6 Introduction to the Diary and Letters of 1940-1946 and the Imposing Figure of Marcel Dupré
“[W]hat a beautiful improvisation; I am very pleased.
It’s decided. Widor sat me at this organ
when I was only twenty; that will bring you luck.”
—Marcel Dupré, quoted in the diary entry of December 8, 1940
As recounted in the first entry of the diary of 1940–1946, on December 8, 1940 Marcel Dupré gave his student Jeanne Demessieux the privilege of sitting near him in the St-Sulpice organ gallery as he played a Sunday Vespers service. Moreover, her diary indicates that he had her perform part of the organist’s duties by improvising the entrance music for the companion rite to Vespers, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Demessieux arguably knew that the organ and organ gallery of St-Sulpice were legendary; to be invited to play this organ for a service was a tremendous honour for that reason alone. But the occasion went beyond this: Demessieux also records Dupré remarking on a parallel. For Widor to have allowed him to perform on the St-Sulpice organ for the first time at age twenty, and for him to now do the same for Demessieux—just a couple of months short of her twentieth birthday—foretold good fortune for her.
The event and prophecy that Sunday afternoon in early December 1940 were the impetus for Demessieux to begin a new diary, one very different from the diary of 1934–1938. On the first page of the notebook in which she began to write, she made an important resolution, namely, to describe events and conversations exactly as they took place, without commentary, and without benefit of hindsight. Even though Demessieux does not entirely refrain from commentary through the diary’s nearly 600 handwritten pages, it is (especially in comparison to the diary of 1934–1938) striking how few reactions to incidents or even personal feelings she expresses. Conspicuously rare as well are the instances when she adds a comment on something said or done by Marcel Dupré, unless it was part of the actual conversation.
The opening pages already present two themes that turn out to be characteristic of this diary as a whole. First, most events narrated, and conversations quoted, involve Marcel Dupré. The importance to the diary of describing all personal interactions with Dupré is confirmed by the fact that, after two more entries in December, Demessieux backtracked to describe an event of November 30, 1940 that resulted from her being known as having the “ear” of Marcel Dupré. Second, many events and conversations concern Demessieux’s gradual rise in status, as a musician and socially, which comes about by means of her association with Dupré.
Thus, Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) must be viewed as the principal “other” of the diary of 1940–1946. Also significant is his wife, Jeanne Dupré-Pascouau (1883–1978), who is a strong supporting character in Demessieux’s narrative. This chapter, by describing Dupré’s personality and career in general terms, will establish the context of many events and conversations in this diary. It will also sketch the social and educational backgrounds of the couple as detailed in the Marcel Dupré biography by one of his American students, Michael Murray, and as shared in Dupré’s own published reminiscences.1
Where Demessieux’s diary corroborates a detail of his life, I will refer to this, but most of Chapter 6 is devoted to Dupré’s life prior to the period of the diary. I will conclude by outlining the many ways that, as told in the diary, members of the Demessieux family would be drawn into the social orbit of the Duprés.
Dupré’s lineage and upbringing
Marcel Dupré was proud of having been born in Rouen, about 111 kilometers by train northeast of Paris, in the Normandy region. Three out of four of his grandparents, and both his parents, held prominent positions in the musical life of Rouen, placing them in the upper middleclass.2 Their social status extended at least as far back as the father of Dupré’s paternal grandmother, Théodore Visinet—a Parisian lawyer, who became editor-in-chief of a respected newspaper in Rouen. Théodore’s daughter Marie taught piano and married the musician Aimable Dupré in 1859. Dupré’s paternal grandfather, Aimable served as an organist in Rouen churches at a time when one could rise to social prominence and earn a living by combining a church music post with private teaching. Highly professional, Aimable took an interest in organ building and was a friend of the famous French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899).
