ASSOCIATION DES AMIS DE L'ART DE MARCEL DUPRÉ

The war years also saw Dupré write a succession of major works, including the monumental symphonic poem Évocation in 1941, the elegant and approachable Sixteen Chorales (Le Tombeau de Titelouze) of 1942, and the transcendental Suite of 1944 and Deux Esquisses of 1945.

After the war ended, Dupré resumed touring abroad. Just weeks after the German surrender, in July 1945 Dupré gave two concerts in London: at the Royal Albert Hall on the 24th, and at St Mark's, North Audley Street, three days later. The latter concert was broadcast live by the BBC. That his overwhelming impact on audiences remained undiminished can be judged from the following transcript of a verbal account by London-based impresario and critic Felix Aprahamian:


It was at that period that I heard Dupré give possibly the greatest improvisation I ever heard from anyone. The BBC had engaged him to do a broadcast recital on the organ of St Mark's, North Audley Street. I remember the organ distinctly, because it had a clock ... let into the music desk of the console. This was useful for broadcasts because the timing had to be absolutely exact, and Dupré had, I think, until exactly two minutes to eight in which to give his recital. It had to terminate then. And the recital was to end with an improvisation .... I'd had Benjamin Britten supply a theme for a prelude and fugue. And it was quite masterly ....

When the time came for the improvisation Dupré was handed the theme - two lines - and he looked at them, then he played the theme for the prelude over and then the theme for the fugue .... I was particularly interested in what would happen in the fugue because, if I remember aright, it was in C minor and somewhere or other during the course of the subject there was an interval from middle C to the perfect 4th of the F above it, and then down to F sharp in the tenor, followed by A flat.

I mean it really needed a master to instantly light on a counter-subject that would make sense. And he did it. I knew from that moment that this was going to be an absolutely terrific improvisation.

Dupré not only found the counter-subject but this thing unfolded so wonderfully until right at the end - the clock with about thirty seconds to go - a long dominant pedal; we'd had inversions, you name it, every kind of polyphonic contrapuntal device, finally a long stretto maestrale and a glorious C major chord to finish with.
To Aprahamian's London account, we add another from Paris by Dupré's student Bernard Gavoty, music critic of Le Figaro:

One day, in Saint-Sulpice, he improvised "for fun" a ricercare for six voices, with a canon for the middle two - and trained musicians will know what an achievement that represents. Nothing in his face betrayed the effort of an operation which is comparable only with the solution of certain problems in transcendental mathematics.

At the last chord he smiled broadly and, pushing in his registers, said simply, "There! If that is not what one can call genius!" I gasped, astounded and overwhelmed.

Dupré, his face serious again, said suddenly, "Come along!" and, taking me behind the organ to the little room which he uses as a study, he spoke firmly: "Do you know what genius is? I will tell you. Genius is the inimitable find, the harmonic or melodic discovery. It is, for instance, the adagietto in L'Arlésienne, or the first bars of Fauré's Secret. What I have just given you is an example of a contrapuntal combination, quite difficult to pull off, I grant you, but requiring only a clear head and care in following your voices .... I beg of you, stop using big words, and leave genius to the masters!"

His voice as he uttered the words was almost severe, and I went away, determined indeed to leave genius to the masters, on condition that I included in their ranks Marcel Dupré.
Dupré continued to teach his organ class until 1954, when he assumed the directorship of the Paris Conservatoire prior to retirement at the age of 70 in 1956. The 1950s brought him many accolades including election to the Institut de France, appointment to the rank of Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian Institute in Rome.

In addition, he found delight in helping his students assume major posts. Among them was the uniquely gifted improviser Pierre Cochereau, appointed titular organist of Notre-Dame early in 1955. In Dupré's words, Cochereau was a "phenomenon without equivalent in the contemporary organ world" - a status that Dupré himself had enjoyed for decades. In his recent book on Cochereau as improviser, Michel Robert writes:

Barely a month after his appointment, Cochereau was already attracting favourable comment. Among the crowd attending the [27 February 1955] funeral of poet Paul Claudel in Notre-Dame was composer Arthur Honegger. Listening to the cascades of improvised music pouring down from the organ tribune, Honegger turned to critic and Dupré disciple Bernard Gavoty, and whispered: "But who is capable of improvising like that? It has to be Dupré."

