Pipedreams Host Michael Barone talks about famed French organist Louis Vierne, whose life and work will be celebrated at a festival at the House of Hope in St. Paul.
Born in 1870, Vierne was legally blind from childhood and his vision deteriorated further throughout his life. He struggled with mental illness, tragic personal losses and poverty….yet he still managed to compose some of the great music of the 20th century. He presided over the organ-console at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris for over three decades.
Segment includes music elements.
Transcripts
text | pdf |
SPEAKER 1: He was taken to the church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, where César Franck was the organist. And the light went on, as it often does with people who have never heard the King of Instruments before. Suddenly, you realize there's this whole other world.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It was through a competition in 1900s with three other organists, that Vierne won the appointment to the post of organist at Notre Dame Cathedral.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The notion of playing the organ to someone who doesn't is confounding, because there are so many things involved. It's not just a matter of getting the keys down properly, as a pianist must. But at Notre Dame Cathedral, there were five keyboards for the hands, another keyboard for the feet, dozens and dozens of stop controls, which bring on various colors and intensities of sound. And it's as much an art, and knowing how to mix those colors as it is to know what notes to play.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
His closest friends died young. He lost a brother and his own eldest son, who was barely 17, in World War I. The medical challenges of his vision problems were considerable. He had to leave Paris for several years to undergo treatments in Switzerland. The treatments were costly. He basically sold everything that he owned and existed on the fringe.
And you hear that in his music. It is filled with a yearning, filled with an urgency, which goes beyond frustration. Filled with a sense of deep disappointment and bitter unhappiness at times, but that also leavened by an inexhaustible well of persistence, of being able to find, ultimately, triumph in the worst of circumstances.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On the 2nd of June, 1937, Vierne was to give a recital at Notre Dame Cathedral under the auspices of the Friends of the Organ, which was a society in France sponsoring organ music. He played what had been his last composed solo organ work. He was scheduled then to launch into an improvisation on a Gregorian hymn tune. At the close of the composed piece, he said, I feel ill.
And then he slumped over at the keyboard, his foot hit the pedal, there were still stops on. A low E sounded for a time, and people in the audience below thought that this was maybe the beginning of the improvisation, and then silence. And he did not die at that very moment, but he was dead within the next three or four minutes. What more poetic way to end than at the console of the instrument that has been key to his existence?
[MUSIC PLAYING]