Dupré’s maternal grandfather, Étienne Chauvière, was also a professional musician. An operatic bass, he retired from the stage to serve as a church choirmaster in Rouen for thirty years.3 He and his wife Julia-Anaïs (née Saffrey) had two musically gifted daughters: Alice, a cellist, and Jeanne, a contralto.4 Both also played the piano, and taught cello and voice, respectively, as well as piano.5 According to Michael Murray, Étienne and Julia-Anaïs Chauvière distinguished themselves in that they “maintained an open table at which any musician, artist, or scholar was welcome.”6 Their daughters would have heard sparkling conversation over dinner and joined the parents’ and guests’ musical performances after the meal. Whether frequently or occasionally, the Aimable Dupré family were among the guests who socialized and made music in the rarified atmosphere of the Chauvière home.7
The sons of Marie and Aimable Dupré were academically brilliant. Henri, who had studied at Oxford, became a teacher of English, first in Bordeaux and then in secondary schools in Rouen and Paris.8 The older son, Albert (b. 1860), Marcel’s father, was meant to be a Latin teacher; an outstanding student at a prestigious Rouen lycée, he went on to win two baccalaureates.9 Nevertheless, Albert chose next to train as a music teacher and organist, including with the internationally celebrated concert organist Alexandre Guilmant.10 At age 24 Albert began teaching music. Two years later he was appointed titular organist of a Cavaillé-Coll organ in a city near Rouen.11 Then, at age 29, he was engaged to teach music at the same prestigious Rouen school where he had received his secondary education—a plum of a well-paid position.12
In 1884, Albert Dupré had married Alice Chauvière and Marcel, their only child, was born in 1886. Guilmant, the organist and a witness at his parents’ wedding, became an important part of Marcel’s childhood.13 Guilmant was a frequent guest as Albert and Alice continued the Chauvière tradition of entertaining persons of musical and intellectual prominence, with music-making following the meal. As a result of that practice, Marcel grew up in an atmosphere saturated with music and with the witty and intelligent conversation of the upper middleclass.
Social music-making at the Dupré home grew to a larger scale in the 1890s when Albert had additions built to the house that was shared by Chauvière and Dupré families to create an ever-larger music room.14 There, he had a Cavaillé-Coll organ installed, and a choral society and orchestra that he founded rehearsed and performed in that room.15 Marcel Dupré credited the wide range of musical genres and masterworks—chamber, piano, vocal, choral, orchestral, operatic, and organ—performed with guests and by the students of his parents and aunt, as one of the bases of his musicianship.16
Reminiscing about his childhood in his Recollections, Dupré also proudly told stories of how, through his parents, he made the acquaintance of more luminaries of the French organ world. He first met Widor when he was three years old, and Cavaillé-Coll when he was eight.17 The latter spoke to him about Lemmens whom he had known personally.18 Moreover, one summer when Marcel was eleven and had just played for a service in the local church at the seaside resort St-Valery-en-Caux, he was introduced to none other than Louis Vierne (1870–1937), Guilmant’s assistant as instructor of the Conservatory organ class and the soon-to-be organist of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.19 The same year as his first Communion, Marcel first visited Widor at St-Sulpice, sat beside him on the organ bench, and received an explanation of the plan of the organ.20
Dupré’s Education
Marcel Dupré’s formal musical training began at age seven with Albert Dupré giving him daily piano instruction.21 He had inherited a prodigious memory from his mother, and from the model of both his parents he had developed a strong work ethic as well. Directed by his father, the young child diligently practised piano, Lemmens’ École d’Orgue et d’Harmonium, and pedal exercises devised by Albert Dupré.22 Only three months after his first keyboard lessons, at age seven, the young Marcel Dupré played a short harmonium piece at a wedding service.23 At age eight, on the occasion of the inauguration of a new choir organ at his father’s church, he performed on the gallery organ for the entrance of the clergy.24
Judging by Murray’s account of Marcel Dupré’s childhood, there seems never to have been a period during which he was not destined to a musical career. By the time Marcel was eleven, he held a church position of his own in Rouen, and time was also being taken for commuting with his father to take lessons in Paris. There, a very strict and demanding Guilmant taught Marcel all that he would need to become a professional organist, including piano, organ, harmony, counterpoint, and improvisation.25
In 1901, when Dupré was fifteen, Guilmant secured an audition with Paris Conservatory piano instructor Louis Diémer for him.26 From there on Dupré’s piano studies were supervised by Diémer’s assistant at the time, Lazare-Lévy. This led to entrance as an auditor, then a full student, in Diémer’s class in 1902, followed by a First Prize in piano at age 19 in 1905. Concerning these four years of concentration on piano study, Dupré later said,
I learned all of the sonatas by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and much of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin. In fact[,] I learned by heart about three-fourths of the works of Chopin.27
Evidently, Dupré had taken seriously his father’s and Guilmant’s dictate that he needed to be a first-class pianist in order to become a professional organist.
