MARCEL DUPRÉ - Church of the Epiphany

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THE CHURCH OF THE EPIPHANY
Since Epiphany was founded in 1842, music has played a vital
role in the life of the parish. Today, Epiphany has two fine
musical instruments which are frequently used in programs
and worship. The Steinway D concert grand piano was a gift
to the church in 1984, in memory of parishioner and vestry
member Paul Shinkman. The 64-rank, 3,467-pipe ÆolianSkinner pipe organ was installed in 1968 and has recently
been restored by the Di Gennaro-Hart Co. It was originally
given in memory of Adolf Torovsky, Epiphany’s organist and
choirmaster for nearly fifty years. The 3-stop chamber organ
by Orglarstvo Škrabl of Slovenia was commissioned in 2014 in
memory of Albert and Frances Manola.
at Metro Center
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Tel: 202-347-2635
Good Friday
3 April 2015 at 6:00PM
$10
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OF THE
1317 G Street NW Washington, DC 20005
www.epiphanydc.org
[email protected]
MARCEL DUPRÉ
(1886-1971)
Le Chemin de la Croix
Op. 29
(Stations of the Cross)
With poetry by Paul
Claudel (1868-1955)
-
Jeremy Filsell, organ
Bard Wickkiser, reader
The nature of tonight’s performance is meditative:
Please ensure that cell phones are silenced and refrain from
applause at the end.
THE STATIONS
Jésus est condamné à mort
[Jesus is condemned to death]
Jésus est chargé de la Croix
[Jesus receives his Cross]
Jésus tombe sous le poids de sa Croix
[Jesus falls for the first time]
Jésus recontre sa mère
[Jesus meets his mother]
Simon le Cyréneen aide Jésus à porter la Croix
[Simon helps Jesus carry the cross]
inspired directly by Romantic/poetic notion. It grew from an
Improvisation at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels on 13
February 1931. Dupré recreated these Improvisations as a
written work during the course of 1931 and whilst the spirit
and thematic material of each improvised movement reemerged, a significant degree of rewriting and rethinking
probably took place. Dupré himself always performed Le
Chemin de la Croix during Lent at Saint-Sulpice and he
retained a special affection for it, expressing late in his life, a
greater personal satisfaction with this work above others of
his oeuvre. He performed three movements at his daughter’s
funeral in 1963 and often included selections from it in his
recitals.
Une femme pieuse essuie la face de Jésus
[A woman wipes the face of Jesus]
Jésus tombe à terre pour la deuxième fois
[Jesus falls for the second time]
Jésus console les filles d’Israel qui le suivent
[Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem]
Jésus tombe pour la troisième fois
[Jesus falls for the third time]
Jésus est dépouillé de ses vêtements
Dupré’s use of recurrent musical themes (his ‘symbolic
motifs’) to characterize concepts and characters in the drama
divulges knowledge of and respect for such ideas used by his
musical forbears. The leaping interval of a fourth representing
The Cross mirrors a similar representation in the music of
Bach, Handel & Schutz, and the conjunct rising four-note
figure signifying Redemption is found again in Handel, Bach’s
St John Passion and Wagner’s Parsifal.
[Jesus is stripped of his garments]
Jésus est attaché sur la Croix
[Jesus is nailed to the Cross]
Jésus meurt sur la Croix
[Jesus dies upon the Cross]
Jésus est détaché de la Croix et remis à sa mère
[Jesus’ body is taken from the Cross and laid in Mary’s bosom …..]
Jésus est mis dans le sepulcher
[The body of Jesus is laid in the tomb]
Born in Rouen in 1886, Marcel Dupré was a piano student at
the Paris Conservatoire, and learnt virtually all the standard
piano repertoire winning his premier prix in 1905 at the age
of 19. His composition studies in the class of Charles-Marie
Widor were rewarded with a premier prix in Fugue in 1909,
and then by the highest accolade of all, the Grand Prix de
Rome in 1914 just a few weeks before the outbreak of the
First World War. During the war, he acted as Charles-Marie
Widor’s Assistant at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, but soon after, he
rapidly established a reputation as a concert organist,
following his performance from memory of the complete
organ works of Bach. International success came first in
England, and then here in America, where he spent much of
the early 1920s. In 1926 he was appointed Professor of Organ
at the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained for 30 years
(including two as Director), training all the leading French
organists of two generations. In 1934 Widor retired from
Saint-Sulpice at the age of 89, and Dupré at last became
titulaire in his own right – a post which he held until the day
of his death. Dupré’s compositional legacy (comprising 65
opus numbers) was of fundamental significance for organ
music in the twentieth century.
Although Le Chemin de la Croix is not specifically entitled a
symphonic poem, it is Dupré’s most important essay in a form
The central protagonists in the musical drama are Christ and
his mother but other individuals play their part: Pontius
Pilate, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica and the Women of
Jerusalem. The fourteen movements are dominated by
recurrences of ten crucial and identifiable leitmotifs:
Persecution [fall of a third and rise by an augmented 4th] –
The Crowd [an animated dotted rhythm] – The Cross [falling
4th] - Steps [a falling half-step] – Suffering [a duplet + triplet
rhythm] - Redemption [a rising tetrachord] – The Virgin Mary
[two falling 3rds] – Compassion [two successive falling half
steps] – Mercy [the rise and fall of a 5th ] – Pity [a chromatic
chord sequence in quarter notes].
The poetry, the Stations of the Cross by Paul Claudel (18681955), was written in 1911. Born in Villeneuve-sur-Fère in
France, he experienced a sudden religious conversion at the
age of eighteen while listening to the choir sing Vespers in the
cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris: "In an instant, my heart
was touched, and I believed." He remained a strong Catholic
for the rest of his life, throughout a career spent in the French
diplomatic corps – as vice-consul in New York (April 1893),
French consul in China (1895–1909), then ambassador in
Tokyo (1922–1928), Washington, D.C. (1928–1933) and
Brussels (1933–1936). In his youth Claudel was heavily
influenced by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and the
Symbolists, all of whom were horrified by modern materialist
views of life. Unlike most of them, however, Claudel’s
response was to embrace Catholicism. All his writings are
passionate rejections of the idea of a mechanical or random
universe, instead proclaiming the deep spiritual meaning of
human life founded on God's all-governing grace and love. His
poetic language and imagery is often lush, mystical,
consciously 'poetic', romantically distant, but always
transcending a level of material realism. He used scenes of
passionate, obsessive human love to convey with great power
God's infinite love for humanity.