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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
After the events in Charlottesville, this is the second consecutive Friday featuring the work of a composer who died fighting against Nazi Germany -- and tonight, the composer is someone who took no fewer than 16 Nazis with him in a ferocious one-man last stand.
Jehan Alain (1911-1940) had an enigmatic, mystical style influenced by Scriabin and Messiaen as well as by jazz and Asian music, and often featuring an unusual set of octatonic scales of his own creation. Almost all of his output was composed for the organ; while he remains obscure, at least a few organists have called him the greatest organ composer of the 20th century.
Alain's career was cut short by the Second World War: when Germany invaded France, he enlisted and served as a motorcycle dispatch rider with an armored division. In June 1940, six days before France surrendered, Alain was sent on a reconnaissance mission to scout the German advance near Saumur, and unexpectedly encountered a large contingent of German troops as he rounded a curve in the road. Unable to turn around and escape, he abandoned his motorcycle and made a heroic last stand with his rifle; his body was found surrounded by sixteen dead Germans. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
Evidently the war had not kept him from continuing to compose; also found around him were numerous pages of handwritten music that had fallen out of his dispatch bag. But nothing he wrote during his military service could be reconstructed, and thus we are left with his Trois Danses as his last completed work. The Trois Danses were also his most substantial piece. He initially composed the work for piano in 1937, but, dissatisfied with it as a piano piece, rewrote it for organ, the version that survives today, in 1939-40. He also began arranging the piece for orchestra, but abandoned that effort shortly before enlisting, when his orchestral manuscript was sucked out of the window of a moving train.
None of the Danses follows any traditional dance form. The first, "Joies" (Joys), alternates between a somber slow figure and a fast ostinato in 7/8 time, which gradually merge into an ecstatic middle section that feels both fast and slow at once. Eventually the movement settles into a quiet, meditative coda. The second movement, "Deuils" (Mourning), broods darkly throughout, lightened only by some floating, trance-like melodies in the later part of the movement. Alain may have composed this movement in memory of his sister, who died in a mountain-climbing accident in 1937; he suggested it could be played as a stand-alone piece under the title "Danse funèbre pour honorer une mémoire héroïque" (Funeral dance to honour a heroic memory). The final movement is titled "Luttes" (Struggles), which plays out as a battle between several contrasting melodic motifs, with none emerging into the foreground for any extended time. Suddenly the rug is pulled out from under all the combatants, with a single new idea taking over; and the end of the piece appears just as suddenly, with a series of chordal blasts interrupting, seemingly out of nowhere.
After the events in Charlottesville, this is the second consecutive Friday featuring the work of a composer who died fighting against Nazi Germany -- and tonight, the composer is someone who took no fewer than 16 Nazis with him in a ferocious one-man last stand.
Jehan Alain (1911-1940) had an enigmatic, mystical style influenced by Scriabin and Messiaen as well as by jazz and Asian music, and often featuring an unusual set of octatonic scales of his own creation. Almost all of his output was composed for the organ; while he remains obscure, at least a few organists have called him the greatest organ composer of the 20th century.
Alain's career was cut short by the Second World War: when Germany invaded France, he enlisted and served as a motorcycle dispatch rider with an armored division. In June 1940, six days before France surrendered, Alain was sent on a reconnaissance mission to scout the German advance near Saumur, and unexpectedly encountered a large contingent of German troops as he rounded a curve in the road. Unable to turn around and escape, he abandoned his motorcycle and made a heroic last stand with his rifle; his body was found surrounded by sixteen dead Germans. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
Evidently the war had not kept him from continuing to compose; also found around him were numerous pages of handwritten music that had fallen out of his dispatch bag. But nothing he wrote during his military service could be reconstructed, and thus we are left with his Trois Danses as his last completed work. The Trois Danses were also his most substantial piece. He initially composed the work for piano in 1937, but, dissatisfied with it as a piano piece, rewrote it for organ, the version that survives today, in 1939-40. He also began arranging the piece for orchestra, but abandoned that effort shortly before enlisting, when his orchestral manuscript was sucked out of the window of a moving train.
None of the Danses follows any traditional dance form. The first, "Joies" (Joys), alternates between a somber slow figure and a fast ostinato in 7/8 time, which gradually merge into an ecstatic middle section that feels both fast and slow at once. Eventually the movement settles into a quiet, meditative coda. The second movement, "Deuils" (Mourning), broods darkly throughout, lightened only by some floating, trance-like melodies in the later part of the movement. Alain may have composed this movement in memory of his sister, who died in a mountain-climbing accident in 1937; he suggested it could be played as a stand-alone piece under the title "Danse funèbre pour honorer une mémoire héroïque" (Funeral dance to honour a heroic memory). The final movement is titled "Luttes" (Struggles), which plays out as a battle between several contrasting melodic motifs, with none emerging into the foreground for any extended time. Suddenly the rug is pulled out from under all the combatants, with a single new idea taking over; and the end of the piece appears just as suddenly, with a series of chordal blasts interrupting, seemingly out of nowhere.