In 1906, a year after his First Prize in piano, at age twenty, Dupré became a full-fledged member of Guilmant’s organ class. Already his mastery of improvisation, firmly based on principles of harmony and counterpoint, was prodigious. That same year, Widor engaged Dupré to play for a marriage service at St-Sulpice and asked him to improvise all the service music. Widor then secretly listened and thought to himself that the improvisations were so polished, they sounded written. On the basis of this audition, Dupré garnered the assistant organist’s position at St-Sulpice.28 His First Prize in organ followed the year after, in July 1907. According to Vierne, Dupré’s performances for the competition in organ and improvisation were the most outstanding he had ever heard at the Conservatory.29
Dupré then continued his musical education by entering Widor’s fugue and composition class in the autumn of 1907. He needed only two years in the class before winning his third First Prize.30
More than his musical ability was cultivated during the years Dupré spent at the Paris Conservatory (1902–1909). According to Dupré, during those seven years, Widor took him to lunch twice a week, and the restaurant they visited was frequented by “senators, writers, painters, the entire Parisian artistic elite” of Widor’s acquaintance, to many of whom he introduced the young man.31 Over the meal, Widor was an enthusiastic raconteur of stories about musicians he had known, a characteristic Dupré would emulate;32 this is evident from his Recollections, and will be borne out by some of Demessieux’s diary entries.
Dupré’s hard work and early fame
It was at Widor’s urging—for the sake of becoming a “complete musician”—that Dupré, following his First Prize in fugue and composition in 1909, worked towards winning a prize in the Rome competition. After more than one attempt, he succeeded in winning the First Prize at age twenty-eight.33 However, as the year was 1914, that is, the beginning of the First World War, Dupré did not then have opportunity to live and work in Rome. Exempted from military duty during the war due to having had childhood bone surgery, he saw something of the war’s horrors by working in a hospital dispensary instead.34 Beginning in 1916, while serving as Widor’s assistant at St-Sulpice, Dupré filled in for an ailing Louis Vierne at Notre-Dame in Paris for four years.35 As a result, it was he who had the privilege in November 1918 of playing the celebratory “Te Deum” at Notre-Dame Cathedral. According to Murray, seven thousand worshippers were present for the occasion, and the cathedral was “blazing with light and pomp.”36
Widor would remain Dupré’s mentor in all things professional, presumably until Widor’s death in 1937. When the Italian residence of Rome Prize winners re-opened after the war had ended, Dupré consulted Widor before declining the opportunity to live and work in the capital of Italy, in favour of his career as a concert organist.37 To that end, Dupré had already decided in 1917 to memorize the entire Bach canon of organ music, some two hundred pieces in total. According to Murray, he went about this in a strict and methodical way, involving repetition and, above all, concentration. It took Dupré three years to complete the entire project.38
Afterwards, in 1920, he attracted attention for being the first to perform Bach’s œuvre for organ from memory, doing so in a series of ten recitals over a period of two months on the Paris Conservatory organ.39 Reviewers’ admiration for this amazing feat, specifically for the precision and clarity of his playing and the restraint of his registrations, helped established Dupré’s reputation as an organist in both Paris, and—as suggested by a 1921 review in The Musical Times—in England.40
Dupré’s London debut, in December 1920, came about because of a wealthy English industrialist, Claude Johnson. He had admired a set of improvisations he heard Dupré play at Notre-Dame in Paris, and then devised the plan of presenting them in concert at the Albert Hall.41 Three months before that event, Dupré was politic enough to perform privately for the Royal College of Organists in London, where he made a fine impression for “his simplicity and tact.”42
According to Murray, Dupré’s next season included recitals in France, England, and Switzerland.43 Meanwhile, his reputation had spread to North America, and Dupré debuted there to great acclaim in November of 1921.44 The first and second of his eventual nine cross-continent concert tours of North America, both well received, followed in 1922–1923 and 1923–1924.45
Dupré’s strong–willed personality
Aspects of Dupré’s character revealed in Jeanne Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946 will be discussed as part of Chapter 9’s commentary on the diary. Nevertheless, one prominent trait, his strong will, deserves mention in advance because it is relevant to Dupré’s relationship with Louis Vierne and to his choice of wife.
