Shorter works by Duruflé, Messiaen, and Fauré

            From his tenth through his sixteenth years, Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) studied organ and choral directing at a choir school in Rouen, France, where he also assisted his organ teacher in services at the cathedral.  The choral tradition of singing Gregorian chant at the Rouen cathedral made a life-long impression on Duruflé.  By 1920, the young musician was studying organ (including that very French art of improvisation) with Charles Tournemire in Paris.  After further studies with Louis Vierne, Duruflé entered the Paris Conservatoire, finally joining the composition class of Paul Dukas, where Olivier Messiaen was a fellow student.

 

            From 1924 until 1947, Duruflé composed only instrumental music: for the organ, orchestra, piano, and chamber ensemble.  When he finally turned to choral music, it was to write the work for which he is best remembered today, the Requiem, opus 9, a masterpiece based on Gregorian chant melodies, and considered by many worthy to stand alongside the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré.  The Four Motets on Gregorian themes followed in 1960.

 

            Duruflé composed the French anthem Notre Père (The Lord’s Prayer) in 1977 for the choir of the church of Saint-Étienne du Mont, after the Roman Catholic church made the transition to the vernacular liturgy, a development of which Duruflé—with his knowledge and love of Latin chant—most vociferously disapproved (perhaps his disagreement with the church fathers explains the absence of any chant melodies in Notre Père).  Nevertheless, Duruflé’s setting is beautiful, and its simple, homophonic style is clearly motivated by a desire to provide a prayer for daily congregational singing at Saint-Étienne du Mont, where Notre Père is still sung in Mass to this day.

 

            Duruflé completed his Quatre Motets sur des thèmes grégoriens in 1960 and dedicated them to Auguste le Guennant, Director of the Gregorian Institute in Paris.  Duruflé set himself the task of basing each Latin motet on one or more Gregorian chants; this requirement liberates rather than restricts the composer, who uses the old church modes to create deft polyphony and impressionistic harmonies.  “Ubi caritas” is based on an antiphon (a liturgical chant with a prose text) intended to be sung in the Mass of the Washing of the Feet, celebrated on Maundy Thursday.  The altos, divided into two choirs, exchange the chant melody antiphonally over a varied texture in the other voices.  “Tota pulchra es” uses three antiphons intended for the Second Vespers of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception; this motet of praise for the Virgin Mary is set appropriately for women’s voices.  “Tu es Petrus” is based upon an antiphon from the First Vespers on the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul.  The text is from Matthew 16:18 (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”).  The text of “Tantum ergo” is drawn from the fifth and sixth verses of the hymn “Pange lingua gloriosi,” intended for the Second Vespers of the First Feast of Corpus Christi (the chant melody for each verse is identical to the “Pange lingua” melody in the first verse).  The chant is sung in longer note values by the sopranos (quarter notes and half notes) while the other voices alternate between quarter-note variants of the chant and more florid eighth-note melismatic embellishments.

 

            James Frazier has written that the works of Duruflé and those of Olivier Messiaen (1909-1992) “are Catholic in two very different ways:  Messiaen’s is theological, whereas Duruflé’s is liturgical.”  While Duruflé wrote his choral music to be sung in church, most of Messiaen’s grand mystical works for organ, for piano, or for orchestra are meditations upon theological ideas—such as the ascension, the Trinity, or the Blessed Sacrament—meant to be played in the concert hall.  O sacrum convivium! (1939), to the text of a Gregorian antiphon, is one of the few exceptions in Messiaen’s oeuvre:  a motet to be sung during communion.  By 1939, Messiaen was already experimenting with the suspension of ordinary notions of time:  time “not as a thread to be observed but as an element to be inhabited” (Paul Griffiths), or as “an eschatological stillness” (James Frazier).  This sense of time can be felt in the regular elongation of the notes at the beginning of each phrase of O sacrum convivium! and in the very long notes at the ends of each verse.  The choral harmonies contain triads with sevenths reminiscent of common tonal practice, but Messiaen has integrated them into modes of his own devising, creating surprising chromatic shifts, and an aura of mystery.

