Jean Langlais – Hommage à Frescobaldi (1951)

Duration ~ 5 minutes

Born in La Fontenelle, Brittany, France, a small village near by the Mont Saint-Michel, Jean Langlais (1907-1991) became blind from the age of two. Sent to the Paris National Institute for the Young Blind in 1918, he studied piano, violon, harmony and organ with great blind teachers among other Albert Mahaut and Andre Marchal. Later, he entered the Paris National Conservatory of Music in Marcel Dupre organ class, obtaining a First Prize in 1930. In 1931, he received the “Grand Prix d’Execution et Improvisation des Amis de l’Orgue”, after having studied improvisation with Charles Tournemire. He ended his studies with a Composition Prize in Paul Dukas’ class at the Paris Conservatory in 1934.

Professor for forty years at the National Institute for the Young Blind, he also taught at the Paris Schola Cantorum where, between 1961 and 1976, he influenced both french and foreign students. In 1945, he became the successor to Cesar Franck and Charles Tournemire at the prestigious organ tribune of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. He left that position in 1987 at the age of 80, having been titular for 42 years.

In Homage à Frescobaldi, Langlais pays homage to the seventeenth-century Italian keyboard virtuoso and composer Girolamo Frescobaldi most overtly in the eighth movement, "Epilogue." The final movement is an energetic pedal solo, the theme of which quotes Frescobaldi's canzona from the Messa della Madonna, from the Fiori Musicali (1635). Not content with a flurry of single pedal notes (in the style of Bach and his contemporaries), Langlais instead requires the organist to play a fugue, with both feet engaged. As the toe and the heel of each foot can play a note, he often asks for three notes at once – and at a few points, he event writes 4-note chords! With a lot of preparation (at a little luck), the piece is a real showstopper!

Jean Langlais was taking a walk along the water at La Richardais holding the hand of his four-year-old son, Claude, when he fell off a low wall and fractured his right ankle. Poorly treated at the Dinard hospital, this fracture limited his mobility for eight months and seemed to permanently compromise his career as an organist.

Moved by this state of affairs, Professor de Sèze, an old friend, entrusted him to the care of the surgeon Merle d’Aubigné, who decided on a second operation on the ankle and rebuilt it fragment by fragment. But he warned Jean Langlais that he would probably never play the organ again, a proposition that the composer couldn’t accept. To completely reeducate the stiff joint, Langlais decided to write a piece (for pedal solo) that greatly increased the technical difficulties, with four-note chords in long notes and a three-voiced fugue based on a theme from Frescobaldi’s “Canzon dopo l’Epistola,” from the “Messa della Madonna”, part of the Fiori musicali of 1635. 

Langlais particularly liked this collection and frequently played the elevation toccatas from it at Sunday Mass at Sainte-Clotilde, just as his mentor Charles Tournemire had done in his time.

The “Épilogue sur un thème de Frescobaldi” for solo pedal takes the form of a Buxtehude “prelude and fugue,” juxtaposing four continuous and contrasting sections (prelude, recitative, fugue, toccata) which explore all the possibilities of the pedalboard: rapidity and chords requiring the use of the heel and toe of both feet. The piece is striking in the extreme classicism of its harmonic language, and it quickly became famous among organists the world over for its demanding virtuosity. In placing it as the closing movement of his new suite in 1951, Langlais clearly indicated the general sense of this new eight-movement organ suite, composed “in the spirit of Frescobaldi.”

An analysis shows that the work divides into two parts: the first five movements comprising movements for the mass, in the manner of the Suite médiévale, with quotations from gregorian chants – and the last three freely complete the service.

Unlike the Suite médiévale, whose medieval splendor unfolds with brilliance in its “Prelude” and concluding “Acclamations carolingiennes,” the “service part” of the Hommage à Frescobaldi (excepting the concluding “Fantaisie”) seeks above all poetry and meditation (for example, the “Prélude au Kyrie” where the Gregorian melody blossoms peacefully on a pedal four-foot flute, accompanied in the manuals by a soft gamba).

Jean Langlais admired Frescobaldi’s modernity and pays homage to him in using polytonality in the imitative counterpoint of the “Homo quidam” in the Elevation.

Throughout this mass, he uses various Gregorian motives: Lucis creator (Offertory), Homo quidam (Elevation), and “Sacris solemniis” (Communion), but always in the sweet and mysterious atmosphere that he so appreciated in the Fiori musicali. In the “Fantaisie” that closes the “mass,” Langlais employs a procedure that he would always willingly use, the transformation of a short motive—here the first four notes of the “Ite missa est” of the “Cunctipotens genitor Deus” Mass—into an animating cell for the work (one hears it no fewer than twenty-four times) before presenting it in full on the pedal reeds 8’ and 4’, accompanied by open fourths and fifths more evocative of Machaut than Frescobaldi.

Hommage à Frescobaldi could well have ended with this brilliant “Fantaisie,” but the composer added three supplementary and completely independent pieces. None of them brings in a plainchant motive, not even the “Antienne” (n° 6) where the modal and personal theme serves as a point of departure for the contrapuntal games that evoke Frescobaldi but also Marcel Dupré, the dedicatee of the volume, recalling the scheme he gave to his improvisation students at the Conservatory. In the “Thème and Variations” Langlais displays his contrapuntal skills in the first two variations, two-voiced then four-voiced, and his sense of humour in the Lisztian third variation. The final pirouette, humorously, is reminiscent of the picturesque conclusion of Louis Vierne’s “Impromptu.”

Upon its publication, the Hommage à Frescobaldi quickly proved to be one of Jean Langlais’ leading collections, along with the Neuf Pièces, and the Suite brève, Suite médiévale and Suite française.

The idiom of Hommage à Frescobaldi, is, however, very much within the late French Romantic organ tradition, making Langlais' dedication of the piece to his teacher, Marcel Dupre, scarcely less important than the title itself.

Basilique Ste-Clotilde – Cavaillé-Coll (1859, expanded in 1962)