7 Controversy in the Paris Organ World, 1927-ca. 1960

“No one believed in the electrified organ
(we had only junk as electric organs). Only the Barker lever was known.
On my first trip to England, I understood and, when I returned,
I said that we know nothing in France. It was then that
Les Amis de l’Orgue was formed, in opposition to me.”
—Marcel Dupré, quoted in the diary entry of April 16, 1943

“. . . it cannot be said that Dupré has done anything for the organ!
He has been under American influence, and his music, in general, is rubbish!”
—Charles Provost, quoted in the diary entry of November 11, 1945

One of the themes throughout much of Jeanne Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946 is the animosity that existed between leaders of the Paris organization Les Amis de l’Orgue on the one hand, and Marcel Dupré and his supporters on the other.^[1] The ill will between the two sides stemmed from multiple issues related to organ building, performance practice, and repertoire. As readers of the diary will discover, conversations quoted make it clear that Demessieux was as strongly opinionated on these matters as were Dupré and his opponents. To provide context for these conversations, this chapter will sketch the origins of the dispute that seethed through much of the twentieth century, and the specific concerns upon which the two sides differed.²

Since the hey-day of the 1890s, when attendance at organ recitals in Paris’s Trocadéro concert hall was at its height, the role of organ music in the city’s musical life had gradually waned. By the 1920s, it was increasingly evident that though organ playing was still one of France’s greatest exports, it had lost its former prestige at home. Meanwhile, the organs of France were the victims of disrepair and damage caused by the First World War.

From the late 1920s and for approximately the next thirty years, two contrasting viewpoints existed among Paris organists as to where the future of the organ and organ playing lay. One position, which clung strongly to nineteenth-century tradition, was held by Marcel Dupré—heir to the performance practice of the organist Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens and a devotee of the organs of the distinguished builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Specifically, Dupré believed he had demonstrated, in his successful domestic and international careers, how to renew and maintain the glory of the French organ school. It involved continuing the interdependent evolutions of organ technique, compositional style for the organ, and organ design in the same directions as had led French organists such as Alexandre Guilmant to their original world acclaim. For Dupré this meant two things: grooming organists who could rival the great pianists in technical brilliance and interpretive charisma, as well as encouraging virtuosic composition for the organ that transferred piano technique to organ manuals and pedalboard. In Dupré’s mind, revitalization of the French organ school called for studying the principles of Cavaillé-Coll in order that nineteenth-century organs could be restored in Cavaillé-Coll’s style. In the design of new organs, from Dupré’s point of view, revitalization depended upon making up for having fallen behind British builders (principally Willis) and American builders (principally E. M. Skinner) in pursuit of technology—and for good reason. Their innovations increased the organ’s dynamic and timbral flexibility, inspired new compositional techniques, and allowed organists to increase their virtuosity.³

Another viewpoint lay with the founders of the Paris Association des Amis de l’Orgue. These were organist André Marchal (1894–1980), musicologist and organist Norbert Dufourcq (1904–1990), and their wealthy patron Bérenger de Miramon Fitz-James (1875–1952). They had founded the association in 1927 with the aim of promoting the organ in France. To that end, its members arranged and publicized concerts of organ music and, like Dupré, encouraged young performers and composition of new organ music by young composers. In other respects, Marchal, Dufourcq, and Miramon Fitz-James had quite an opposite set of goals to Dupré’s. Among them were cultivation of early, that is, pre-Bach music (despite its lack of virtuosity) and championing new approaches to performing the music of Bach, as well as making organ playing more expressive and poetic in general.

Moreover, Les Amis de l’Orgue promoted a new style of organ design in France as a reaction against the symphonic style of organ, a style that had first been practised by Cavaillé-Coll, had evolved following his death in 1899, and been further developed by builders in other countries. From the perspective of leaders of the Association, just as Romanticism in music composition had been superseded by the styles of Debussy and Ravel, organ building now needed a new aesthetic, producing a sound of “greater clarity, colour, and etherealness.”⁴

This new aesthetic promoted by Les Amis de l’Orgue was largely in reaction to a style of organ design prevalent in the early twentieth century. It involved a considerable percentage of 8-foot (unison) stops, few stops above the 2-foot level, and inclusion of mutations and mixtures only in the main division.⁵ From Dupré’s perspective, however, association of this development with Cavaillé-Coll fostered misunderstanding of the nineteenth-century builder’s design principles, particularly a false belief that Cavaillé-Coll neglected mutation and mixture stops altogether.⁶ In short, as Dupré saw it, the term “symphonic,” when applied to organs in a pejorative way, was misunderstood. According to Murray,

[a]lthough “symphonic” . . . had principally meant to Cavaillé-Coll and his generation an organ whose dynamic range approached that of the orchestra but whose tones still echoed certain qualities of the Classical past, the term had by now [the twentieth century] come to designate much more and much less: images of monstrous electrical organs that imitated orchestral colors exclusively and offered from cramped chambers and ill-chosen locales nothing but eight-foot tone.⁷

Such organs arguably existed because some organ builders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had put more emphasis on immediate commercial success than craftsmanship; in Germany this practice had sparked the organ reform movement in the early twentieth century.⁸ But these instruments—suited to movie theatres, perhaps, but not churches and concert halls—represented neither Cavaillé-Coll’s style nor Dupré’s ideal.

