Organ Works - Volume 2
ALKAN, Charles-Valentin

Pro Organo

The short Pro Organo, still in manuscript, is a single-page album-leaf dated 16 February 1850, which would seem to put it among Alkan’s very earliest organ compositions. It is difficult to be sure whether Pro Organo, placed in large lettering at the head of the page as if it were the title, is actually an indication of the chosen instrument: the word Praeludium stands above the first bar, where one would expect a tempo indication – that is, is this a prelude ‘for organ’, or the ‘Prelude’ of a projected longer cycle whose collective title would have been Pro Organo? As with so many of the enigmas surrounding Alkan’s life and work, no ready answer is forthcoming. The piece is marked ‘Manualiter’, indicating it should be played on the manuals only. It carries a key-signature of C minor, but there are indications from the beginning that C major will be its ultimate goal. It is based almost entirely on a four-note fragment of scale (or sometimes three notes, the fourth note repeating the pitch of the third) which usually falls but sometimes, by inversion, rises. Alkan treats this simple motif to imitative entries, augmentation, ostinato and fugato, and puts it through a wealth of chromatic harmony with distant modulations, though the pull of C is strong throughout. The music spans the entire gamut of the keyboards, beginning on high with the falling version of the motif, and descending through the course of the piece to an oft-repeated low pedal C; the final C major cadence is curtly achieved by two staccato chords.

12 Études d’Orgue ou de Piano à Pédales pour les Pieds seulement, Nos. 7–12

Alkan’s 12 Études d’Orgue ou de Piano à Pédales pour les Pieds seulement were presumably written in the late 1860s and published about 1869. Alkan did not assign them an opus-number; but though they can regarded as technical studies (in a very unusual medium) they are in their own way as serious and as epoch-making music as his two sets of 12 Études for piano in the major and minor keys. They are of less extended duration and, for obvious reasons, of more limited compass; but their originality is of a similar order of invention. Suffice it to say that in these pedal études Alkan demands of two feet the same dexterity as he takes for granted, in his piano works, from ten fingers. The player encounters many contrapuntal passages, melodies with accompaniment and rapidly-articulated repeated notes, anacruses, gruppetti, grace-notes, florid cantilenas and intricate figuration. Alkan dedicated the Études to the organist-composer Louis Lefébure-Wély (1817-1869), sometimes called ‘the Auber of the organ’. Ronald Smith has suggested that the dedication may have been a joke, ‘and a rather savage one at that in view of Wély’s own cautious writing for the pedals’. The fact is that Alkan’s pedal Études were unprecedented, and reveal him as a most practical visionary. Few French organs had adequate pedal-boards until the 1850s or later, and until the end of the century few composers for the instrument were at all adventurous in their pedal writing. It was only with the arrival of such figures as Widor, Vierne and Marcel Dupré that pedal technique was properly taught and the value of Alkan’s pioneering work appreciated. According to Smith, Dupré considered these pieces ‘the complete and indispensable foundation of pedal technique’. On the present disc we hear Nos.7-12 of these twelve Études pour les pieds seulement. Étude No. 7, like several of these pieces, seems like a miniature tone-poem contrasting depths and heights, chromatics and diatonics, torment and at least the hope of bliss. It starts Allegro in F sharp minor by alternating rapid, angry chromatic figuration in a falling-rising curve with a bold chordal motif. As the rapid figuration starts to double in thirds or even move in contrary motion, building up an effect of near-delirium, the chords are expanded into grace-note anacruses, up to or down to a single note. With a shift to the relative (A) major, a more flowing central section in triplet rhythm intervenes, moving in thirds or sixths but tonally vagrant, and after an abbreviated recall of the central section a wide-ranging coda juxtaposes all three ideas, the chromatics having a grumbling last word in the deep bass confirming A. Étude No. 8, Energicamente in D minor, begins with a swaggering recitative in octaves, conjuring up an image of trombones, contrasted with an ecclesiastically chant-like theme harmonised largely in triads. These two ideas alternate, the chant-like idea having the last word. But it is a curious last word, the harmony slipping from D major to D minor with almost Mahlerian pathos and creating a sense that the cadence is open-ended, unresolved. Ronald Smith considered the ninth Étude, Moderato in D, as a ne plus ultra of Alkan’s fiendish demands upon the organist’s feet. Marked leggieramente, this is a scherzo, as well as a virtuoso study in gruppetti and grace-notes in both feet simultaneously, applied to a jaunty tune which gives an unmistakable impression of the composer’s mockery. In one of the few passages where the feet alternate on a single line, Alkan carefully specifies ‘D[roite]’ and ‘G[auche]’ on each appoggiatura, thus ensuring that the feet will have to cross! Étude No. 10, also Moderato in D, is in complete contrast. Marked dolce and sempre legato, this is a study in the smooth, flowing articulation of semiquaver and triplet figuration simultaneously, four against three, the figurations periodically swapping between feet. Some mild Scotch-snap rhythms intrude in the coda before the music comes to rest on a low triad of D major. The eleventh Étude, an Adagio in F minor, is another virtual tone-poem reporting from uncanny spiritual realms. Marked legato e sostenuto tanto che possibile, it begins with a dolorous theme sounding beneath slow triplet rhythms and descending into the depths. A misty chromatic ascent brings a more hopeful C major melody, cantabile, above deep bass throbbings, and both ideas are developed, leading to a passage of repeated triads in which, at one point, the feet are two octaves and a third apart, before the music sinks back into the miasmic abyss. The Twelfth and final Étude, Tempo giusto in C major, is a chaconne with 40 variations, which sum up many of the techniques evolved through the set. The boldly diatonic theme with which it opens is treated to an array of transformations, some involving polyphony, some grace-note-writing, some rapid figuration, some intricate chromatics, some wide melodic leaps, some chords from widely spaced feet. The central group of variations goes to the minor and then to E flat before returning to C major, and the Étude (and the whole cycle) ends on a triumphant rising diatonic scale in thirds from the lowest to the highest available notes.

