GMCD 7162 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Instrumental/Music for Organ Reviews ***Sound Clips***	MARCEL DUPRÉ Volume 4 Intégrale des œuvres pour orgue Complete Organ Works Sämtliche Orgelwerke   Jeremy Filsell - Organ   www.jeremyfilsell.com

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DDD Total time = 66.20 Recorded at St. Boniface Episcopal Church, Sarasota, Florida, USA - September 1998

Vitrail, Op.65

‘I was brought up in the organ of Saint-Ouen; it is Saint-Ouen that made me.....’ Although Dupré was so closely associated for so many years with Saint-Sulpice in Paris, he remained deeply attached to the ancient Abbey Church of Saint-Ouen in his home town of Rouen, and its glorious Cavaillé-Coll organ. At the age of four he had witnessed the inauguration of the organ by Widor in 1890; his own father was organist here for nearly thirty years; and he visited the church and played the organ in public and in private on countless occasions throughout his long life. One of the glories of Saint-Ouen is the great rose window in the North Transept, and it was this window that inspired Dupré’s final work, Vitrail (Stained-glass window), in 1969, just two years before his death. The window consists of a dazzling circle of prophets and saints in red, blue, gold and green, surrounded by wheeling golden stars and suns, geometrically arranged in five triangles around a central five-pointed star, and its structure is reflected in the six short sections of Vitrail, which follow an unusual symmetrical design with three different themes - the first inspiring sections 1 and 4, the second, sections 2 and 5, and the third, sections 3 and 6. The whole work can be briefly analysed as follows:
1) Marcato for Mixture choruses, based on theme 1, a short chromatic phrase of rising and falling tones and semitones
2) Poco piu lento for flutes, introducing a new theme in which the intervals are expanded to thirds
3) Energico for Mixtures. The third theme, prefigured in the preceding section, expands the intervals again into a sequence of rising and falling fourths
4) Allegro molto - the first theme returns in a twinkling scherzo, the alternate notes of the two hands tracing darting points of light and colour
5) Andante - the second theme returns in a brief meditation for Voix Céleste
6) Allegro animato - the third theme returns, and is soon joined by the other two in a resplendent coda.

Souvenir, Op. 65bis
This tiny miniature was not intended for publication, but nevertheless forms a moving postscript to the more imposing structure of Vitrail; it was composed shortly afterwards, as a gift for a friend after the death of her mother, whom Dupré had known since his childhood.; unable to attend the funeral, he wrote this little tribute, on a single sheet of paper, in a deliberately unassuming and retrospective style.

Le Tombeau de Titelouze, Op. 38
‘Marcel Dupré wrote his Tombeau de Titelouze’, wrote his first biographer, Abbé Delestre, ‘after a conversation that I had with him during the Organ Week that took place in Rouen in 1942. I showed him the tomb of the great musician in the Cathedral: its location is identified, but up to now there is no inscription to mark the spot for visitors. Dupré immediately conceived the idea of this tombeau...’. We know that Dupré played in Rouen in late July 1942, and that was probably the occasion of this meeting. Only a few weeks later, on 17th September, his pupil Jeanne Demessieux recorded in her diary that Dupré ‘showed me something he has written during the vacation - some chorales on liturgical themes and a little toccata, entitled Le Tombeau de Titelouze’.
Jehan Titelouze, ‘the father of French organ music’, was organist of Rouen Cathedral from 1588 until his death in 1633. In his preface to Le Tombeau Dupré pays tribute to the ‘rich and closely argued polyphony, the noble and pure style’ of his music. ‘Destined for those who are beginning the study of the organ,’ he explains, ‘the present collection comprises 16 chorales based on liturgical hymns, eight of which were treated by Titelouze...’
The chorales are all fingered and pedalled to assist the student, and are graded in order of difficulty, gradually adding the pedals, then a fourth and then a fifth voice, ending in a grand five-part fugue and a toccata that would surely defeat most beginners. The harmonic language ranges from extreme modal restraint in most of the earlier pieces to a more contemporary style in some of the later ones, and the textures too are imaginatively varied - Dupré thrived on self-imposed limitations. Although the Tombeau was conceived as a didactic work, and some of these pieces are too short even to play during a service, some of the others are perfectly suited for liturgical use, and one or two of them - notably the exquisite Iste Confessor - also retained a place in Dupré’s own concert repertoire in later years.

