The
largest part of Widor’s works for organ comprises of ten
“symphonies”. Both the
genre and the use of the orchestral term for it originated with him.
The first eight were published in two sets, in 1872 and 1879-87:
four in C-minor, D-major, E-minor, and F-minor, and four in
F-minor, G-minor, A-minor, and B-major.
Nowhere is there evidence of an attempt to transfer the
Beethovenian symphonic concept to the organ, and yet to have called these
groups of five to seven large pieces lasting from a half-hour to an hour
“suites” (which is what they really are) would have suggested slighter
works, perhaps having an antique cast, and would have misrepresented their
often profoundly serious expressive character as well as the breadth and
magnificence of sheer sound they generate when played on the organs for
which they were conceived. They
are, however, in no sense liturgical music (Widor was worldly by nature
and not an observant churchman), and they have nothing to do with the
“versets” that made up much of the earlier French organ repertory.
Though movements were probably played as voluntaries at mass, they
are really concert music. And
although all sorts of influences from the past can be discovered in them
- perhaps
surprisingly, Schumann’s piano music seems to be an important one -
the soil from which these symphonies grew was not compositional
ideas but the immense, symphonic sound of Cavaillé-Coll:
It
was when I felt the six thousand pipes of the Saint-Sulpice organ
vibrating under my hands and feet that I took to writing my first four
organ symphonies...I didn’t seek any particular style or form.
I wrote feeling them deeply, asking myself if they were inspired by
Bach or Mendelssohn. No, I
was listening to the sonorousness of Saint-Sulpice, and naturally I sought
to extract from it a musical fabric - trying to make pieces that, while
being free, feature some contrapuntal procedures.
In
1895 and 1900 Widor published two more symphonies.
Although the sequence of keys continued - C-minor and D-Major - the
numbering did not, out of respect for Beethoven’s ninth, it was said.
Instead, they were given titles after the architectural style of
the two churches to which they were dedicated and in which Cavaillé-Coll
had installed the two greatest instruments of his last years:
the gothic abbey church of Saint-Ouen, Rouen, whose organ Widor
inaugurated in 1890, and the romanesque basilica of Saint-Sernin,
Toulouse, whose organ had been dedicated the year before by Alexandre
Guilmant. (It is ironic that
both organs have peculiarities that prevent these two symphonies from
being played on them exactly as written.)
Much distinguishes them from the earlier symphonies.
In the first place, they are more skillfully composed, more
cohesive, arresting, and original than the first eight.
The number of movements is reduced to the conventional four, though
the first movements have nothing of “first-movement” or “sonata”
form. (All four of the outer
movements of these two symphonies end
quietly after having built to full organ -
another new feature of Widor’s method.)
After his eighth symphony, Widor had come to feel that organ music
ought to take its themes from the music of the church, and in these two
last symphonies plainchant supplies much of the material.
It makes its first appearance in the Gothic symphony in an oddly
tentative manner. After two
and a half movements have
elapsed with not a trace of
Gregorian chant and the listener is enjoying a vigorous jig-fugue, the
music softens unexpectedly and in the bass one hears, mysteriously,
the first phrase of the Christmas introit, Puer natus est nobis (“Unto
us a Child is born”; ex. 1). It
appears four more times, the last time loudly and in augmentation (twice
as slow), but it is never incorporated into the main material of the
movement, with which it has nothing whatever in common.
In the finale, which follows directly, the same tune serves as the
theme for a set of variations.
The
Romanesque symphony is altogether different;
here, the Easter gradual, Haec dies quam fecit Dominus (“This is
the day the Lord hath made”; ex.
2) is no longer simply a theme, but a constant presence permeating the
whole fabric of the first, second, and fourth movements, welding all the
parts of the work into a cohesive artistic object, whose unity is all the
more remarkable for owing nothing to borrowed structural formulas.
