How French was the music of Duruflé?

It’s been said that between Bach (d.1750) and Messiaen (b.1908) no music of note was written for the organ. There’s something, if not everything, in that claim. (It omits Saint-Saëns and Bruckner, for a start.) But it’s certainly also true that Messiaen was only one of a number of inspiring composers for the instrument in France at the start of the twentieth century, as French organ music took off in the years around the Second World War. Maurice Duruflé was primary among them.

Duruflé is best known now for his wonderful Requiem (1947). Like many of his best-loved works, this piece is based around a polyphonic development of Gregorian chant – that is to say, its “melodies” are taken from the plainsong setting of the Requiem Mass. A similar technique is deployed in the beautiful motet Ubi caritas et amor. But it was for the organ that Duruflé composed the most – not that this in itself was a particularly large body of work. Like his teacher, Paul Dukas — of Sorcerer’s Apprentice fame – Duruflé was an intensely harsh critic of his own work.

Duruflé’s Suite for organ was composed in 1932; he was already in his thirties, but it comprised only his fifth opus number. It is one of his most successful compositions. Its dark first movement was a particular favourite of the composer’s during his equally prominent career as a concert organist. Its success has endured – largely because it poses much less of a technical challenge than the succeeding two movements. I want to pose some influences on the theme of this first movement which sharpen up our appreciation of where this kind of French organ music sits in its contemporary context.

Here are the first few moments of the Prelude. It’s stirring stuff. Now, Duruflé did set out a version of this music’s provenance when he brought the Suite to London:

The Prélude, which is sombre in character, is composed in the form of a diptych. A single theme, presented in three successive expositions, gradually accumulates the power of the organ. The second part consists of a long recitative, developing the first notes of the theme.

But what of this theme? It’s been mentioned before that the key and pedal point is reminiscent of Dukas’ own Piano Sonata. After all, this Suite is dedicated to Duruflé’s former teacher. But a listen to the Dukas reveals that similarities are thin, at least as far as the melodic material goes.

The opening theme seems eerily familiar to the similarly brooding opening to Arnold Schoenberg’s radical work for string orchestra from 1903, Verklärte Nacht. A quick listen will reveal the similarities – particularly in the melodic contour of the organ’s right hand in the Duruflé and the violins in the Schoenberg. Moreover, I think it’s revealing that Duruflé might be drawing on Schoenberg at the beginning of this piece – an exemplar, if ever there was one, of the uniquely French organ tradition of the first half of the twentieth century.

That tradition was based in the Catholic revivalism existing at the fringes of political debates in early twentieth-century France. Duruflé’s crucial role in returning plainsong to the music heard in church services across France during this period was a small part of these contentious concerns. One of the means by which secularism was deemed by traditionalists to encroach upon the church was in the musical forms of music distinctly ex cathedra. This was as true in the Paris of Duruflé as much as it was in the Linz of Bruckner’s day. A reappropriation of the music proper to the worship of the Church therefore accompanied the large-scale Catholic revival of the late nineteenth century in France: an age of the Ultramontanes fighting Prussians under the banner of the Pope, and the building of the Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris as a gruesome monument to civic and national sin. Duruflé, that is to say, grew up in the cultural and aesthetic reverberations of this revival.

This is all to highlight the prevalent impression that the music of Duruflé and his contemporaries was distinctly French – and, as an extension of that, cut off from the historical view and musical terminology of its Austro-German counterparts. Roman Catholic Church music, in particular, would seem to be as distant from the “emancipation of dissonance” proposed by Schoenberg and his Viennese colleagues – let alone the music associated with Richard Wagner.

Now, I don’t think it’s only a bit of Schoenberg that we can hear in the Prelude to the Suite. The opening of Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony is also in there somewhere. Strauss’ work is a monument to German intellectual and musical ambition – and a culmination of sorts to the reaction to Wagner. Composed at the start of the First World War, Strauss didn’t mess around in his statements about its intentions as a work of art. “The German nation,” he wrote, “will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity. I shall call my alpine symphony: der Antichrist.” Why don’t composers publicise their work like this anymore?

Strauss, by the way, was making a reference here to Nietzsche’s book of 1888, and he later dropped the title. Nonetheless, if we are to imagine Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) having a musical counterpart, it would surely be Strauss’ contemporaneous Symphony, with its pictorial celebration of hard graft and achievement as the mountaineer reaches the summit. The point is that this is as far away from the concerns and sound world of Duruflé as can be.

But the opening of the Alpine Symphony is in the same key as Durufle’s Prelude, and begins with the same B flat pedal point. Its mood is undeniably similar, although Strauss then launches into one of the most extraordinary crescendos in the symphonic repertoire. My point is that the influence of these two openings from the Austro-German repertoire seem more important to Durufle’s musical gambit than do his French predecessors Dukas or Louis Vierne.

It’s undeniably true that crossovers between Schoenberg, Strauss and Duruflé were limited. The First World War imposed wider demands for an artistic differentiation which had first found expression after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In 1920, Dukas – the dedicatee of Durufle’s Suite – had been commissioned to join a host of European composers, including Schoenberg, in a musical tribute to Claude Debussy for the pages of La revue musicalle. But Schoenberg never wrote the piece. Any personal links between Duruflé, Strauss and Schoenberg are hard to come by.

So why the link? In 1932, Duruflé was surely aware of the worsening political situation for Jews like Schoenberg in Germany: the latter was to flee for America the next year. Perhaps, conversely, he felt affinity with the context of Verklärte Nacht, written after Schoenberg’s first encounter with his future wife. Duruflé often heard his music first in the playing of his wife, Marie-Madeleine. There’s a good chance that Duruflé’s references in this piece were subconscious.

But these influences might help us to reconsider the musical categories into which we put this music. Might we hear Strauss, Schoenberg and Duruflé, separated only by a few years, as not so far apart as they might have liked us to presume? Historians have begun to look more into these cross-cultural links; not as a piece of Habsburg nostalgia, but as products of a Mittel-European intellectual culture lost after the Second World War. Perhaps the multiple dividing lines separating European cultures one from another in the early twentieth century has already become more of an imposition from our twenty-first century perspective. Reality may not have appeared so to the Nietzsche-loving Strauss, devout Catholic Duruflé, and exiled Jewish Schoenberg in the years before their shared culture was shattered by another conflagration.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.