Dupré and the older organist Vierne enjoyed a close friendship until a falling out occurred in early 1924.46 Ill feelings seem to have begun that year when Vierne, who perceived Dupré’s use of the phrase “Organist at Notre Dame Cathedral” in his American and English publicity as a challenge to Vierne’s position as titular organist of Notre-Dame, publicly lashed out at Dupré. Their relationship, as a result, was shattered, far out of proportion to the original misunderstanding. While Vierne would later (that is, in 1936) write favourably of Dupré in his memoirs, Dupré, on the other hand, would forever after hold a grudge against Vierne, one that developed into expressions of deep animosity.47 An example of his malice towards Vierne is cited by Ann Labounsky in her biography of organist Jean Langlais.48
That Dupré was innately strong-willed—born with a tendency to stubbornly maintain his own thinking—is already suggested by three stories of his childhood in which he went against his father’s wishes.49 When he became a young adult, the most striking example of this willfulness is the story told by Murray of how Dupré came to be married in 1924.50 At age twenty-two (1908), he was a boarder in Paris at the home of his uncle Henri Dupré, who had recently married young Jeanne Pascouau. Soon, Marcel and Jeanne fell in love, and in 1909, they even produced a child, Marguerite.
Albert Dupré (who had recently risen in social status by becoming titular organist of the large church of St-Ouen in Rouen) was greatly displeased with his son’s embarrassing conduct. But he failed in persuading Marcel to give up the relationship: it endured through the years leading up to the divorce of Henri and Jeanne Dupré in 1921.
A civil marriage between Marcel and Jeannette (as Marcel Dupré preferred to call her) followed three years later.51 After the death of Henri in 1929, they were married in a ceremony at St-Sulpice. That union, over twenty years in the making, would prove to be one of the foundations of Dupré’s career success.
The collaborator: Dupré’s wife, Jeannette Dupré-Pascouau
The woman that Marcel Dupré married was intellectually brilliant in her own right. Murray’s sketch of her life up until her marriage, summarized below, indicates that she rose to the peak of qualifications as a teacher.52
Jeannette Pascouau was born in 1883 in the elegant resort town of Biarritz on the Basque coast of southwestern France. Her parents could afford to place her in an elite secondary school in the larger city of Bordeaux. There she boarded with a family related to the Dupré-Visinets; Henri Dupré was one of her teachers. Gifted in languages, Jeannette also excelled far beyond the typical young woman of her time by enrolling in the Sorbonne University in Paris. She majored in English and alternated periods of study in the French capital and at Oxford University in England.
Having received the first of her degrees from the Sorbonne in 1903, Jeannette was, by chance, first assigned by the Ministry of Education to a teaching post in Rouen.53 Thanks to the family with which Jeannette had boarded in Bordeaux, she was naturally absorbed into the social milieu of the Albert Dupré family and thereby met Marcel Dupré.
Not long after Jeannette married Henri Dupré in 1908 (and was soon estranged from her husband), she took a teaching post in Paris and returned to further study at the Sorbonne.54 There, in 1914, Jeannette earned the highest of teaching degrees, the agrégation. She was, thereby, qualified to instruct senior classes in a secondary school or lecture at a university. As a result, and due to the war, during the period 1914–1918 she was assigned to teach in prestigious boys’ secondary schools in the French capital while male teachers were away fighting. After the war had ended, Jeannette took a position at an upper-level girls’ secondary school in Paris.
However, despite her decades of hard work and career success, when Jeannette married Marcel Dupré in 1924, she gave up her profession to devote herself to managing the affairs of her husband’s extremely busy career.55 To that end, Jeanette began to accompany her husband on his overseas concert tours, beginning with his third transcontinental tour in 1924–1925.56 Arguably, she bore for him the burden of last-minute logistics during this and subsequent overseas tours so that he could concentrate on his performances.57
By the time Jeanne Demessieux met Marcel Dupré over a decade later, in 1936, he had visited North America six times and made five transcontinental tours. His glowing press reviews in France applauded not only his recitals at home and in Europe, but his successful concert tours of North America as well, making him doubly famous at home. That Dupré would complete altogether nine transcontinental tours of North America was due equally to his capacity for hard work and the assistance of his intellectually sharp wife.
Dupré as private and Conservatory teacher of organ and improvisation
Alongside being a successful concert organist, Dupré found he enjoyed teaching and spent considerable time writing textbooks.58 As a pedagogue, he was extremely systematic. At some point during his teaching career, Dupré wrote down a detailed, five-year curriculum for organ study. It took an accomplished pianist—who was ideally old enough also to begin study of harmony—from the beginning of Dupré’s Méthode d’Orgue through progressively more difficult repertoire by Bach and Franck, as well as progressively more difficult improvisational forms.59
As Dupré put much effort into his teaching, it is not surprising that after the death of Eugène Gigout (Guilmant’s successor at the Conservatory) in December 1925, he applied for the position of Conservatory organ instructor. Both Dupré and his rival for the position, Charles Tournemire (1870–1939), received strong support from opposing factions inside and outside the Conservatory.60 Demessieux records Dupré as saying, many years later, “I was a candidate for something once in my life, for the organ class: I swore that I would never do that again; the lobbying one must do!” (August 10, 1941).
Arguably, Tournemire and Dupré were very different musicians. Ann Labounsky, in her biography of Tournemire disciple Jean Langlais (1907–1991), has described them as follows:
[Langlais] saw in Charles Tournemire the best of what a church musician could be. He represented the antithesis of the technical austerity of Widor and Dupré; in him Langlais found a teacher with a sense of poetry and lyricism that recalled the qualities of his [Langlais’] other Franck-trained teachers at the Institute. He also found himself drawn to Tournemire’s unique style of improvisation and composition based on Gregorian chant.61
I imagine that in 1926 Paris organists such as Louis Vierne, André Marchal, and their friends supported Tournemire as the worthiest candidate for the Conservatory teaching position. However, according to Murray, Dupré enjoyed the support of a group of composers on the selection committee—Paul Dukas, Gabriel Pierné, Alfred Bruneau, and Maurice Ravel (not to mention Widor).62 As a result, Dupré was elected to fill the position of organ instructor at the Conservatory in January 1926. After an interval waiting for the French government to make the appointment official, he took over the class on March 1.63 This, de facto, made Dupré the dean of organ playing in Paris and, arguably, all of France.
If Dupré’s success as a teacher could be measured by his students’ accomplishments, this became evident over time: when he had been in the post for ten years, eleven organists had earned First Prizes in organ and improvisation under him.64 Moreover, the majority of these were, by 1936, incumbents at Paris churches, including André Fleury, Noëlie Pierront, Olivier Messiaen, Joseph Gilles, Jean Langlais, Henriette Roget, Gaston Litaize, and Jean-Jacques Grunenwald.65
Dupré achieved this success by paying attention to detail and wielding firm control over his students. He was infamous for laying down lists of strict rules, not only regarding organ playing but also as to how class members should govern their lives and spend their practice hours.66 Yet, for the performance of repertoire, Dupré rarely gave advice on interpretative matters. The execution of ornaments in Bach’s music was already laid down in his Méthode d’Orgue; it also contained seventeen rules concerning the lengths of notes (in cases of repeated notes, chords played with full organ, and manual changes) that Conservatory students were expected to follow.67 All other essential interpretive matters were, to Dupré’s mind, common-sense practices, such as allowing a breath before the entrance of a new stop and slowing at major cadences without exaggeration.68 In all other situations, he forbade rubato in organ playing.
Except for the results of the annual organ competition, which depended on a jury, Dupré’s power over his students was generally seen as autocratic. The narrowness of every aspect of his approach to organ pedagogy caused some students to grumble, although they rarely dared to go against his dictates in class. According to Labounsky, Langlais, a member of the organ class from 1927 to 1930, was resentful that during the period his status was that of auditor he was required to attend sessions at Dupré’s home in Meudon, which was a train trip away from Paris.69 Moreover, Labounsky reports that when Langlais made the mistake of playing the same piece for the Conservatory class twice in a row (having misunderstood what he was told about it the first time), Dupré crushed him with sarcasm.70
Though scathing towards those who defied his rules, Dupré was, overall, generous in his warm regard for his students. He charmingly addressed each as vous rather than the less formal tu. At the same time, Dupré was also inclined to call every pupil “mon petit” (“my little one”), as if their parent.71 In fact, accordingly to Labounsky, “Langlais regarded Dupré as a father: ‘He was very paternal, very kind, very gentle; and he found almost everything good—almost, not always everything.’”72
Dupré, internal Conservatory politics, and Marguerite Dupré
Weathering internal politics was one of the downsides of teaching at France’s most prestigious music school. Murray’s Dupré biography, in its chapter describing the Paris Conservatory, gives brief examples of the types of internal disagreements that existed at different times between the institution’s teachers: Franck put up with colleagues’ ill feeling towards him for teaching composition in his organ class; Guilmant dared to praise Debussy’s genius while others railed against the latter’s musical anarchy, and so on.73
In Dupré’s case, I suspect that as a composer uninterested in opera and ballet, he did not always feel respected by his colleagues who wrote and conducted stage music. According to Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946, he said to her after serving on the composition examination jury at which her violin sonata was rejected,
My poor dear, I was not able to rescue you: they are all against me. They have been very harsh today: I have suffered for it (January 30, 1941).