1957: A return to the US: Detroit, New York City, and the Mercury LPs The year following Dupré's retirement, his childhood friend Paul Paray reached out from America. Paray, who conducted Detroit's symphony orchestra, invited Dupré to play the October 1957 opening concert on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Ford Auditorium. Dupré accepted his friend's invitation, and with the Detroit Symphony recorded Saint-Saëns' Symphony in C minor (the "Organ" Symphony) for the Mercury label, helping to launch the era of stereo LP recording. It is a pleasure to note here that Thomas Fine, who re-mastered the original Mercury recordings for transfer to CD, is the son of Robert Fine and Wilma Cozart Fine, both of whom were central to the production of the original tape recordings.

Paul Paray with Dupré in Detroit, 1957 Photo: courtesy: Jim Lewis

Wilma Cozart Fine, Director for Dupré's Mercury recordings Courtesy: Thomas Fine

During this visit to America, he also recorded works by Widor and Franck as well his own Prélude et Fugue en sol mineur (Opus 7/3) and his Triptyque, newly composed for the Detroit visit. To take advantage of a more suitable instrument and acoustic, the solo recording sessions originally planned for the Ford Auditorium were moved at the last moment to St Thomas Church in New York City. On the evening of Monday 14 October 1957, the St Thomas recording sessions began. In her diary, Dupré's wife Jeanne related that taping was "interrupted every 3 minutes: the microphones pick up a low rumble each time the metro passes under the church. After each recorded fragment, we went to a nearby room to listen ... allowing us to note anything we were not satisfied with and then resume with a different registration. The process demands a lot of patience." Three days later, early in the morning of Thursday 17 October, the New York recording sessions ended with works by Widor and Dupré. Jeanne Dupré wrote: "We finished just after 2:30 am - with a break for ice cream. Phew! What a relief for Marcel, and what an undertaking!"

For the 71-year-old artist, it was indeed a major undertaking. During his US visit, Dupré completed the Saint-Saëns symphony recording, a Detroit solo concert and concert with orchestra, and travel to New York. Then, to fulfil his commitment to Mercury, he undertook three intensive nighttime recording sessions constantly interrupted by the sound of subway trains running under the church in midtown Manhattan. Listeners will immediately be struck by the imperiousness of Dupré's readings of his predecessor Widor on the 1957 New York LPs. Before settling into its restrained final bars, the Salve Regina movement from Widor's Symphonie pour orgue Nº 2, in particular, reaches a truly disturbing intensity, displaying the "elemental force" so often noted in Dupré's playing and drawing on the full resources of the Aeolian-Skinner instrument - all captured with dramatic clarity and realism by the Mercury recording team. Of Dupré's account of the Allegro from Widor's Symphonie pour orgue Nº 6, Rollin Smith accurately observes that "there has never been a more magisterial performance."

The Aeolian-Skinner console in the 1950s St Thomas Church, New York City

And given the acute problems Dupré was by then experiencing with his hands, it is difficult to understand how he remained physically capable of recording his Prélude et Fugue en sol mineur, Opus 7/3, at a tempo that challenges young virtuosi even today.


A few hours after the final Mercury recording session ended at 2:30 am, Dupré and his wife returned to the church to prepare for his evening concert. After a full day of rehearsal on the Aeolian-Skinner instrument, the Duprés left for dinner. "At 8 pm," Jeanne Dupré wrote, "we returned to St Thomas, a stone's throw from the restaurant. The concert was due to begin at 8:30, but already the vast church was full: on the ground, in the galleries, in the choir section."

In his own memoirs, the organist of St Thomas Church, William Self, wrote, "Dupré walked to the console as if he had never a care nor a worry, sat down, and started to play - a magnificent recital, fully justifying the expectations of his audience." Jeanne Dupré concluded her diary entry for 17 October 1957 thus: "Words cannot express the grandeur and beauty of this concert. I have never heard Marcel more dazzling."

1959: The Mercury recording team travels to Paris

So successful were the New York and Detroit recordings that Mercury signed Dupré to record another five LPs on the instrument that he had played for more than a half-century, the monumental five-manual Clicquot/Cavaillé-Coll organ in the Church of Saint-Sulpice. In late June 1959, Mercury shipped its recording van across the Atlantic, and the five discs of repertoire by Bach, Franck, Dupré, and Messiaen were recorded in nighttime sessions between 3 and 12 July that warm summer.

