Jean Langlais: The Man and His Music (review)

Jean Langlais: The Man and His Music. By Ann Labounsky. Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 2000. [392 p. ISBN 1-57467-054-9. $34.95.]

The unique school of Parisian organist-composers stemming from César Franck's organ class at the Paris Conservatoire and inspired by his legendary improvisations at Sainte-Clotilde in Paris has at last begun to receive serious scrutiny by scholarly organists like Thomas Murray (Marcel Dupré: The Work of a Master Organist [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985]) and Rollin Smith (Saint-Saëns and the Organ [Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1992] and Louis Vierne: Organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral [Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1999]). Now Ann Labounsky weighs in with an absorbing monograph on the blind Parisian organist Jean Langlais (1907-1991), who, she argues, must be considered heir to a distinctive improvisational and compositional tradition established by Franck and continued, albeit in modified form, by Franck's pupil and successor (once removed) at Sainte-Clotilde, Charles Tournemire. Langlais absorbed this "Sainte-Clotilde Tradition" (a term coined by Labounsky and other Langlais pupils) through studies with three Franck pupils while enrolled at the National Institute for the Blind and through later study with Tournemire, whom he succeeded as organist of Sainte-Clotilde in 1945.

Except for an excellent but necessarily brief chapter devoted to Langlais in Michael Murray's French Masters of the Organ: Saint-Saëns, Franck, Widor, Vierne, Dupré, Langlais, Messiaen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), Labounsky's is the first comprehensive study of him in English, complementing the 1995 French biography Jean Langlais (1907-1991): Ombre et lumière by his second wife, Marie-Louise Jacquet-Langlais (Paris: Éditions Combre). While Jacquet-Langlais probably enjoyed a more intimate association with the composer than did Labounsky, the latter knew him somewhat longer; she met him in the early sixties, studied with him in Paris, accompanied him on his first American recital tour, and received a proposal of marriage from him (which she promptly rejected). Although the notion of writing Langlais's biography had occurred to her earlier, it was only in 1973, when Langlais expressly commissioned her to do so, that she embarked upon the project in earnest, collecting his recollections and reminiscences and supplementing this information by interviews with Langlais's family, friends, and pupils.

In addition to continued organ study with Langlais throughout the seventies, Labounsky premiered many of his works in France and the United States, and in 1979 she embarked on an ambitious project to record the composer's complete organ works for the Musical Heritage Society--an undertaking authorized by Langlais, who forfeited half the royalties. Her project is expected to comprise twenty-four compact discs in twelve volumes, nine of which have appeared so far; distribution of pieces within the entire set is indicated in a chronological list of Langlais's complete works appended to Labounsky's study. The worklist also shows that Langlais composed for organ throughout his professional life, a relatively long period extending from 1927 to some five months before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-four. From this substantial output--Langlais wrote more organ works than any other composer save Johann Sebastian Bach--Labounsky has selected for discussion a series of compositions that admirably illustrate her subject's lifelong involvement with the organ and demonstrate her own appreciation and understanding of the poetic and spiritual side of his creativity.

Although Langlais performed many of his works on American recital tours from 1952 through 1981, only a handful of his early works have won a place in the standard repertory. In seeking to redress the balance, Labounsky writes compellingly about worthwhile but neglected pieces, while frankly admitting that others (unspecified) should have remained unpublished: "Langlais could not objectively decide what to throw away. . . . Instead of reworking sketches for months at a time, he usually sent them to the copyist as soon as they were finished, without a second thought" (p. 330).

Labounsky's...