to fugue improvisation, Wednesdays to improvising on a given “free theme” (thème libre), and Fridays to hearing repertoire, as well as (if there were time) improvisation on plainchant themes.⁷⁴

Under Dupré’s tutelage, the improvisational procedures practised in class were highly codified, in the manner described in his 1925 treatise:

• The fugue was to have all the elements of a written, scholastic fugue, including, for example, retention of the countersubject against the subject throughout.⁷⁵ In his treatise, Dupré also supplied detailed key schemes for the middle section of a fugue.⁷⁶

• The piece improvised on a given thème libre was to be in what was essentially a monothematic sonata form.

In words of David McCarthy, treatment of the thème libre was to have

strict proportions according to the length of the given melody: an exposition, bridge, exposition in the relative [or dominant key in the case of a major-key theme], development, recapitulation of theme (with something new, such as a canon), a bridge theme (half as long as the first bridge), and a conclusion (using the head motive from the main tune, which should have been avoided in the development).⁷⁷

• The improvisation based on a plainchant theme was to use one of the contrapuntal procedures Dupré had derived from Bach’s chorale preludes—choral canonique, choral contrapontique, choral orné, or choral fugué.⁷⁸

Some of Demessieux’s short-hand references in the diary of 1940–1946 to improvisational forms she performed in Dupré’s organ class are puzzling, but become clearer with reference to his treatise on organ improvisation. In Chapter VIII, Dupré describes four musical forms under the title “Les Quatre Formes Symphoniques.”⁷⁹ He names these symphonic forms Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, and Finale (i.e., Rondo form), and it is under Allegro that he describes what modern readers know as sonata form. Therefore, when in her diary entry of January 19, 1941 Demessieux quotes Dupré as praising her “beautiful symphony, a lovely piece,” this likely describes a sonata-form piece created from a given theme (or from a given pair of themes, because in the previous sentence a summary of her improvisations that day refers to a “[p]iece on two themes”). That “symphony” is a short way of saying “movement in a symphonic form” is further suggested by the diary entry of February 19, 1941: Demessieux writes, “The symphony movement was a scherzo on two themes.” From this it seems, also, that Dupré allowed capable students to improvise in class using one of the other symphonic forms he described in his treatise.

Only one of Demessieux’s references to the organ class concerns a Friday (February 14, 1941). It is here that she names a piece of composed music she performed—Franck’s Grande Pièce symphonique. According to Mélis (referring to the 1930s) and Odile Pierre (who was taught by Dupré in 1954–1955), students were required to perform from memory a new piece or movement each week.⁸⁰ This had undoubtedly also been the case during Demessieux’s time.

Even though Demessieux’s diary does not indicate the range of repertoire heard in class, one can gather which composers Dupré placed emphasis on from records of Conservatory organ exams and competitions.⁸¹ They list large-scale works by J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Franck, and Widor and, exceptionally, one by Buxtehude.⁸² Moreover, Demessieux kept her own record of organ works that she prepared for the year-end organ exam and for the annual organ competition. Here one notices an emphasis on Bach, Liszt, and Franck:⁸³

• Organ exam, 1938–1939:
  “De profundis” [“Aus tiefer Not,” a 6]—Bach
  Fugue in B Minor—Bach
  Prelude and Fugue on B–A–C–H—Liszt
  Competition: Fugue in A minor—Bach
  
• Organ exam, 1939–1940:
  Sixth [Trio] Sonata (Finale)—Bach
  Fugue in C minor—Bach
  Prière—Franck
  Competition: Third Choral in A minor—Franck
  
• Organ exam: 1940–1941:
  “Jordan” [“Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam,” likely BWV 684]—Bach
  Passacaglia and Fugue—Bach
  Grande Pièce symphonique—Franck
  Competition: Fantasia on “Ad nos, [ad salutarem undam]”—Liszt

Organ exams, held each January and May, and the organ competition, held in May or June, generally consisted of three tests: improvisation of a fugue on a given subject, improvisation of a piece based on a given thème libre, and performance of one major piece of organ music, or a movement thereof.⁸⁴ Judging from exam and competition documents I have examined, immediately in advance of performance of the two improvisations, each student had seven minutes sequestered nearby to examine the given melodies.⁸⁵ As for the repertoire performed, in advance of the May exam, each student submitted a list of three pieces they were prepared to play, from which the chair of the jury chose one piece immediately prior to the performance.⁸⁶ A satisfactory May exam qualified the student to compete in the next month’s organ competition.

Documents examined also reveal that for an organ competition (unlike for a piano competition) there was no set piece to be performed. Rather, each student played a different work, probably chosen jointly by student and teacher from those prepared for classes. According to the list of Demessieux’s repertoire above, for the last organ competition in which she participated (in 1941, at age 20) she performed the first section of Liszt’s Fantasia and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.” Filled with extensive passages in the style of virtuoso piano playing, this piece, in its technical demands, arguably hearkened back to Demessieux’s training as a concert pianist.

At the same time as Demessieux was studying at the Conservatory, she held the post of titular organist at Paris’s Church of St-Esprit. Chapter 3 will describe the church’s organ and the repertoire Demessieux played for services, thereby providing context for references to St-Esprit in Demessieux’s diaries and letters.

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