11 Pièces, dans le Style Religieux et 1 Transcription, du Messie de Handel, Op. 72

In the late 1860s Alkan produced two astonishing collections of medium-sized pieces, the Grands Prèludes, Op. 66, and the Pièces dans le Style Religieux, Op. 72. Although Op. 66 is designated for pedal-piano (with a suggestion that it may be played by three hands at one piano) and Op. 72 for ‘piano ou harmonium’, both cycles work effectively on the organ and there can be little doubt that Alkan designed them as parallel or complementary sequences. For one thing, both sets contain eleven original pieces but each is rounded off by a twelfth, transcribed from Handel’s Messiah. The 11 Pièces, dans le Style Religieux et 1 Transcription, du Messie de Handel – to give Op. 72 its full title – was published about 1867 with a dedication to his publisher Simon Richault. Unlike the Grands Préludes, all these pieces are written on two staves, with no part for the pedals, as befits performance on ‘piano ou harmonium’: yet their full sonic amplitude and occasional flashes of grandeur seem to demand the organ to do them full justice. There is no obvious unfolding key-scheme as in the Grands Prèludes, but the individual pieces are well contrasted, covering a wide range of characters, the later ones tending to be longer and more complex. For Alkan the ‘style religieux’ seems to have indicated at least a superficial appearance of emotional simplicity: pieces brilliant and optimistic, or lyrically devotional. But his characteristic strangenesses and sense of the incalculable almost always implant a small worm in the bud of these rosy musical pictures. The first piece has strong affinities with the last of the pedal Études, for it too is in C major (with a tempo-mark of Tempo giustissimo) and is largely an invention on a ground bass announced at the outset. There the similarities end, for this is a festive, joyous processional which one could well imagine scored for full orchestra. It is followed by an Andantino in A major, an extended, glowingly lyrical meditation with an expressive second strain in the minor and a berceuse-like third theme, all three ideas being woven together in the coda. The third piece, Quasi-Adagio in D minor, begins as a fugato in barcarolle rhythm. The counterpoint grows searching and intricate, but in the latter half of the piece Alkan contents himself with a more harmonic approach, the voices doubled at the sixth or the third. In the coda the subject is presented in both hands in contrary motion. The fourth piece starts as a cheerful, almost child-like pastorale in G major. In a contrasting minor-key section, a mock-sinister tune slithers about in the bass, and in the reprise of the major-key pastorale it joins in the proceedings, proving to be perfectly harmless. No. 5, marked Lentement, returns to D minor for enunciations of a chorale melody against persistent dotted-rhythm harmonies. These give birth to a livelier, almost neo-Baroque fantasia section, rising to a fortissimo return of the opening music, interrupted by snatches of the central section, until the chorale subsides into chromatic sighs and a rather grim coda which awakes memories of the closing bars of Alkan’s famous piano variations Le Festin d’Esope. With its pealing scales and triumphantly singing melodies, the sixth piece (marked Majesteusement) is a kind of grand voluntary in B flat, the diatonic figurations generating music of exceptional brilliance. Typically for Alkan, though, not all is light, and a moment of sombre mystery supervenes, with shifting harmonies over a nagging semitone in the bass, just before the decisive coda. No. 7 is a charming gigue in F major. The placidity of its lilting refrain is somewhat disturbed by a more intense variation of itself in F minor and some uneasy modulations