From the Introduction to French Masters of the Organ, by Michael Murray.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Reprinted by permission of copyright owner.

Remains a matter of definition. One often hears “romantic” used to classify each of these composers. Now it is true that by date or by predilection Saint-Saëns, Franck, Widor, and Vierne belong to the nineteenth century, a century in which, as everyone knows, a bountiful romanticism flourished. They may be so classed by reference to period, without ignoring dissimilarity of manner. But to call romantic such more recent figures as Dupré, Langlais, and Messiaen shows how muddled the term has become. Whether or not romanticist gesture can be found informing their scores, would not chronology alone insist that they be called by another name? And if “modern” is too pliant for the task, and if “neo-romanticist” begs the question, and if “avant-garde” is clearly passé, what term are we to use?

An answer will emerge in the chapters below, but we must undertake a preliminary refinement. First, “romantic” chiefly misleads not because it has come to denote many and mutually contradictory ideas—any number of useful words do the same—but because it purports to denote one style while in fact denoting many. We cannot know what synonym to infer when the tag is attached to a given object: sentimental, expressive, sensual, melodic, symphonic, heroic, undisciplined, despicable, impractical, rebellious, formless, poetic, imaginative, or—what? And we cannot in every case trust context to make meaning clear.

“Romantic” also misleads because it suggests the opposite of “classic,” whereas history more accurately would let the words name the sides of a single coin. That is, together the classic and the romantic make up one idea having two main parts. It is emphasis that shifts, now to one side, now to the other. Beethoven, for instance, was either a classic-romanticist or a romantic-classicist, depending on which of his coexistent attitudes predominate in a given piece. He was never one or the other exclusively, but always both at once in proportions that varied from work to work. His style, his very epoch, is symbolized by the hyphen.

“Classic” itself misleads by being sometimes used to name a style (that of Haydn, often, and Mozart) and sometimes to name a composer who perfected a style or crowned an evolution. Chopin or Wagner is classic in this sense no less than Schubert, Palestrina, or Bach—“classic,” used thus, having nothing to do with period. When, on the other hand, it does denote period (as with Haydn and Mozart) it often suggests, in Charles Rosen’s words, the exemplary and normative, or what we are pleased to look back and consider exemplary and normative.

For in truth, as Walter Pater told us more than a century ago, every period and branch of art exhibits the classic and the romantic concurrently. “The romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely working influence.” By the same token, the charm of the classic is ever “that of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm of familiarity.... It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper.”

We retell, then, an ancient tale: partisans condemning the new as upstart, suspect, and threatening, the old as barren and spent. And no student of history will be surprised to learn that in the neo-classic wars of our own day “romantic” became an epithet hurled with malice, by organists especially, at whole schools and their gifted figures.

It is merely factual to say that in the period 1950–70 our profession fell victim to hysteria. How else explain the appearance in a prominent journal of such a passage as this: “‘Sludge’ is an apt word to describe Guilmant, Widor and the others.... Franck is probably the best of them, but even his music is overrated”? How else explain the pronouncement by a respected musicologist and a venerable university press of so astounding a generality as this: “There is no other branch of music, except the liturgical, in which all musicians would admit the inferiority of everything written in the last two hundred years, of organ music written after 1750, to that written before”? How else explain the animus of a reviewer who, in the guise of reasoned discourse, holds to the calumny that in Bach the French masters advocated “use of the swell pedal, coupling of manuals and reedy registrations in contrast to the German preference for exposed pipes, independent choruses and clear, brilliant mixtures”—and who begins a review: “Soupy, mushy and muffled! Oh, that organ!”?

Little wonder that by the 1970s, obscured by smoke from the battlefield, “romantic” had not only become a tag for styles and works judged corrupt, a catchall term few writers or speakers bothered to define, but also evoked connotations as caustic as its denotation was vague. No one who did not live through this revolt could imagine its strength and malevolence. It ravaged instruments, repertories, and careers.

Its unhappy memory, however, furnishes a moral. Though today “romantic” at least sometimes connotes the admired and sanctioned—for the tide has turned again, and we appraise Franck and the others more reasonably—a wiser connotation cannot alone make the word serviceable. What is needed is definition in common, and our vigilant resolve to be discriminating.

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For the purposes of this book, at any rate, let us start by calling “romantic” the period 1789–1914 and the musical art created therein, bearing in mind that to assign as bounds the French Revolution and the First World War is a convenience, nothing more. History cannot without stretching be fitted to arbitrary form, the history of ideas least of all. But these bounds will be useful so long as we remember that distinctive changes had already begun to occur while Bach was alive, and to become manifest in the work of his sons; that some of Haydn’s and Mozart’s music continued this foreshadowing; that Beethoven was arguably the greatest of the nineteenth-century innovators though born and at work in the eighteenth century; that the new idioms arose on precedent meter, tonality, harmony, and rhythm; that organ art tends to evolve more slowly than the musics of other media; and that our designation of the period is unusually broad.

