Published to mark the
centenary of his birth in 2002 Ronald
Ebrecht has selected a wide-ranging
tribute to Maurice Duruflé who
is fully deserving of biographical and
analytical study. This volume goes some
way to examining his importance and
place in French musical life from his
student years under Tournemire, Vierne
and Dukas to the international touring
he undertook with his wife, Marie-Madeleine,
so cruelly curtailed by a horrific car
accident that increasingly crippled
him.
Though the majority
of contributors are American , perhaps
inevitably it’sMarie-Claire Alain and
Eliane Chevalier who most poignantly
and acutely point to the complexities
and ambivalences of Duruflé’s
personality – who point, indeed, to
the timidity and warmth that lay at
his heart as a man, the veneer of which
was composed of a kind of cloistered
distance. Product of successive choir
schools and provincial and Parisian
organ lofts he studied with the mightiest
of the mighty though always denied,
as has sometimes been alleged, that
he was a student of Widor. He did however
certainly deputise for Dupré’s
organ classes around 1943, by which
time he was into middle age. The trouble
with Duruflé, if trouble it is,
is what one contributor characterises
as his "minuscule output."
Given that he came to hate his Greatest
Hit, the Toccata, and that his other
well-known composition, the Requiem,
has been so haughtily dismissed in some
powerful quarters it’s a wonder that
he composed at all. Written after his
father’s death and his first post-War
work, the Requiem was written off as
"weak" by Nadia Boulanger
and though Dupré, showing better
taste, admired the Requiem, it was inevitably
the case that Duruflé was increasingly
seen as too old-fashioned for the Lions
of Modernism, who found his Debussyian-Fauréan
heritage too old hat for their liking.
And yet it was Duruflé,
the organist, who premiered Poulenc’s
Organ Concerto and who, as an executant,
left impressive memorials of his art
(in the Fauré Requiem, in Saint-Saëns’
Organ Symphony amongst others – it’s
a pity there’s no discography in this
festschrift; it’s badly needed). He
attracted a wealth of young talent to
his classes and increasingly gave far-flung
tours as a soloist, not least to American
Universities. It was only the 1975 crash
that curtailed his involvement – a role
increasingly taken by his exceptionally
gifted wife, whose interpretations of
his work were different from his own
but equally powerful.
There is just appreciation
here of his essentially traditional
approach to composition. Though he was
certainly no innovator he is not the
comfortably quiescent composer some
see him; we see, convincingly, how restless
and alive his harmonies are, how, whilst
following the dictates of the text,
he nevertheless manages to construct
long phrases of multi-sectional complexity.
And awareness of his organ compositions
shows how attuned one needs to be in
understanding the tonal resources of
the French romantic organ as well as
the importance of the electric action
that superseded the manual in Duruflé’s
lifetime. One might also want to consider
tempi in the light of the suggestion
made in Ebrecht’s own chapter that tempos
were slower in certain acoustics; also
that when the composer played his own
works they were slower than the published,
revised tempi. Of interest, additionally,
is Duruflé’s late embrace of
a stripped down neo-classicism and the
way in which, cleverly and with minimal
adjustment, he converted his earlier
late Impressionist style to a more modern
one (even in the case of works which
he subsequently revised). The fact that
both these styles were already old fashioned
when he employed them shouldn’t really
be of concern – they were what suited
him.
There are of course
some typos and other mistakes; it was
Arthur Rubinstein who lived in Paris
and so electrified audiences with his
Chopin not Anton Rubinstein (spelt here
Rubenstein). Ford Madox Ford wasn’t
an American – he was British. And when
Mme Duruflé is quoted as saying
on page 45 that "My usband says
that I play too fast, but I can, and
I love to" I hope this is a case
of a dropped H and not Franglais. I
would also point to the fact that the
documentation of his life before around
1963 is rather sparse and, as I said
earlier, a discography should have been
appended to join the useful organ specifications
and bibliography.
Otherwise this is a
well-produced, thoughtful and illuminating
festschrift whose value is significant
in one’s perceptions of this still undervalued
and "timid" traditionalist.
Jonathan Woolf
Ronald Ebrecht (editor) 