Dupré at Saint-Sulpice, 1960s Collection: Raymond Sultra, courtesy: AAAMD

Notes taken by the Mercury engineers relate that late in the night of 9 July, Dupré finished recording his Opus 36 Préludes et Fugues. Earlier that day, the temperature in Paris reached 35.6 degrees celsius, the highest recorded that year. One can only speculate on conditions inside the recording van, parked outside the church and packed with pre-digital-era recording equipment. Despite the heat outside, the mechanism of the huge instrument and the tuning of its 6,600 pipes remained stable for Opus 36, certainly more so than the organ was several days earlier for the Franck and Messiaen recordings. The shepherds' pipings in Franck's Pastorale and Messiaen's Les Bergers, their pitch slightly soured by the oppressive heat, produce an authentically rustic sound! Less familiar than the 1912 Opus 7 Préludes et Fugues, the 1939 Opus 36 set makes even greater demands on organists, and requires repeated hearings to reveal its riches. Indeed, it is fair to identify these works as an inflection point in twentieth-century writing for the organ. By turns, the three preludes and fugues are gossamer, ethereal, abstruse, playful, sardonic, beguiling, glowing, disquieting, intimidating, and overwhelming.

And as with the Suite from 1944 and the Deux Esquisses from 1945, we encounter in Opus 36 textures and sounds never before heard in the organ repertoire. Recording these works in the 1980s, Swedish organist Torvald Torén characterized the A-flat prelude and double fugue, Opus 36/2, as "counterpoint on the level of Bach." Indeed, for many listeners the final pages of the A-flat double fugue are among the finest moments in organ recording, a monument of learned and intricate counterpoint moving inexorably toward a blazing conclusion.

The Clicquot/Cavaillé-Coll organ, Saint-Sulpice, Paris

For maximum impact Opus 36 requires not only a large instrument in a resonant acoustic, but a focused effort - intellectual, interpretive, and virtuosic - from the performer. Dupré's July 1959 recording fulfills these requirements with an authenticity that six decades later remains unequalled. Among the other works Dupré recorded from his œuvre at Saint-Sulpice, especially noteworthy are the Carillon and the Final from Opus 27 (1931). As earlier noted, slips and smudges are evident, Dupré clearly hampered by Saint-Sulpice's heavy keyboard action during the late-night recording sessions. But, in both tracks, what moments of magic are to be heard! The "something elemental" in his playing Stuart Archer identified a half-century earlier is very much in evidence here, both in the disturbingly dark underside of the tintinnabulating Carillon and the imperious agogic thrust of the Final, constructed on the B-A-C-H motif. Turning to Dupré's 1959 recordings of Bach and Franck, we begin with a necessary understatement. There are many approaches to organ performance, especially when the works of major figures such as these are at issue. The literature is voluminous, the competing pedagogies strongly at odds, and the interpretive factions bitterly and sometimes personally contentious.

Indeed, over the centuries we often witness a new generation reject the aesthetic of its teachers, striking out in new directions. But as history shows, those new directions will in turn be rejected and replaced - not infrequently by a return to the aesthetic of a more distant past.

This essay is therefore not the place to debate the "authenticity" of the 73-year-old Dupré's performance of Bach and Franck, nor to evaluate competing claims of a "true" tradition of playing Bach or Franck passed down through the generations from teacher to pupil. Neither Bach nor Franck, needless to say, left us recordings that would enable us to verify these claims.

Both, however, taught students who claimed in good faith to have inherited their masters' manner of playing. Alas, the interpretive approaches of even these first-generation students are often at odds, to say nothing of second- and third-generation successors. Compare, for example, the 1975 recording of Dupré's works on the FY label by his student Pierre Cochereau to one by Dupré's grand-student (via Éliane Lejeune-Bonnier) Yves Castagnet on the Sony label in 1993. Castagnet provides extremely restrained, literal readings, staying very close to Dupré's scores and achieving reference-level performances worthy of careful study.

Cochereau's 1975 recording, on the other hand, makes substantial changes to the score's indications of tempo, registration, and even rhythm. In his liner notes, Cochereau indicates that Dupré personally gave him approval to make these interpretive changes. Indeed, we know that over the decades even Dupré's recordings of his own works departed, at times in dramatic ways, from his published scores. Compare, for example, in the St Thomas recording his treatment of the closing bars of the Fugue en sol mineur, Op 7/3. Dupré shortens the final chords dramatically from the values in the published score - using the Aeolian-Skinner's cohesive attack and the church's acoustic to generate greater impact, even ferocity.

Dupré at Meudon in the 1960s Photo: Aubert/Philips

Harsh things have been said about Dupré's 1959 Bach and Franck recordings. His critics - among them a number of grand- and great-grand-students of Dupré and his successor Rolande Falcinelli - criticize an aesthetic they hear as dry, metronomic, and anachronistic. These critics also condemn what they see as not only the folly of recording Bach's masterworks on an instrument far removed from the sound-world of the instruments Bach knew, but also of doing so when playing accurately had become a constant and painful struggle for Dupré. Today we can leave these conflicts to the dusty corners of organ lofts. Open to Dupré's aesthetic, a new generation has begun to rediscover musical riches in the Mercury recordings' emotional restraint, nobility, and deep roots in Dupré's Conservatoire training with Guilmant, Widor, and Vierne at the dawn of the twentieth century. We will therefore focus our attention on moments of magic preserved by the Mercury recordings. As listeners will discover, they are both numerous and arresting. Space permits mention of only a few.