It is broad partly because the Romantic Movement as more customarily defined had begun to give way by 1840 to the clusters of idea and act later called Realism and Impressionism. As much was true, in any case, in literature and painting. The corresponding trends in music came later, and in organ music later still, the organ being confined, as we now find quite usual, to its own remote corner of the universe where news arrives late if at all. Thus the century produced no Realistic organ music warranting the name—pace the vogue of thunder pedals and battle pieces—nothing that approaches comparison to Courbet’s art or Balzac’s; and the entry of Impressionistic harmonies into the vocabulary of organist-composers took place later than in music at large.

Sentiment expressed in symbol has of course sprung up time out of mind. It did not come into being because of that overthrow of aristocracies, rise of the common people, exaltation of the individual, cult of the work of art, and love of nature which we associate with the birth of the Romantic Movement. Nor need “romantic” imply emotion told at the expense of form, nor “classic” necessarily mean the symmetrical and calm. The haven of eighteenth-century detachment is largely a pleasant myth.

For the art of centuries past is veiled from our eyes by a kind of scrim. Sometimes the backlighting, intensified by scholarship or by intuition or by happy chance, grows bright enough to make the scrim less opaque. But the viewer’s perception remains perpetually beclouded, if only by ignorance of the thousand details of daily living that remain unrecorded because deemed obvious or trivial—the sounds, sights, fears, strivings that go to make up the feel of an age, hence go to shape a creator’s attitudes and aims. Every generation is a secret society, as John Jay Chapman somewhere says, and for the most part its tastes, enthusiasms, and interests are incommunicable to posterity. So it is that interpreters, despite the most diligent study, can re-create only the echo, as it were, of past musics.

We may well ask if it is antiquity in itself that conjures stability and repose. Cannot stability and repose akin to what we think of as the eighteenth century’s be found as readily in the work of romanticists and moderns? Is it not the passage of time—our cumulated experience—that gives to the music of the eighteenth century balance and clarity of form, objectivity and grace of expression? Do we not apply these qualities like a layer of varnish between old idioms and our perception? To Mozart’s contemporaries, after all, the Symphony in G Minor doubtless seemed anything but graceful, the elegance sought by eighteenth-century minds being not necessarily the elegance we recognize.

Be that as it may, periods of exploration in the arts tend to be followed by periods of retrenchment, perhaps because this systole and diastole are innate in the race. And when we recall that other romanticisms arose in other centuries and were as stoutly ridiculed by successor movements, it becomes clear that neither nineteenth-century romanticism nor the neo-classic repudiation that followed was anything very new.

With respect to our French masters, in any event, the first fruits of romanticism may be dated to 1841, when at the Church of Saint Denis, as we shall see, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll unveiled the prototype organ. By then, after half a century of upheaval, the art of organist and of organ builder was in France at an ebb. Many of the organs that survived the Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns, when churches had been closed and organ pipes melted down into tools of war, stood decrepit and unplayed. On the playable organs one heard gavottes, airs, and the mimicry of storms and shipwreck—this at the most solemn moments of the liturgy. “Organists are weak,” lamented the scholar Fétis in 1830, “and what they produce is simply beneath criticism.” And together with the increasing importance given to timbre as inherently expressive, and the concomitant perfecting of instruments and expansion of the Beethoven-Berlioz orchestra, came the belief that organs were too meager in tone to embody current intentions.

It is intention that most handily differentiates periods—“intention” here meaning the namable ideas and feelings governing the principal creators, the namable gestures animating their works. If Dupré, Langlais, and Messiaen are to be grouped under the same head as Saint-Saëns, Franck, Widor, and Vierne, we must seek an intention in common; and if it is to be called romantic, it must include certain prime romanticist motives that may be taken as givens because manifested by such archetypical creators as Weber, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Berlioz: the need to build new structures to replace those decaying or dead; the view of human feeling as worth expressing in all its contrarieties; the conviction that art is serious, the profession of artist noble; and the concern with psychological and dramatic truth, with shadings and contrast, with tension and oppositions. These motives are prime because they underlie such secondary motives as the interests in the expressive qualities of timbre, in the supernatural, and in program music and other less patent inter-relations among the arts.

