Notes for: July 21, 2015
Maurice Duruflé was a French composer, organist and teacher who was little known in his lifetime but has won many admirers in recent years. An introspective and highly self-critical musician, he published only 14 works, and often continued to edit and change pieces after publication. Today he is known mainly for his Requiem and a handful of short organ and choral pieces composed for church performance.
After graduation from the Paris Conservatoire, he was named assistant organist at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. In 1929, he became organist at the church of Saint Etienne du Mont, which contains the shrine of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, and the tombs of Pascal and Racine. Duruflé held that position for the rest of his life, premiering Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, and in 1943, adding the position of professor of harmony at the Conservatoire.
Despite the fact that Duruflé lived into his eighties, his list of works is quite brief. Strong self-criticism and doubts as to his compositional abilities kept him from writing more than a handful of works, most of them for organ or choir. His surprising self-effacement was not due to a lack of recognition or talent, for he won several prizes both for his organ playing and his compositions, and his works are of a consistently high quality, revealing a mastery of harmonic color, counterpoint, and formal clarity.
Duruflé’s Prélude, Récitatif et Variations for flute, viola, and piano is a rare example of the composer’s instrumental chamber music. He wrote the work in 1928 and dedicated it to the memory of the well-known French publisher and contemporary music enthusiast Jacques Durand, who had died in August of that year.
The Prélude, marked lent et triste (“Slow and sad”), begins quietly. After building to an impassioned climax, the piano’s cascading arpeggios settle down and give way to the Récitative (a style of “singing speech,” borrowed from opera and sacred music), a dialogue between the viola and flute. The ensuing theme, intoned by the flute with a spare accompaniment in the piano, demonstrates Duruflé’s interest in medieval plainchant, which serves as the basis for the Variations that conclude the work.
Notes for: July 15, 2025
Maurice Duruflé was a superb organist, a gifted composer, and an influential teacher. As a composer he was a perfectionist who would spend years on a work before allowing it to be published. As just one example, he spent six years writing his masterpiece, the Requiem. As a result, his output was slim: a total of 20 works, only 14 of which he allowed to be published with opus numbers, and most of which were for the organ.
Duruflé spent his early years as a boy chorister in the Rouen cathedral, where he gained intimate familiarity with plainsong and also began working as a church organist. He spent several years at the Paris Conservatoire, where he earned first prizes in composition, harmony, counterpoint, improvisation, and fugue. He soon began his lifelong career as organist at St-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris. He also began teaching harmony at the Conservatoire. And after his marriage in 1953 to the brilliant young organist Marie-Madeleine Chevalier, the pair became a renowned touring and teaching duo.
During his lifetime, Duruflé was considered a conservative composer. When he once was asked why he wrote in a relatively conservative language, he replied, “It is because I have always been surrounded by Gregorian chant, which is of course rather traditional.” Yet in his compositions he combined traditional liturgical music with the musical waves sweeping early 20th-century France. Like Debussy, Duruflé combined ancient scales with impressionistic harmony. His students at the Paris Conservatoire called what they learned from him “the Duruflé style,” a style influenced by the organ, by Bach, Faure, and Ravel, and by a modal language. You’ll hear what they meant in the Prélude, Récitatif, et Variations, which Duruflé wrote while still a student at the Conservatoire (it won that year’s composition first prize).
The piano begins the Prélude with attention-grabbing chords and Impressionisticsounding runs. The viola enters with a tender theme, the flute comes in with its own flowing, lyrical melody, and the three elements then combine in a richly textured movement that builds in intensity until subsiding directly into the Récitatif, which like the Prélude is marked “lent et triste.” While the Prélude opens with solo melodies and ends with all three instruments joining animatedly together, in the Récitatif Duruflé reverses the pattern. All three instruments open the movement, then give way to the viola, whose plaintive melody leads directly into Variations on a modal flute theme. The Variations are varied rhythmically (the second variation), modally (the third variation, with its interesting canon), and in mood, as a more somber third variation gives way to a playful fourth. The coda is animated, colorful, and joyful. Duruflé dedicated the work to Jacque Durand, the prominent music publisher of Debussy’s and Ravel’s works.