thereafter, but the major form returns untroubled until the coda, when a new, stark and striding fortissimo theme puts the comfortable nature of the refrain into a darker perspective. The eighth piece contrasts a tense, harried A minor subject with pulsing toccata-like semiquaver accompaniment, against a more hopeful Dolce tune in A major, carried by flowing triplet figuration. The two themes are closely related, Alkan typically showing obverse and reverse of the same spiritual coin. But it is the anxious, driven, toccata music that occupies most of the piece, becoming more contrapuntally complex, and when the major-key tune returns its wandering modulations undercut its positive qualities and lead into a dramatic coda. No. 9, in E flat, is a grand slow march, its tendency for swagger soon overcoming its initial hints of sanctimony. There is nobility, too, in the way its contrapuntal continuation (it can hardly be called a trio) mounts towards the light in enthusiastic figuration. The main march idea is varied on its return, after which comes an unexpectedly stealthy coda over a staccato bass. Ronald Smith called the tenth piece ‘a lumbering carillon in the Dorian mode’, though the key signature is D minor. The dotted rhythms of the bass line give rise to more anxious and mysterious episodes, moving the music into less confident regions and encountering an aspiring D major melody before the pealing ostinati of the carillon return. The coda has a touch of extravagant grotesquerie. The eleventh and longest of these pieces was, for Ronald Smith, ‘an absolute oddity’. It is certainly a strange invention even for Alkan. Nominally it is another of his A minor-major explorations of dark and light, the first represented by an anxious though beautiful song-like melody. This is several times punctuated, off-key, by a loud, bald octave F; and this octave, a glaring immovable ‘object’, continues to crop up throughout the piece. A more florid major-key version of the melody is enwrapped in filigree semiquaver figuration, but loses its way, and the anxious song returns. So does the baleful octave, on B flat; and it introduces a curious groping chorale, in E flat minor if it has any key, in five time. (Alkan was fascinated by the use of five beats to the bar, which he observed in certain kinds of Spanish music; he produced several piano pieces in this rhythm, notably the posthumously published Zorcico, danse ibérienne – strictly speaking true, though the Zortziko is specifically a Basque dance. Here he retains the 4/4 metre of the rest of the piece but the chorale is written entirely in quintuplets.) The airs, anxious and florid, are reprised and developed together, and the chorale returns in A major grandeur, as if to resolve matters positively: but it is cut off, and in the most alienated moment in these works the anxious melody sounds again, unaccompanied, in the silence, fading into the distance and broken up by the unforgiving, immovable octave. Assuaging the sadness and tension of this unsettling piece, the twelfth and last item in Op. 72 is a modest and radiant transcription of the Larghetto, the so-called ‘Pastoral Symphony’ in B major from Handel’s Messiah. It stands no doubt as a symbol of the true ‘style religieux’ to which Alkan himself aspired, in spite of his more tortured and sardonic sensibility.

© Malcolm MacDonald, 2007 Malcolm MacDonald is the author of The Symphonies of Havergal Brian (three vols., Kahn & Averill, London, 1974, 1978 and 1983) and the editor of Havergal Brian on Music, Volume One: British Music (Toccata Press, London, 1985); Vol. 2 is in preparation. His other writings include books on Brahms, Foulds, Schoenberg and Ronald Stevenson; his most recent title is Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (Kahn & Averill, London, 2003).