 

            Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)—renowned for piano works, chamber music, and over a hundred art songs—began his musical training in the church.  In his fifth year, he began spending hours each day playing the harmonium in the chapel adjoining the school his father directed at Montgauzy (central France).  At age nine, his father took him to Paris to enroll in the École Niedermeyer—a school for classical and religious music—to be trained for a career as a choirmaster.  Almost eleven years later, he graduated with first prizes in fugue and counterpoint, and also in composition, for his Cantique de Jean Racine, opus 11.  Of the Cantique, Jean-Michel Nectoux has written

 

…there is character and originality in the serenity of mood, in the flow of chordal harmony, and in the delicate but substantial choral writing.  It recalls the most seductive and melodious passages of Mendelssohn or Gounod.  The jury [for the composition prize] were so taken by its inner intensity and fervor, which matched Racine’s text, that they did not hold Fauré to the letter of the rules.

 

            Fauré’s Messe Basse (Low Mass) for women’s voices began its life in 1881 as a Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (Mass of the Fishermen of Villerville).  Fauré and André Messager were vacationing in the coastal town of Villerville, and they collaborated on a mass to be performed in the local church for the benefit of a fisherman’s benevolent fund.  Fauré contributed the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, and Messager composed the Kyrie and an “O Salutaris.”  In 1906, Fauré revised the mass to make it his own, composing a new Kyrie and Benedictus (based on the “Qui tollis” from the earlier Gloria), and retaining his earlier Sanctus and Agnus Dei movements.  Nectoux has written that “this religious work … recaptures the simplicity and the direct fervor of Racine’s ‘cantiques,’ admirably caught by Fauré fifteen years earlier.”

 

--John Shepard

 

Fauré’s Requiem, opus 48

 

            Fauré’s Requiem has become one of the most beloved works of the choral canon.  It was originally set as a chamber work for chorus, two soloists, low strings, several solo instruments, and organ in 1887-1888; Fauré expanded the work by adding two movements and altering the orchestration in 1893 and 1900, respectively.  The orchestration of 1900 is perhaps not the work of the composer.  The score published in that year is full of outright errors, suggesting that the normally fastidious Fauré “farmed out” the orchestration, as he was known to have done with other works of that period.

 

            However, it is that version which became widely known in the 20^th century.  Despite the awkward orchestral doublings (the violins rarely play an independent line and the woodwinds often double the organ part needlessly), the Requiem’s melodic beauty and the “humanist” approach to the Requiem text have attracted performers and audiences for more than a century.  The glorious melody entrusted to the tenors in the first movement, the reverential counterpoint of the Offertorium, the beautiful simplicity of the Pie Jesu, and the awesome sense of repose in the final movement have all contributed to the work’s recognition as a masterwork.

 

            In the early 1980s the English composer, organist, and conductor John Rutter devoted substantial time and energy to a reconstruction of Fauré’s original instrumentation of the Requiem.  In his new edition of 1983, Rutter restored the original scoring for organ and low strings divisi.  Except for two brief violin solos, the string section consists of first and second viola, first and second cello, and string bass, rather than the standard classic/romantic era string section of first and second violins, violas, celli, and basses.  The French horns are retained as they have important functional lines.  The organ, however, now presents most of the material that was given to the woodwinds in the version of 1900.

 

            Listening past the details, one hears the most obvious and effective restoration in this version—that of the original sonority of the low strings.  The warmth and resonance of divided violas match the aura of comfort apparent in Fauré’s melodic design and text selection.

 

            For, or course, this is not a literal setting of the complete liturgy of the Roman Catholic Requiem.  Fauré chose his texts from that liturgy, avoiding the ideas of judgment and expiation, choosing rather to focus on “eternal rest” and the welcome of the departed into paradise by the angelic hosts.

 

            The intensity of Mozart’s “Dies irae” (“Day of wrath”), the bombast of Berlioz’s “Tuba mirum” (the trumpet heralding Judgment Day), and the awesome power of much of the Verdi Requiem are not embraced by Fauré.  Avoiding the “Dies irae” altogether, Fauré creates an atmosphere in which a transcendent spirituality is all-important.  The promise of eternal rest is much more apparent in this work than the threat of retribution.

 

            This personalizing of the text of a liturgical work is perhaps less significant than it is sometimes made out to be.  Many composers prior to Fauré had designed settings of liturgical texts to fit their own sensibilities or even the practicalities of their times.  Schubert never set the complete text of the Mass, choosing to leave out lines that did not reflect his beliefs or those of many of his acquaintances in the era of quite liberal Catholicism that followed the Josephinian reforms of Imperial Austria.  An even earlier example of a composer’s freedom in this area would be the Musikalische Exequien, Heinrich Schütz’s 17^th-century Requiem setting.  The best-known instance of such selective text setting is the German Requiem (which the Riverside Choral Society will perform later this season), for which Johannes Brahms chose his own biblical texts.

 

--Patrick Gardner