Modern Gregorians

Stand facing the Panthéon, across from the imposing buildings of the Sorbonne as the traffic whizzes along behind you. Now turn to your left, walk to the corner, and let your eye follow along the Place du Panthéon as it angles to the right at the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève. There it stands, kitty-corner behind the Panthéon—an endearingly flamboyant faux-medieval church enhanced by an incongruous Renaissance tower jutting up from one side. St. Étienne du Mont holds the shrine of St. Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, the tombs of Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, a breathtaking choir screen of carved stone, and the oldest organ case in the city. The area’s many tourists tend to give it no more than a passing glance as they head for the Hemingway-haunted St. Germain cafés just down the hill. That’s a pity, not only because St. Étienne du Mont’s interior is exquisite, but also because for 56 years it was home base for Maurice Duruflé, master organist and introspective composer whose intense self-criticism limited his output to barely over a dozen works. But one composition proved to be his ticket to musical immortality—the Requiem, dedicated to the memory of his father and premiered in 1947.

That’s the lead I wrote, then discarded, for a program note on Duruflé’s Requiem. For once I didn’t toss a paragraph under the bus because it was lousy; in fact, it’s a perfectly serviceable, respectable little blob of prose. However, I hadn’t paid proper attention to the specs—1000 words for an article not only on the Duruflé, but also on a half-dozen other choral pieces as well. So at 202 words it’s way too long, a dandy lead for a full-length note on the Requiem alone, but not for the article as contracted. So my Parisian paragraph takes up residence in Free Composition instead. I spent a good hour tootling around the 5ième arrondissement and Mont Saint-Geneviève (via Google Earth’s street view) getting a feel of the neighborhood around St. Étienne. No point in letting all that armchair tourism go to waste.

Bringing myself closer to Duruflé’s refined and reserved Requiem brings home the durability of Gregorian chant as not only the wellspring of Western music, but a continuing source of inspiration. All those melodies, so many of them made up of formulae and patterns, provided the basis for the development of polyphony as composers sought to lengthen, amplify, and magnify the chant for uses in those grand medieval cathedrals that began springing up like so many stone flowers starting with the 12th century. That’s really the point at which the Western tradition broke off from its brethren and began developing along its own unique lines. Then came the slow distancing of music from its liturgical roots, as chant melodies became less important and eventually disappeared altogether with the secularism of the Renaissance. But chant never went away. Even the well-meaning but ultimately misguided readjustments of Vatican II couldn’t kill if off.

Roman Catholic plainchant, with its modal cadences and indeterminate rhythm that provides for almost infinite flexibility of interpretation, brings not only a sense of spiritual dignity to a composition, but also keeps today’s music anchored in the flow of past tradition. I suppose that would make it of little interest to some folks. But for others, plainchant provides connection and resonance. Thus Stravinsky’s faux-chant moments in the Mass, an austere work that always reminds me of those elongated and frozen saint statues around the portals at Chartres.

But it was the French who really had the lock on modern Gregorianism. The monks of Solesmes provided not only the church but also the entire musical community with a conception of plainchant rhythm and style with a universal appeal. Whether or not that style remotely resembles plainchant as performed in, say, Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen is beside the point. We’ll never have the faintest idea how it sounded back then; for all we know, some of those dignified old melodies might have been given the floridly ornamented pitch-bent treatment common to the Eastern church, complete with underlying drones. The Solesmes interpretation is but one amongst many, but it carries the weight of familiarity in addition to its official churchly approval.

With the example of the Solesmes monks before them, French composers adapted Gregorian chant into all manner of works. You hear its influence in some of Debussy’s piano works—dig the Saraband from Pour le piano, for example. Gabriel Fauré absorbed it into his oh-so-refined and perfumed style, with his lovely Requiem the result. Duruflé’s Requiem ups the ante by using bonafide Gregorian chant melodies from the liturgical Missa pro defunctis. As has been pointed out, he wasn’t the first to do that—Tomàs Luis de Victoria beat him to it by a good long while—but his Requiem is the one that brings the art of blending an ancient melodic style with modern harmony to its highest level of sophistication. That, and his Four Motets on Gregorian Themes, which outdo the even the Requiem in naval-gazing austerity.

Maybe Duruflé wasn’t a major composer in the same sense as his eminent colleague Olivier Messiaen. Certainly his minuscule output argues against his joining Debussy, Berlioz, Franck, Fauré, Ravel, et al. up on the highest throne of French music. Then again, a sharply limited output hasn’t seemed to work against Ravel. To be sure, Duruflé was himself an endangered species, a pure church musician in a resolutely secular country where the relics of Catholicism have become mostly tourist attractions. Perhaps Duruflé’s Requiem is also a relic, a last incense-scented gasp of an obsolete tradition. But it’s a truly lovely thing, a reminder that Christianity can be encompassed in music of tenderness, compassion, and sweetness. In a world in which evangelical Christians seem ever-more hellbent on stuffing humanity into an Iron Maiden of medieval superstition and social stagnation, this fragrant evocation of a shy, retiring man’s faith in the bliss of eternity is welcome indeed.

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