Nevertheless, the leaders of the Association des Amis de l’Orgue, in their viewpoints, were able to wield great influence upon their students and organ aficionados. André Marchal, like Dupré, enjoyed an international concert and recording career. The organ students he taught at Paris’s National Institute for the Young Blind remained loyal to him even after they earned a Conservatory organ prize under Dupré. As a private teacher, Marchal was also sought-after by students from France, other parts of Europe, and North America.⁹

For the performance of early music, Marchal rejected Lemmens’ all-legato style that Dupré adhered to. Marchal’s specific style of playing is described as follows by a friend of his, the British music critic Felix Aprahamian:

Having rejected an untraditional Romantic approach to Bach early in his career, his [Marchal’s] later resistance to the equally false aesthetic of metronomic intransigence and excessive staccato made him a sometimes wayward but always sensitive Bach player.¹⁰

Marchal’s repertoire ranged from the Medieval era to Messiaen, but omitted the big organ works, particularly those of Liszt and Widor and Dupré’s large-scale compositions. Moreover, unlike other famous French organists born prior to 1925, Marchal was not a composer, something Dupré considered essential to an organist who was a complete musician.

Norbert Dufourcq, a Marchal student and close friend, was foremost a highly knowledgeable historian of French music and early organ building in France, and a scholarly editor of early organ music.¹¹ He shone as an engaging, if also polemical, writer and speaker. Dufourcq’s visibility rose further when he collaborated with Marchal in several famous series of lecture-recitals that occurred in Paris, elsewhere in France, and beyond between 1941 and 1969.¹²

Marchal and Dufourcq had spearheaded their new style of organ design in France in collaboration with the French organ builder Victor Gonzalez in the 1920s. Beginning with organs the Gonzalez company built from about 1930, they attempted to unite in one instrument the tonal requirements of diverse styles of composition for the organ—French- and German-Baroque organ music, Romantic-era organ music of Franck and Vierne, and modern organ music. To that end, Marchal, Dufourcq, and Gonzalez embraced principles of organ design that they termed néo-classique.¹³

Overall, the neoclassic organ had only one principle in common with Dupré’s ideal organ design: it incorporated technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among these were the use of electro-pneumatic action to transmit the commands of the organist’s fingers to pipes and adjustable combination systems powered by electricity for the sake of timbral and dynamic flexibility.¹⁴ The neoclassic organ completely distinguished itself from nineteenth-century organs, however, in its tonal design by, for example, making plentiful use of mutation stops (especially third-sounding stops, but also fifth-sounding stops) and mixture stops on as many divisions as the size of instrument permitted. It also differed from the Classical French organ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in that it included a Récit division that was under expression and incorporated string stops and undulating stops such as the voix céleste.¹⁵ Voicings of pipes in a neoclassic organ did not match Dupré’s vision of an organ’s tonal design: they were neither those of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century builders nor Cavaille-Coll’s, but individual to the instrument and experimental. As a result, in sound each neoclassic organ adhered to its own individual aesthetic.¹⁶

As was to be expected, these two streams of thinking on organ design in France did not coexist peacefully. In 1933, the French government had formed, as part of its Commission on Historic Monuments, a Commission on Historic Organs. Its task was to evaluate French organs in need of restoration and assign contracts to organ builders. Dupré and Marchal were both original members of the Commission on Historic Organs; Dufourcq, too, served for a long time on the Commission.¹⁷ Dupré, for his part, stood for organs being restored to their tonal designs as originally conceived or as adapted in the nineteenth century. Marchal and Dufourcq, in contrast, pushed for altering instruments according to neoclassical principles, resulting in some controversial re-buildings of existing organs.¹⁸

A controversial rebuild mentioned in Demessieux’s diary is the organ created by Gonzalez for the concert hall of Paris’s Palais de Chaillot (February 9, 1941 and November 11, 1945).¹⁹ This organ was built between 1936 and 1938 to replace the Cavaillé-Coll organ that had served so well in the concert hall of the recently demolished Palais du Trocadéro. In executing his neoclassic design Gonzalez incorporated little more than the pipework and windchests of the Cavaillé-Coll instrument.²⁰ Dupré would arguably have agreed to the plan of electrifying the action, extending the range of manuals and pedalboard, and building a mobile console, all of which required massive changes. He was evidently less pleased with the addition of newly designed mutation and mixture stops, the re-voicing of pipes, and the overall sound. In the words of Michael Murray:

Dupré was to see the traditional casework, which had given focus to sound and grace to physical appearance, abandoned at the Trocadéro and elsewhere in favor of exposed pipes, even exposed divisions. He was to see the brilliant yet mellow Cavaillé-Coll upperwork [stops at the 2-foot pitch level and higher] give way to clangorous mixtures incapable of blending, and the warm Cavaillé-Coll foundations and reeds give way to harsh choruses and rasping half- and quarter-length resonators. Worst of all, he was to see Cavaillé-Coll’s achievements misinterpreted by a new generation eager to renounce the virtues as well as the excesses of Romantic organ-building.²¹

In other words, to Dupré and his supporters, the neoclassic organ rendered an equal disservice to performance of music of Bach, the Romantic era, and the modern era. Conversely, to the supporters of the neoclassical organ Dupré was, in effect, defending “technologie passéiste”²² and degenerate practices of foreign builders of symphonic organs.²³

As mentioned earlier, differing ideals of organ design were not the only grounds upon which the two sides criticized each other—they also argued about repertoire and performance practice. Specifically, a general anti-Romantic sentiment derided nineteenth-century organ repertoire (apart from Franck) and included Dupré’s large-scale organ works in this censure. Dupré’s detractors also accused him of metronomic playing of an unmusical sort as compared to Marchal’s flexible performance style.²⁴ Moreover, they liked neither Dupré’s fast tempi nor his articulation, and claimed his registrations flawed by heaviness. According to Dufourcq, when teaching,

[Dupré] showed himself to be fiercely opposed to certain interpretations, to certain aesthetics; this attitude could not but irritate those who were warm-blooded.²⁵

In turn, Marchal and his students came under criticism from Dupré’s supporters for neglecting the cultivation of virtuosity and ignoring most of the big Romantic-era organ works in existence.²⁶ From the point of view of Marchal’s detractors, when playing Bach, he and organists influenced by him employed inappropriate rubato and an idiosyncratic melange of different sorts of detached articulation.

Dupré’s viewpoint in Demessieux’s diaries

Ideological differences between Paris organists, outlined above, resulted in acrimonious disputes, both in writing and in meetings of the Commission on Historic Organs. When combined with the baser human emotions such as egotism and envy, these differences arguably caused unconscious, and not-so-unconscious, forming of cliques of loyalty—for example, when church positions and teaching posts came open.²⁷ As a result, competition in the Paris organ world was strong and ruthless.²⁸

Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946 shines light on Dupré’s point of view: that a major cause of enmity toward him and his goals was not merely his traditionalist stance, but, more importantly, his colleagues’ jealousy of his abilities and achievements. Dupré believed that their resentment began in earnest following his pioneering 1920 series of Bach recitals. In the following quotation from 1946, he warns Demessieux about what to expect after her own debut as a concert organist:

“. . . At your age I too saw that the old could be jealous of the young. I am jealous of no one, as you know. Later I knew the jealousy of colleagues, and now, as you well know, I know the jealousy of the young. It doesn’t bother me. You’ll see!” (April 16, 1946).

But three years earlier, Dupré had, in fact, acknowledged that he felt keenly the malice of others which he attributed to jealousy:

“I’ve reached the age of fifty-seven without having yet attained my goal, which is rest. I have accomplished so much; and all I get are insults, insults” (April 16, 1943).

These comments, albeit made in private conversations, emphasize that Dupré frequently felt not just disappointed by others’ criticisms, but embittered. Being human, he sometimes had unkind things to say of some colleagues and former students that he would not have wanted to be published. However, thanks to Demessieux’s decision to commit them to paper, they reveal to the modern reader Dupré’s emotional state of mind during the 1940s.

The text of Demessieux’s diary of 1940–1946 follows this chapter. The first 49 manuscript pages cover her last months of study at the Paris Conservatory. The next 500 or so describe the period of her post-graduate organ study under Dupré as well as her 1946 Paris recital series. In these diary entries Demessieux frequently quotes Marcel Dupré at great length, indicating an ability to recall details of what was said that equalled her capacity for quickly committing music to memory. Selected letters written by Demessieux—and a few by Dupré to his close friend Jean Guerner—are inserted where they supplement the information in the diary. The diary’s final 20 or so manuscript pages concern the last seven months of 1946, during which the Duprés were overseas. Here I have supplemented the diary text with letters written from North America by the Duprés to Jean Guerner.

NOTES: