A Time to Remember - Jehan Alain

 Jehan Alain  -  The Tragic Loss of a Musical Great

One of my passions is organ music and on a wintry Orcadian evening there is no greater pleasure than settling down  to listen to a recording of work by the great Masters such as Widor, Vierne or Franck. With Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday almost with us, I am diverging from the usual blog theme of Orcadian writers, artists and musicians to remember and celebrate the life of organist and musician Jehan Alain, who, had he not been tragically killed in active service in France in 1940, may have been one of the greatest.

Jehan Alain was arguably one of the last of the French Romantic organists, but had he survived the war he would most likely have been considered a modern composer. He was the eldest son of the musical Alain family, born on 3^rd February 1911 in St-Germain-en-Laye, a western suburb of Paris, also the birthplace of Debussy. He had two sisters, Odile and Marie-Claire and a brother, Olivier. His father Albert studied under Guilmant and Vierne at the Paris Conservatoire and although the young Jehan received piano lessons from Augustin Pierson who was the organist at Saint-Louis in Versailles, it was his father who gave him initial training on the organ. Jehan could do nothing else but appreciate the ‘king of instruments’ as Mozart called the organ, because his father spent years building a four-manual instrument in the family sitting room, which can now be seen and heard in Switzerland. Before that, the family had to make do with a harpsichord.

From 1927 until 1939 Jehan attended the Paris Conservatoire himself, where he studied organ under Marcel Dupré, a former student and protégé Widor, gaining first prize in improvisation in 1939. He studied composition under Paul Dukas and Jean-Roger Ducasse and in 1936 he won the Prix des amis de l’orgue for his Suite for Organ Op 48; introduction, variations, scherzo and choral. Despite his illustrious pedigree, when it came to studying the organ he said of himself that he:

“was neither pianist nor organist, only a bit of an acrobat and scarcely an improviser: a sort of genuine (sincere) charleton!” 

He was certainly a bit of a musical acrobat. In his Fantasmagorie, composed in the key signature for the right hand is three sharps while for the left hand it is five flats. In addition he was known to have had a good sense of humour, which was reflected in some of his works. His Lullaby on two ciphers (JA 7bis) is an improvisation on two notes of his father’s organ that had stuck causing them to sound without being struck (ciphers). 

Alain’s music was influenced by Debussy and Messiaen, but he was also interested in Indian music, the Far East and North African music, Gregorian chants, Baroque music and jazz.

He was impressed by a visit he made in 1932 to the centenary exhibition celebrating the Colonial Exposition held in the Bois de Vincennes in 1831. This was organised by the French Government, bringing people from the French colonies to Paris to demonstrate their arts, crafts, architecture, music and literature. The hope was that this would show a mutual exchange of cultures, countering the accusations of exploitation.

Alain’s first fantasy draws on words by Omar Khayyam 

Then to Heaven itself, I cried out to ask how destiny can guide us through darkness. And Heaven says, "Follow your blind instinct."

In 1935 he was appointed organist of Saint Nicholas de Maisons Lafitte in Paris and in the same year he married Madeleine Payanne. They had three children. Life was going well, but tragedy struck the family in 1937 when his sister Odile died in a mountain hiking accident aged twenty three. Jehan was profoundly affected by this. He wrote the dedication:

“When in its extremity the Christian soul can find no new words to implore God’s mercy, it tirelessly repeats the same plea with vehement faith. The limits of reason are reached and only faith can pursue its ascension.” 

He devoted the central section of his final organ work Deuils to her memory.

Much of Alain’s work has a spiritual component. Alain described his work Le jardin suspendu (The Hanging Garden) as ‘a portrayal of the ideal, perpetual pursuit and escape of the artist, an inaccessible and inviolable refuge.’

His most performed piece nowadays is his Litanies composed in 1937.

The only known recording of his playing – a 6 minute improvisation – was made in 1938 at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth synagogue where his friend was the organist.

Alain is regarded today as a skilled organist and a promising composer, but what is not so well known is that he was also a poet, an elegant letter writer and a draftsman. He drew numerous sketches, some of which, like the one he drew for the cover of a recording of the Fantasmagorie, bordered on the grotesque.

Jehan Alain had a love of motorcycles and motorcycle mechanics. When war broke out he signed up for the 8^th Motorised Armour Division of the French army. On the 20^th June 1940 he was dispatched to reconnoitre the German advance on the eastern side of Saumur, a town on the Loire. Coming round a bend at Le Petit-Puy, he heard a band of German soldiers. He could have turned and fled or surrendered, but instead he abandoned his bike and started firing at them with his carbine. He killed sixteen of the enemy before he was shot himself and died at the age of twenty nine.

Three days beforehand, Marshal Philippe Pétain had called on French troops to stop fighting. Although the mayor of Saumur wanted to declare the town as an open one to avoid destruction, the Ecole de cavalerie (the French army cavalry academy) was situated there and its head, Colonel Daniel Michon, insisted the school defend the town as a matter of military honour. 780 students and teachers were joined by about 1000 soldiers in the area who were retreating from Dunkirk. They managed to hold off 10,000 German troops for three days although a barrage of 2000 shells was launched at the town.

Although elsewhere in France, defeated units were ruthlessly massacred; at Saumur many of the German troops had a similar background to the French cadets. Some had met in pre-war equestrian events. Because of this, they freed their prisoners and buried the dead, including Jehan Alain, with military honours. 

He was hailed as a hero and posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery, but the world was denied musical compositions, which going by his previous works, promised to be among the greatest French music of the century.

                                                                         Jehan Alain 1911 -1940