Symphony-Passion, Op. 24
The Symphonie-Passion had its origins in an improvisation on the organ of the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia in December 1921, during Dupré’s first visit to America; presented on this occasion with some themes of plainsong - Jesu Redemptor, Adeste Fideles, Stabat Mater and Adoro Te - he decided to use them as the basis of a four-movement symphony depicting the life of Christ. This improvisation was greeted with such acclaim that he immediately decided to undertake a properly composed, written version of the work; but the next few years were the busiest of his whole life, and it was not until the summer of 1924 that he was able to complete it, giving the ‘first performance’ at Westminster Cathedral on 9th October. Remarkable both for its vivid musical imagery and for its varied and imaginative treatment of the plainsong themes - which are fully integrated into the structure of the outer movements, but treated with great delicacy and restraint in the more overtly programmatic central movements - the symphony enjoyed an immediate success, and has remained the most frequently performed of all Dupré’s major works.
The Abbé Delestre once asked Dupré if he could be at all precise about the relationship between the Philadelphia improvisation and the final version of the symphony: ‘Apart from the general conception of the four movements, and the four plainsong themes’, the composer replied, ‘there remain, in the finished work: the form of each of the pieces, the tonal schemes, and a certain number of ‘notes’ that I hastened to write down, during the night, in my hotel room. After all, what can survive of a fugitive improvisation? - only the ideas that have struck you sufficiently strongly for your consciousness to seize hold of them on the spot, with the specific intention of retaining them...’ On another occasion, referring specifically to the first movement, Dupré told Jeanne Demessieux that the essence of the earlier improvisation was there, but that the end was different; when he was writing down the symphony, he ‘found’ the end of the first movement while he was improvising and experimenting in private on the organ of Saint-Ouen - ‘he was searching for it, and all of a sudden he found it.’
In Dupré’s dramatic conception of The world awaiting the Saviour, pounding chords and irregular rhythms depict a world of tormented and restless souls, but the Christmas hymn Jesu Redemptor omnium is soon introduced, very quietly, as a second subject, a symbol of light in the darkness. The unrest resumes, and gradually the hymn comes to dominate the music in a great crescendo, embracing the pounding rhythms in a triumphant canon between treble and bass, and finally hammered out in victorious D major chords, as Hope overwhelms Despair.
In Nativity Dupré adopts a touchingly naive, pictorial style; this movement takes the form of a triptych, portraying firstly the Virgin and Child, then the March of the Shepherds to Bethlehem, and finally the Adoration. The tender, swaying lullaby of the first section has a mysterious, almost oriental flavour; it returns in the third scene, where it is combined with the familiar melody of Adeste Fideles, before the angels finally add their blessing in two distant Alleluias.
The sinister jagged rhythms of Crucifixion vividly depict the faltering steps of Christ’s ascent to Calvary, and mount relentlessly to a harrowing climax. Finally, in a desolate epilogue, ‘the bleak, frozen image of the sorrowing mother’ (as Messiaen memorably described it) is evoked by the fragmented, disembodied melody of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa. The two-note phrase which forms an obsessive accompaniment seems to echo the cries of the weeping women at the foot of the cross - ‘Jesu, Jesu....’
Resurrection is conceived as a vast crescendo, built on the theme of the Eucharistic hymn Adoro Te. The dissonance of some of the music reflects the bitterness of Christ’s struggle with the powers of darkness, but the home key of D major is finally established in a powerful toccata, around which the plainsong thunders out in canon between treble and bass, and the final chords echo and intensify the triumphant climax of the first movement of the symphony.

Page revised Friday May 25 2007