The third movement quotes the Easter sequence, Victimae paschali
laudes (“Praises to the paschal Victim”;
ex. 3). This symphony
is Widor’s masterpiece, though he himself more often programmed the less
austere Gothic.
The
first three movements were performed by Louis Vierne in March, 1895, at Écully,
near Lyons; on April 28 Widor himself gave the first complete
performance at Rouen, in the church to which it was dedicated. No
composer working in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century
could begin a ninth symphony without an acute awareness of the shadow of
Beethoven hanging over him, and perhaps it was Beethoven’s example that
moved Widor to plan a work whose finale, constructed as a set of free
variations on a vocal theme, was so long as to make the preceding three
movements seem almost like a prelude to it. This is all, however,
that connects Widor’s “Gothic” to Beethoven’s ninth.
Widor’s first movement has no trace of symphonic form (and the finale,
of course, no singers), but it is one of the most ingeniously composed and
“tightest” thematically of all his pieces. It is shaped, as are
the two outer movements of the “Romanesque”, primarily by the
surge and ebb of the power of the instrument itself. The first two
thirds of the movement build slowly, in an unbroken flow of moderately
paced eighth notes, the volume growing and subsiding in smaller waves, to
a thundering climax in which the steady march never falters; then
everything subsides into sublime calm. The harmonic language is
chromatic and dissonant to a degree remarkable for 1894, when the piece
was composed -- Widor was well acquainted with Liszt and was one of
the few Frenchmen present at Wagner’s first complete Ring at Bayreuth in
1876-- and the two themes, presented at the beginning simultaneously in
the treble and bass, are never abandoned for more than a few beats
throughout the movement.
The
lyrical second movement is one of Widor’s most frequently played pieces,
famous for the fact that in the first section the melody and accompaniment
are both played on the harmonic flute, an invention of Cavaillé-Coll
whose treble sings out over its velvety middle register. The voicers
who finished this stop on the Slee Hall organ used this piece to test it.
The introduction of plainchant into the third movement has already been
described; Widor may have thought of this energetic 6/8 fugue as the
scherzo of his symphony.
The
last movement begins with a harmonization of the first two phrases of Puer
natus est. Immediately afterwards is heard the obbligato melody that
accompanies the chant in variation 1. This tune, which will turn out
to be the second major theme of the movement (ex. 4; hereafter,
“B”), begins with the same three intervals - albeit transposed and
rhythmically transformed - that began the fugue subject of the preceding
movement (ex. 4). Variations 1 and 2, the latter with the chant in
canon between treble and bass, end with “B” sounded by one hand,
freeing the other to change stops according to directions in the score.
Variation 3 is a fast canon between the top two voices on a transformation
of “B”. Variation 4, on the massed foundation stops 4’, 8’,
16’, 32’, develops the third phrase of the chant (ex. 1c; heard
here for the first time) first in the treble, then in canon between bass
and alto, and follows this with one of the most extraordinary passages in
all the symphonies, a series of close imitations of the interval of the
tritone (e.g., C to F# - “the devil in music”) so chromatic as to be
almost atonal, and strikingly evocative of the prelude to the third act of
Parsifal - which would not be performed in Paris until 1911.
Variation 5 is another canon, this time in three parts paraphrasing the
chant melody, and again ending with a passage designed to allow the
registration for the following movement to be set up. The finale, in
the style of a toccata, presents “B”, then the chant combined with
“B”, then, in a climax of blinding C-major, Puer natus sounded out by
the full battery of pedal reeds. The music subsides through “B”,
to end in transcendent calm with a simple harmonization based perhaps on
the last notes of the second phrase of the chant. A recording exists
of the first, second, and finale of the last movement of this symphony,
made by the composer in 1932. It has served as a model for the
present performance.