Various traits that embody these motives connect our seven masters. First, the works of each composer require for their suitable rendering the timbres perfected by Cavaillé-Coll. Messiaen conceives melodies or fragments in specific sonorities (for instance, the sonority of prestant and piccolo in “Le Banquet céleste”) and insists that meaning changes if sonority changes. Langlais is influenced by Aeolian-Skinner, but so loves the organ at Saint Clotilde that he laughingly calls it his mistress; it inspires nearly all his works, and he is distressed when interpreters registrate them by whim. Widor and Vierne incorporate into their pieces the characteristic crescendo that starts by coupling to the foundations a full récit behind closed shutters. Saint-Saëns and Franck delight in Cavaillé-Coll’s flutes and solo reeds no less than in his mutations, as witness the Trois Rhapsodies and “Grande Pièce symphonique.” Even Dupré, who is better acquainted than any of the others with the sophistication of English and North American organs, conceives his music in the Cavaillé-Coll tone and mechanism—not excepting the “Variations sur un Noël,” Symphony in G Minor, Suite Bretonne, and Triptyque.

Then too, these composers share a distinctive technique. Given impetus in midcentury by Cavaillé-Coll’s mechanical innovations, technique became exigent and complex in ways undreamed of by Bach and his French contemporaries. It was to comprise arpeggios, chord progressions and repeated chords, double thirds and double sixths, stretches, leaps, runs, scales in all the keys and configurations, a meticulous legato made vibrantly alive by discriminating articulation, a counterpoint entailing substitutions of unexampled intricacy, and that singular lightening exemplified by such nimble works as the Vierne “Naïades” and the Dupré Prelude in G Minor. So it is that, without denying differences among these composers, we distinguish a keyboard technique common to all, and comprehensive enough to be called transcendental. The word is Liszt’s, whose name reminds us that virtuoso technique at the organ took form and energy from the growth of virtuoso pianism, and that the primogenitors Lemmens, Saint-Saëns, and Franck were themselves splendid pianists.

In like fashion, Dupré’s Triptyque reminds us that Dupré and the rest share the romanticist bent for extending old forms. Franck takes Beethoven as model and writes a work of startling length that is divided into movements, cyclical in its themes, rich in contrasts of timbre, and boldly labeled symphonic. Widor and Vierne follow suit, though instead of reworking sonata form, they conceive their symphonies as sets of pieces united by subtleties of mood. Dupré pays homage to Bach by writing ricercares, inventions, and chorale settings, Saint-Saëns by writing preludes and fugues. In fact all the French masters concur in their indebtedness to Bach, either by enlarging on his forms or by adopting his attitudes and techniques. Indeed, Bach, as we shall see, stands as cornerstone of their art.

They in addition regard their calling with an earnestness resembling Bach’s. There is gravity in Reubke or Reger, to be sure, and great art, even comedy, cannot be fashioned other than soberly. But the French masters’ sobriety is distinctive. It arises from qualities in the instrument and in churchly locale. By monumental physical aspect, by awesome sonority, by a setting typically vast and Gothic and magnificent, the organ seems to them to demand a music uniquely dignified and profound. This perception does not keep Dupré from devising music nimble and even frolicsome, as we saw, or Langlais from spinning gossamer textures in the “Arabesque sur les flûtes,” or Messiaen from relishing the shepherds’ lighthearted wonderment in “Les Bergers.” But when Langlais writes a De Profundis or a hymn to the Virgin, or Dupré Le Chemin de la Croix or a symphony on the Passion, or Messiaen a suite on the Blessed Sacrament, each man feels that the instrument, no less than the subject, enjoins a unique solemnity.

This attitude has little to do with the biographical facts. Vierne’s misfortunes, Langlais’s early poverty, Franck’s wretched familial relations, Dupré’s discipline, Messiaen’s piety, Widor’s aristocratic connections, and Saint-Saëns’s loneliness do not inescapably conduce to seriousness—compare Byron or Satie or Bernard Shaw—and it will probably never be shown conclusively how life goes to shape art. But a particular seriousness is here evident, the more austere for serving an ancient and eccentric craft.

Thus each master after his fashion endorses Widor’s romanticist creed, put to Schweitzer one afternoon at the console of Notre Dame. “Organ playing,” Widor said to that devoted pupil, as the rays of a setting sun streamed through the stained glass, “is the manifestation of a will filled with a vision of eternity. All organ instruction, both technical and artistic, has as its aim only to educate a man to this pure manifestation of the higher will.” To Widor, it was Bach above all who bespoke “the emotion of the infinite and the exalted, for which words are always an inadequate expression, and which can find proper utterance only in art.” Bach’s music “tunes the soul to a state in which we can grasp the truth and oneness of things, and rise above everything that is paltry, everything that divides us.”

That later generations would claim as much for the music of his own school Widor could not foresee. But his cultivated mind, in its vast acquaintance with history and biography, could have foretold the difficulties faced by those of us who try to defend that appraisal. Like us, he knew that genius can never be explained, and that all attempts to explain it are works of the imagination.