Organ recitals in S:t Jacob's Church

Friday 29th of May 5 pm

Heroic deed

Program

César Franck (1822–1890)
Pièce héroïque from Trois Pièces (1878)

Henriette Puig-Roget (1910–1992)
Complainte (1929) from Trois Pièces

Joseph Jongen (1873–1953)
Sonata Eroïca op. 94 (1930)

Programme notes

“My new organ? It is an orchestra!” The exclamation captures something essential in César Franck’s musical world. In his encounter with Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s new symphonic organs he found an instrument with a richness of colour that could carry both intimate prayer, dramatic development, and orchestral grandeur.

As organist of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, from 1859 onwards Franck had access to one of Cavaillé-Coll’s most inspiring instruments. There his major organ output took shape: first the Six Pièces d’Orgue, published in 1868 and compared by Franz Liszt to Bach’s organ works, then the Trois Pièces for the 1878 World Exhibition in Paris, and finally the Trois Chorals, composed in the summer of 1890 as a kind of musical testament.

Franck’s organ works marked a turning point in French organ history. After a long period dominated by lighter Gebrauchsmusik, he gave the organ a new artistic weight, where improvisatory freedom is united with strict form, chromatic harmony, and a deeply personal spirituality. Through his music and his teaching at the Paris Conservatoire he became a model for an entire generation of French organists and composers, laying the foundation for the French symphonic organ tradition that still shapes the repertoire today.

To celebrate the recovery after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, a World Exhibition was held in Paris in 1878. On the banks of the Seine rose the vast Palais du Trocadéro, whose Grande Salle des Fêtes seated 5,000 people. There, on 7 August 1878, France’s first large concert organ was inaugurated, built by Cavaillé-Coll with 66 stops on four manuals and pedal.

The inauguration was marked by a series of fifteen concerts featuring some of France’s leading organists. Among the highlights were the premiere of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Organ Symphony and Camille Saint-Saëns’ performance of Franz Liszt’s fantasy on “Ad nos” – the first time the work was played outside Germany.

César Franck appeared as soloist at the thirteenth concert, on 1 October 1878. For this occasion he had, in a short time, composed three new organ pieces, the Trois Pièces, which were placed between the Grande pièce symphonique and improvisations, including one on a Swedish melody. The works were only published in 1883 by Durand, after Franck had revised the registrations for a more realistic type of organ, akin to the three-manual instrument in Sainte-Clotilde. The autograph manuscript, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, still contains the registrations intended for the great concert organ of the Palais du Trocadéro.

The concert was reviewed in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. The reviewer considered Pièce héroïque to be of lesser interest than the other two pieces, and it is possible that this criticism contributed to Franck never again performing the work in public. The piece has, however, regained its rightful place and today ranks among the most frequently played of Franck’s organ works.

A spurious anecdote has claimed that Franck composed Pièce héroïque as a tribute to the French army after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, with the final grand major-key hymn symbolising the moral victory of the French soldiers. The story may stem from a confusion with Saint-Saëns’ Marche héroïque, which was dedicated to the memory of a friend who fell in the war.

Pièce héroïque is built on a basically pianistic structure, in which eagerly driving chordal accompaniments are set against the heroic main theme in the bass. From this a confident chorale theme in B major emerges, forming the central section of the piece. After the return of the main theme, the music is gradually built up until it finally erupts in the chorale theme, now on full organ as a triumphant hymn. According to the manuscript, the piece was completed on 19 September 1878.

To have one’s work premiered by Olivier Messiaen at the organ of La Trinité is an unusual starting point for a composer in their early twenties. Yet this was how Henriette Puig-Roget’s Complainte appeared in 1929, an early witness to a musician whose relationship to the organ united French tradition, improvisatory sensitivity, and a strongly personal voice.

Puig-Roget studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where she was a pupil of Marcel Dupré and also encountered the poetic, mystically tinged organ world of Charles Tournemire. She later became organist of both the Oratoire du Louvre and the Great Synagogue of Paris, while at the same time working as a pianist, teacher, assistant conductor at the Paris Opera, and professor at the Conservatoire. Her organ music is only one part of a large but long under-recognised output.

Complainte, the first of her Trois Pièces, is a youthful work but already bears the marks of a mature musical imagination. The title suggests lament or song of sorrow, but the music does not remain in pure elegy. Instead it moves in an expressive world where cantabile lines, colour, and harmonic tension collaborate. We hear the French organ tradition’s sense of sound and line, but also a distinctly individual voice: restrained, intense, and deeply human. The piece is dated Paris, 1929.

Joseph Jongen received his basic musical education at the Conservatoire in Liège, where he was awarded first prizes in harmony, fugue, piano, and organ. In 1897 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome, which opened entirely new possibilities for him as a composer. His studies continued abroad with Richard Strauss and Vincent d’Indy. Towards the end of 1904 he settled in Brussels. In 1911 he was appointed professor of harmony at the Conservatoire in Liège. His pedagogical career continued with a professorship in counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire in Brussels. At the same institution he was appointed director in 1925, a post he held until his retirement in 1939. During his years in Brussels he was also active as a conductor and concert organist. Summers he spent at his country house, Cokaifagne near Sart-lez-Spa, where he devoted much time to composing.

Throughout his life he regarded composing as his highest priority. Around 400 works have survived, including chamber and orchestral music, choral works and songs, many instrumental pieces, and some 150 keyboard compositions.

Sonata Eroïca op. 94 is without doubt Joseph Jongen’s finest work for solo organ. The piece, a commissioned work, was composed in 1930 for the inauguration of the Josef Stevens organ in the Grande Salle de Concert of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The original title in the manuscript is Variations, but Jongen changed it to Sonata Eroïca shortly before the premiere. The work is dedicated to Joseph Bonnet, titular organist of St-Eustache in Paris, but was not intended for any specific concert engagement with Bonnet. It was, however, Bonnet who helped secure publication at the renowned publishing house Alphonse Leduc in 1931.

Jongen began composing the work on 18 September 1930. He seems to have written it more or less from beginning to end, with a clear sense of how he wanted to shape each section. On 25 September 1930 the work was completed. The composer himself gave the premiere at a concert in the Palais des Beaux-Arts on 6 November 1930. According to the newspaper reviews, it was an unqualified success.

Several musical figures and compositions can be seen as sources of inspiration for the Sonata Eroïca. First and foremost the French organist Marcel Dupré, whom Jongen heard perform Variations sur un noël at a concert in 1929. Although the variation forms differ, the pieces share much: the noël-like theme, the final fugue, and the progressive build-up towards a concluding toccata. At another concert, around the same time, Louis Vierne played Franck’s Pièce héroïque and the Adagio and Final from his own Third Organ Symphony. The melodic outlines of the main theme in the Sonata Eroïca show clear affinities with themes in Vierne’s Third Symphony. Franck’s Pièce héroïque is likewise closely related to Jongen’s work, both thematically and in the concluding paean.

The main theme is stated in the minor key throughout the piece, except at a ff close to the end when, for the only time, it appears in C sharp major – a shift that heightens the heroic and triumphant effect.

— Programme notes by Johan Hammarström