Widor
played his Romanesque symphony for the first time in January, 1900 at the
Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche in Berlin. Schweitzer reported
that when he heard him play it “for the first time in St. Sulpice” the
following May he was “still striving with technical problems” -
evidently registration; in this of all his pieces the famous Walze,
a mechanical crescendo device of the Germans, would have lightened his
task. Both outer movements are organized dynamically, like the first
of the Gothic: the first has one full-organ climax half-way through
with a single statement of Haec dies in the pedals; and the finale,
after subsiding from its full-organ opening, has three crescendos back to
full organ before its quiet ending. The constant crescendos and
diminuendos required Widor’s feet to fly over the nineteen combination
pedals of Saint-Sulpice with a virtuosity comporable to what was demanded
by the written pedal notes.
The
composer’s preface describes best how the music grows out of the
plainchant in this work. He contrasts the Haec dies with the Puer
natus est:
Like
most chants for “semi-chorus”, that is, a group of four or five
voices, the Puer natus est, with its very pure lines and solid
construction, could not be more suitable for polyphonic
development...Utterly different is the Haec dies, an elegant arabesque
embellishing a few words of text - about ten notes per syllable - an
elusive vocalise like the song of a bird, a sort of cadenza conceived for
a virtuoso free of all constraint. To keep the listener’s
attention on such a fluid theme there is but one means: repeat it
ceaselessly. Thus is conceived this first movement of the Symphonie
romane, which, sacrificing everything to the subject, risks here and there
some timid attempt at development, only to abandon it rapidly and return
to the original idea.
The
listener familiar with Gregorian chant must be warned that the versions of
these melodies used by Widor are those he grew up with and remained loyal
to even after the scholarship of Solesmes had reestablished the medieval
readings now accepted; moreover, he used only the first two or three
phrases of much longer chants, and he modified and freely atomized even
these. No other comment on the first movement is needed, except to
point out that a motive first heard as an extension of the chant melody
near the beginning becomes an ostinato figure underlying much of the rest
of the movement.
The
second movement is entitled Choral, perhaps because it opens with a
harmonization of the chant in four parts, faintly suggesting a Bach
chorale. Its form is episodic and appears to introduce a series of
new themes and motives - until one looks more closely at them and
discovers that almost everything that happens is generated from the Haec
dies melody by techniques of fragmentation and derivation characteristic
of Beethoven (though without a trace of his style) and by Liszt’s method
of thematic “transformation” (with much more than a trace of his
style!). The movement is full of color, contrast, and soaring melody
(Widor’s motto, printed on many of his title pages in English, was
“Soar above”). Like the first, it makes much use of an ostinato
bass, and the figure, four notes descending stepwise, comes from the
countermelody heard directly after the opening “chorale”, itself
derived ultimately from the chant.
The
Cantilène abandons Haec dies for the first three phrases of the sequence
Victimae paschali laudes (this, too, differing slightly from the modern
“authorized” reading), treating it in the simplest and most balanced
form of any of the movements recorded here: two sections of
uniformly textured accompanied melody, identical except for their endings,
separated by a brief passage of louder four-part harmony, and rounded off
by a short coda. The chant tune seems to enter only in bar 11, as
the continuation of an intensely expressive cantilena filled with wide,
upward-striving intervals. But if we regard this opening cantilena
as simply an elaborateprolongation of the first note of the sequence, then
the entire movement can be seen as two statements of the three phrases of
the sequence, with the third immediately repeated several times at the end
of each section.
The
finale returns to Haec dies, now transformed into single line of rapid
eighths, high on the keyboard, with full organ: a stunning and
original beginning. The rest of the movement proceeds in a series of
dynamic surges, as suggested above, the last being on the broadest scale
and demanding every ounce of wind the blowers of the Slee Hall organ can
supply. Here the chant returns in its original form for the first
time since the first movement, played high, pianissimo, over a throbbing
bass; then another crescendo to full organ for the greatest
sustained climax of these two symphonies, during which the chant is heard
four more times.
For
an extended discussion of this work see Lawrence Archbold, “Widor’s
Symphonie romane”, French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and
Widor, ed. Archbold and William Peterson (Rochester, The University
of Rochester Press, 1995), pp. 249-71.