Autobiographical Recollections of Charles-Marie Widor

Autobiographical Recollections of Charles-Marie Widor

Edited and translated by John R. Near

Boydell and Brewer / University of Rochester Press, 2024

ISBN 9781648250866 / 298 pp / £85 (hard copy), £25 (ebook)

Reviewed by Robert James Stove

Brash to the nth degree will be the reader who is not awed into at least temporary deference by this book’s cover design: from which stares the haughty, craggy visage of the septuagenarian Widor himself, as severe and impassive as any Easter Island statue, and with his dotted cravat alone implying amiable human emotion. A similar profound, if less overwhelming, awe should govern readers’ response to John R. Near’s pertinacious research.

No other musical master owes as much to one specialist’s efforts as Widor does to Professor Near’s. In addition to producing the definitive biography of his subject (Widor: A Life Beyond the Toccata, 2011), and more recently assembling Widor’s didactic prose (Widor on Organ Performance Practice and Technique, 2019), Professor Near has supplied indispensable critical editions of Widor’s organ symphonies, correcting abundant errors that plagued original print versions. Envisage a parallel universe where Ernest Newman had not only written his four-volume account of Wagner, but been compelled to edit each Wagner opera from the autograph: this analogy alone can hint at the magnitude of Professor Near’s endeavours.

He began these endeavours at a time when, on the share-market of musical opinion, stocks in Widor – and in the French Romantic organ school generally – had crashed. ‘We don’t play Widor here,’ sniffed the head of organ studies at Professor Near’s own New England Conservatory: ‘you know, he really didn’t write good music.’ Such Podsnappery echoed the verdict of Hungarian-American musicologist Paul Henry Lang, who in 1941 dismissed Widor’s organ symphonies (had he ever heard them?) as ‘contrapuntally belaboured products of a flat and scant musical imagination, the bastard nature of which is evident from the title alone.’ If Lang’s assessment no longer wins over undergraduate hearts and minds, we have Professor Near’s efforts above all to thank for the change.

In 1936 (the year he turned 92), Widor dictated the Souvenirs on which the present volume is based. Only one copy of the 103-page document survives: Jeanne Dupré, widow of Marcel Dupré, found it in her husband’s papers. It came into the possession of Widor’s grand-niece, Marie-Ange Guibaud, who enabled Professor Near to use its contents when he worked on the 2011 biography.

These contents engendered certain problems. Widor’s memory, though exceptionally retentive, played on him the occasional trick. Now and then his amanuensis, Édouard Monet, simply spelled a name wrong or left a blank that now cannot be filled. But the chief difficulty lay in the extreme breadth of Widor’s erudition; on every page he alluded to artistic and political figures who, albeit celebrated in 1936, will mean little or nothing to most readers almost a century afterwards. Herein is the book’s most remarkable achievement. Fully half of the present volume consists of Professor Near’s own endnotes, which lighten our darkness, making the crooked straight and the rough places plain to an extent that, if he had published nothing else in his life, would itself cause him to shine among modern scholars.

It is, on the whole, a rather mellow Widor who emerges from the Souvenirs. He allows himself the occasional peppery rebuke – his chief target being Vincent d’Indy, safely dead since 1931 – but the politicking zest of his younger self (which included his public humiliation of Paris Conservatoire director Théodore Dubois) had faded. Whether through genuine late-onset benignity or through a prudent memento mori, he told at least one interviewer after revealing a controversial tale: ‘Keep this to yourself.’ Still, readers will hardly feel oppressed by excessive blandness. Widor’s capacious mind so abounded in anecdotes which sometimes dated back to France’s Second Republic (1848-1851), and his career had introduced him to so many notabilities from Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Portugal’s Luís I, and John D. Rockefeller Junior downwards, that he merely needed to keep talking to remain interesting.

And in words, scarcely less than in notes, the style was the man. Although in many respects Widor’s career is unimaginable outside France, no-one partook less of vulgar chauvinism. Like Richard Strauss, he recognised only two sorts of people: the gifted (whatever their national origins) and the ungifted. If the organ-loft mentality exists outside the preconceptions of the organ’s ill-wishers, Widor never lapsed into it. When he looks back, he takes at least as much pride in his operas, ballets, and chamber works – some of which are now creeping, not before time, into discographies – as in his output for the King of Instruments. His role as cultural bureaucrat formed a liberal education in itself, bringing him in touch with France’s outstanding painters, sculptors, and authors as much as with its composers. Of narrow factional prejudice in his own art, he seems to have been almost wholly devoid (who else could have numbered among his admirers Saint-Saëns and Debussy?). Royal and imperial courts, however glamorous, instilled in him a respect that never degenerated into toadying. He speaks with particular esteem of Alfonso XIII, whom he found generous, charming, and intelligent: a finding almost universal among those who knew Spain’s unfortunate monarch in the flesh, rather than merely deriving their misinformation about him from newspapers’ gossip-columns.

Only near the end did Widor’s formidable stamina seep away from him. Professor Near quotes a sorrowful account by his pianist friend Isidor Philipp of a 90^th-birthday concert at Saint-Sulpice, which Widor insisted on conducting himself, despite a podium technique which Philipp called ‘mediocre, uncertain, timid.’ Desperately, Philipp writes, ‘he insisted upon going on to the end. … After the concert he was led fainting to his car.’ Yet he rallied, to Philipp’s own astonishment. A lesser nonagenarian would have been rendered prostrate by the news in November 1936 that Madrid’s Casa Velásquez, the cultural centre to which Widor had devoted so much activity and money, suffered terrible bombing damage during the Spanish Civil War. Not Widor: ‘If our dear Casa is destroyed, we will rebuild it.’ Four months later he breathed his last, having assured the faithful Dupré: ‘I cannot complain, I have had a beautiful life.’

One finishes examining Autobiographical Recollections with renewed awareness of how well Widor fits Berlioz’s epitome of Meyerbeer: ‘he had not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky.’ Widor recounted how, when Big Bertha directed its fire at Paris during the 1914-1918 war, he and his colleague Charles Waltner happened to be strolling along the Pont des Arts, ‘in the wonderful moonlight at midnight. The whistle of a bomb grazed our ears and I said to Waltner, “Hey, that was meant for us!” [Eh, mais, c’est pour nous!].’ Had the ammunition come a few centimetres closer to the great man … the resultant loss to French music hardly bears thinking about.

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