It has been hypothesized that, when Dupré’s daughter Marguerite competed for a Prize in piano in 1932 and was awarded only a Mention, the jury had been wary of awarding a prize to the offspring of a Paris Conservatory instructor—because it could suggest favouritism (be “politically incorrect”).74 Murray, however, attributes this down-grading more specifically to the jealousy of some of Dupré’s colleagues, presumably making them loath to bestow further honour on the Dupré name by awarding First Prizes in piano on two generations of the family.75
Indicative of Marguerite Dupré’s ability, she went on to a successful career as a solo pianist in France, Europe, and abroad.76 To that end, she made her Paris debut in October 1932 performing with her father his Ballade for piano and organ at the Théâtre Pigalle. Her American debut followed in 1937 when she joined her parents on Dupré’s seventh trip to North America. In some concerts of that tour, they even played his newly composed Variations on Two Themes, Op. 35 for piano and organ together.
Dupré’s wealth, public recognition, and the German Occupation
During his career, Dupré accumulated a minor fortune from his repeated concert tours of Europe and North America. According to Murray, “[m]ost of Dupré’s early tours took place in countries whose currencies were strong in relation to the French franc”; between 1922 and 1925 alone he earned an estimated $30,000 U.S. dollars from recitals.77 In the autumn of 1925, Dupré was able to purchase a villa in the Paris suburb of Meudon. He also bought a piece of property beside the villa so that a new wing, a recital hall, could be attached to it.78 For this large music room, he purchased the organ that belonged to the estate of Guilmant as well as two grand pianos.79 Beginning in 1934, Dupré also financed a larger console for the organ, additional stops, and, over the years, numerous technical innovations of his own devising.80
One measure of the public success of Dupré’s career is that he received high honours from the French government. In 1935, in recognition of his meritorious contributions to musical life in France and to the glory of France in the world, the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honour was awarded to Dupré; in 1948, this would be superseded by the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honour.81
In January of 1940, despite declarations of war in Europe, Dupré returned home with his wife and daughter from an overseas tour to take up again the two prestigious positions he held in Paris: instructor of organ at the Conservatory, and titular organist of the church of St-Sulpice (Widor had retired in 1934).82 When the Nazis invaded from the northwest and closed in on Paris five months later, in June of 1940, Dupré was, according to his Recollections, one of only seven Conservatory teachers and about twenty-five students who had not fled to southern France. Instead, he remained in the French capital and helped reorganize the Conservatory: by running it over the summer with a reduced staff and student body, it was protected from the threat of its building being requisitioned by the occupiers.
On July 18, Dupré was one of the instructors who performed in a concert held in the Conservatory’s organ hall to raise money “for students who were without financial resources.”83 According to musician and journalist Louis Vuillermoz, this was “the first artistic event presented in Paris during this time of upheaval.”84 Also that summer, the director of the Academy of Fine Arts singled out Dupré by asking him to give an organ recital at St-Sulpice to raise money for pupils of the Conservatory and France’s national schools of Fine Arts and because “[i]t is necessary to re-establish intellectual and artistic life in Paris, whatever the cost.” Presided over by His Eminence the Cardinal Suhard, archbishop of Paris, the recital was given on August 4, 1940.85 Thus, early on, it may be argued, keeping France’s artistic life alive was established as one of Dupré’s Occupation-period values.