Among the Bach works, the Fantasia in G, BWV 572, remains to this day a recording milestone. Dupré's reading of the score turns on its head most, if not all, interpretive orthodoxy. Despite a slight unsteadiness in articulation, the flutes of the opening section float serenely out into Saint-Sulpice's acoustic, garlanding a middle section of five-part harmony that builds - again, contrary to contemporary performance practice - from a gentle opening on the foundation stops through increasingly rich registrations to a massive diminished 7th chord employing the fiery tutti of the organ's 102 stops. As that unstable chord rolls down the nave, the Fantasia's final section begins with serene restraint on a light registration and in a startlingly slow tempo. Together, Dupré's interpretive gestures magnify, rather than diminish, both Bach's musical architecture and the compelling power of this historic recording.

Among the Franck works Dupré recorded at Saint-Sulpice during the July 1959 sessions, the Grande Pièce Symphonique and the Fantaisie in A are especially recommended. Here it is appropriate to acknowledge that, for many, the high point of mid-20th-century Franck interpretations is the intégrale by Dupré's student Jeanne Demessieux, recorded for Decca that same month, July 1959, just a few miles away at the Église de la Madeleine.

Indeed, Demessieux's recording of Franck's Prière, Opus 20 (1862) remains, for many, unequalled in its emotional intensity and sheer poetic beauty. Yet seventeen years prior to her Decca sessions, Demessieux wrote in her diary entry for Friday 19 June 1942:

Lesson at Dupré's. I completed all of Franck and the Alkan études today; two sets of scales at maximum speed, after which Dupré said: "That's unrivalled .... What a joy to see you ascend! No one has ever seen something like this."
The entry for the following Monday continues:

Morning spent at Meudon to continue the lesson interrupted on Friday. Franck's 1st and 2nd Chorals .... Here is what Dupré said to me today: "Last Friday was staggering for me .... Ah! That's grand, noble; it's wonderful."
We can therefore be sure that Demessieux studied Franck's works in detail with Dupré. Though remaining at a distance from his prize student's rhythmic freedom and emotional depth, Dupré's recordings provide context for her interpretations while presenting listeners with complementary delights. Among these are the adamantine rhythm and at times overwhelming grandeur of the Fantaisie, as well as his magisterial traversal of the musical topography of the Grande Pièce (which, though differing from Demessieux's in its musical "feel," is less than a minute longer - 26'02" versus 25'11").

Both tracks draw not only on Dupré's half-century performing Franck in concert on hundreds of instruments worldwide, but also on his experience using Saint-Sulpice's opulent acoustic to magnify Franck's musical rhetoric. The result: timeless and irreplaceable accounts of these scores.


In conclusion

When the present decade ends, Dupré's Mercury recordings from Detroit, New York, and Paris will themselves be more than seventy years old. Yet, now digitized, they will endure well into the future. Over the years Dupré has inspired countless virtuoso interpreters, composers, teachers, and scholars. They include Graham Barber, James Biery, David Briggs, Yves Castagnet, Susanne Chaisemartin, Pierre Cochereau, Robert Delcamp, Jesse Eschbach, Rolande Falcinelli, Lynnwood Farnam, Jeremy Filsell, Jean Guillou, Wayne Marshall, Marilyn Mason, Michael Murray, Flor Peeters, Françoise Renet, Daniel Roth, John Scott, Rollin Smith, Graham Steed, Stephen Tharp, Torvald Torén, D'Arcy Trinkwon, Ben van Oosten, Clarence Watters, Gillian Weir, Benjamin van Wye and many more. Their performances and writings are widely available online and via various streaming services. Now, characterized by a truly impressive interpretive and aesthetic reach, a new generation has engaged with Dupré. Among this diverse international group are the performers, scholars, and teachers David Baskeyfield, Ben Bloor, Katelyn Emerson, Tobias Frank, Pär Fridberg, Vincent Genvrin, Sebastian Heindl, Christopher Jacobson, Jan Liebermann, Angela Metzger, Jean-Baptiste Monnot, Ulf Norberg, Alessandro Perin, Robert Quinney, Jean-Baptiste Robin, and still others.

Dupré at the Albert Hall console, London, April 1971 Photo: John D. Sharp