Marcel Dupré

Marcel Dupré was the supreme virtuoso of the organ in the twentieth century — a player whose technique and memory were so far beyond the ordinary that the French press, which had no shortage of superlatives, settled on calling him “the Paganini of the organ.” He could play the complete organ works of Bach from memory; he could improvise, on themes shouted up from a concert hall, a four-movement symphony that observers took for a written masterpiece. He gave more than two thousand recitals across four continents. And for thirty-seven years he held the bench at Saint-Sulpice that his teacher Widor had held before him, so that the great organ of that church passed through only two pairs of hands in the better part of a century.

He was born in Rouen on 3 May 1886 into a family steeped in the instrument. His father, Albert Dupré, was titular organist of the Abbey of Saint-Ouen and, like his own father before him, a friend of the builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. When Marcel was ten, a Cavaillé-Coll organ was installed in the family house. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1904, studying organ with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne, and fugue and composition with Charles-Marie Widor; in 1914 he crowned his Conservatoire years by winning the Prix de Rome with the cantata Psyché.

The complete Bach, from memory

The feat that made his name was an act of memory. In 1920 Dupré played the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach in ten recitals — entirely from memory — at the Paris Conservatoire, and repeated the cycle the following year at the Palais du Trocadéro. Nothing on that scale had been attempted; it announced a player for whom the entire central repertory of the instrument was simply held in the head, ready to hand.

The Bach cycle was the foundation of a strict, lucid musicianship translated to the pedalboard. Widor had pronounced two of the Trois Préludes et Fugues, Op. 7, “unplayable,” and for years Dupré was the only organist who could play them in public — a small token of the gap between his technique and everyone else’s.

America and the great improvisations

In November 1921 Dupré made his American debut on the famous organ of the Wanamaker department store in New York, closing the recital with an improvised four-movement organ symphony that one newspaper called “A Musical Miracle.” The Wanamaker firm sponsored tour after tour — ninety-four concerts in 1922, a hundred and ten in 1923 — and America made his international reputation.

It was in Philadelphia, in the Christmas season of 1921, that improvisation became composition. Handed four themes by the audience — among them Adeste fideles and the Stabat mater — Dupré improvised a continuous work in four movements running from Advent to Easter. He afterwards wrote it down as the Symphonie-Passion, Op. 23, published in 1924. A decade later he did the same with the Stations of the Cross: invited to improvise between readings of Paul Claudel’s poetic Chemin de la Croix, he played, in February 1931, fourteen meditations of such weight that he set them down as Op. 29, one of the monuments of the French organ literature. With Dupré, the line between improvising and composing all but disappeared.

Saint-Sulpice, the Conservatoire, the succession

In 1934 Dupré succeeded Widor as organist of Saint-Sulpice, holding the post until his death — so that, across the long tenures of master and pupil, the bench changed hands only once in a century. He was professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire from 1926, and finally its director from 1954 to 1956. As a teacher he was as consequential as his playing: his class produced Olivier Messiaen, Jehan Alain and his sister Marie-Claire Alain, Jeanne Demessieux, Jean Langlais, and Pierre Cochereau, among the most important French organists of the age. His treatises on improvisation became the standard manuals of the discipline.

He died on Pentecost Sunday, 30 May 1971, at his home in Meudon. He had played the morning Mass at Saint-Sulpice that very day, lunched at home, and died that evening — a working organist to the last hour, at the keyboard of the church he had served for thirty-seven years.