In the autumn of 1940, Henri Rabaud announced his retirement as director of the Conservatory. As Demessieux notes in her diary entry of November 30, Dupré was mooted by some of his colleagues and the Conservatory administration as a candidate for the directorship. Seven more diary entries, from December 1940 through mid-March 1941, refer to the competition for the position, with the composers Marcel Samuel-Rousseau and Claude Delvincourt mentioned as serious contenders. Unbeknownst to Demessieux and those with whom she discussed the directorship, on February 22, 1941, Jacques Chevalier, the outgoing Minister of National Education (and Secretary of State for Public Instruction) in the Vichy government, signed an order making Claude Delvincourt director of the Conservatory.86
Demessieux would also not have been aware of what happened on February 28, 1941, when a new Secretary of State for Public Instruction, Jérôme Carcopino, arrived in Vichy. According to Carcopino’s memoirs, the day after he took office he received a telephone call from the Vichy government’s ambassador to the German military command in Paris, Fernand de Brinon.87 He informed Carcopino that the Germans refused to ratify the choice of new director for the Paris Conservatory. Upon probing further, Carcopino was given the name of another candidate whom Brinon thought deserved more consideration. (Carcopino, who refers to this candidate only as a “composer and undisputed virtuoso,” refrains from identifying him by name in his memoirs, saying he could not imagine that this person would have gone to the German ambassador to push his case.)
Replying to Brinon, Carcopino countered with two arguments. First, Delvincourt as a war hero should naturally be the preferred choice of the German military commanders. Second, it was a matter of principle that he, Carcopino, not agree to rescind his predecessor’s decision for no better reason than an apparent whim of the German military command in Paris. To Carcopino’s relief, his bravado had the desired effect—the matter must have seemed too trivial to pursue any longer. On March 2 or 3, 1941, Brinon telephoned Carcopino again. Evidently, the Germans did not want to make difficulties for him during his first week in office and had agreed to the official publication of Delvincourt’s appointment.
There is no doubt that Dupré was among the short-listed candidates for Conservatory director: a German military command document, written while the decision was still pending, reports that another candidate, Marcel Samuel-Rousseau, was regarded as being of the wrong political bent, given his association with the former minister. In contrast, Delvincourt and Dupré both possessed the right political leanings and attitudes towards German art, with Delvincourt being younger and more dynamic, and Dupré’s appointment being of more prestige value.88
Did Dupré contribute to the artistic life of France in other ways during the Occupation (1940–1944)? He did, indeed. The Vichy government, as part of its oversight of all aspects of France’s musical life, formed committees made up of selected French citizens.89 One of these was the Committee for the professional organization of music; it was formed in March 1942 and got underway in October of 1943, charged with ensuring musical taste in France. Of its 59 members, Dupré was chosen to chair the seven-member subcommittee for organ and church music.90 He also participated in a Vichy government-financed project aimed at producing recordings of contemporary French music, to be distributed to other countries’ ambassadors and cultural organizations. Specifically, works representing forty composers were chosen to be recorded, among them selected movements of Dupré’s Concerto in E Minor for organ and orchestra.91 In fact, Demessieux describes one of the recording sessions, with Dupré at the organ and Eugène Bigot conducting, in her diary entry of October 20, 1943.
Dupré remained active as a concert organist during the Occupation.92 Demessieux’s diary mentions some of his Paris radio broadcasts and periods during which he gave recitals away from home.93 As I have argued elsewhere, Dupré continued “business as usual” not because he wanted to assist the German occupiers in normalizing life under their rule, but because he wished to use the celebrated tradition of French organ playing—which he represented—to draw attention to the glory of French culture.94 To that end, Demessieux commented in her diary on August 13, 1944 that at the close of Dupré’s recital at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral—the last in a series featuring both German and French organists—he was hailed as a French hero for this performance by the thousands in attendance.95
The Duprés’ relationship with the Demessieux family
The Marcel Dupré who figures throughout the diary of 1940–1946 had been a celebrity in France since the 1920s. Indeed, his upper middleclass status was not merely inherited from his parents, but also highly merited. In the eyes of young Jeanne Demessieux, Dupré and his family (wife Jeannette and daughter Marguerite) belonged to a social and musical milieu that was the epitome of what this teenager from Montpellier could aspire to. By describing in her diary multiple occasions when she was invited to sit near the Duprés at concerts, the times when she was kept in conversation with the Duprés between services at St-Sulpice, and the meals she took with them at their Meudon villa, Demessieux illustrates that she became increasingly intimate with the family.
The diary entries also provide insights into how her own parents and sister Yolande, too, were drawn into the Duprés’ social orbit. Specifically, Jeanne describes Marcel and Jeannette Dupré’s visits to the Demessieux family apartment, details how the Duprés received Jeanne’s parents and sister in the St-Sulpice organ gallery, and refers to concerts that the two families were seen as attending together. These associations raised the social status of the Demessieux family as a whole.
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