For this project, I’m focusing on Louis Vierne, who was the organist of Notre Dame in Paris from 1900-1937.
Louis Vierne in 1915. (Source: WikiMedia Commons.)
The first source I examined is French Masters of the Organ by Michael Murray. 1 The chapter on Vierne discusses his life from birth until 1900, when he was appointed to the job at Notre Dame. It isn’t the most relevant to Vierne’s life in the 1920s, but it does a pretty bang-up job of explaining the relationships between Vierne and his teachers Franck and Widor. The connection to Franck will be useful later, since so many other figures were influenced by or had strong opinions about Franck. This book also taught me a fun fact! Vierne attended the National Institute for Blind Children. It turns out that the inventor of Braille, Louis Braille, attended the same school 50 years before Vierne and was an accomplished organist himself. 2 It’s not relevant to my paper, but I found it so interesting that I had to include it in my blog post.
Another book I found focuses on five art songs Vierne composed using poems by Baudelaire.3 This source is important because it reminds me, an organist, that Vierne did in fact compose things outside of the organ.4 I think I might still focus on Vierne’s organ music for this project, but his settings of Baudelaire poems will help me connect him to broader French culture.
The last major source that I have covered so far is an overwhelming, Bible-sized book solely about Vierne by Rollin Smith.5 Smith kindly assembled a bio-chronology of Vierne’s life in Appendix A, which gave me an easy place to start tackling the book. The chronology gives me a quick run-down of Vierne’s life, and I can choose to only read what happened between 1920 and 1930. According to the chronology, Vierne toured the USA in 1927.6 There’s a whole chapter in the book dedicated to his American tour. That chapter might have some information on what Vierne’s contemporaries thought of the tour and what ideas Vierne may have brought back with him.
It’s difficult for me to remember that the goal of this project is to contextualize Vierne in the 1920s. I think I have a good start on painting a picture of the man himself. As far as contextualization, all I have so far is that Vierne pretty much ignored/had nothing to do with the music of Stravinsky and Webern (Murray 125).7 My next step is to find sources examining the influence Vierne exerted on other composers, and to focus on the works that Vierne himself wrote during the 1920s. His fifth organ symphony will likely be the focus, since it’s the only organ symphony he wrote in this time period. Stay tuned!