Today is May 30, 2021. That means it has been exactly 50 years since French virtuoso, Marcel Dupré, played his last Sunday service at Saint-Sulpice, went to his beloved home in Meudon for lunch and died peacefully about 7 pm that evening.

I know that I recently wrote a post about my former teacher, “Time warp,” where I wrote about Dupré’s 2,000 concerts on tour and posted pictures of my visit to Dupré’s home in 2010, but today there were more tributes on the Facebook Organists Association page. Here is his final improvisation, which he played as the postlude on May 30, 1971:

Someone asked whether parishioners applauded afterwards, but Lew Williams answered: Concerning applause at the end, I doubt very much that such a thing would have occurred in those more-conservative days 50 years ago. The austere Dupré would likely have frowned upon such activities. He was regarded with affection and awe by his parishioners, and they respected his gravitas for the grand maître that he was.

[An aside: It is truly valiant that Dupré played the organ on his last day of life, but you ought to read the account of how Louis Vierne died, on the organ bench during his 1,750th recital at Notre Dame.

“I’m going to be ill,” he said to his student Maurice Duruflé, who was standing beside him. Then, the 3,000 in the audience, far below the organ loft, heard a low note come from the organ: the start of the improvisation, they assumed. But right then, Vierne had a heart attack. His foot landed on low E of the pedalboard — the last note he ever played. He died just a few short moments later. It’s not an entirely depressing story. The great thing is, Vierne had always said that was exactly where he hoped he would die — at the keyboards of the instrument he loved. The organ bench he was sitting on is even on display in the organ loft at Notre Dame to this day.

Check out the Huffpost article for the complete story on Vierne dying on the organ bench.

Sadly in his last few years, Dupré was afflicted with severe arthritis in his hands and his fingers were seriously gnarled. He had always been known for his large hands, but when I studied with him in 1968, he could barely reach an octave. Fortunately for me, that meant he gave me tips on how to play his earlier compositions which had very large reaches, and gave me license to “reduce the chord” to something more manageable.

I also found this interview with Marcel Dupré and it just gives me goosebumps to hear his voice after 53 years. Even though my French is pretty rusty, I found it possible to understand most of it.

https://youtu.be/Oheu71bzEw8

And did you know that Marcel Dupré was the organist at a wedding for two very famous people? Indeed, he was the organist for the wedding of the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, to Wallis Simpson on June 3, 1937. Laura Trevelyan, in Anglophenia, wrote:

it was a rather simpler affair. Edward had abdicated from the throne in order to marry the woman he loved, the twice-married Mrs. Simpson, causing a constitutional crisis – so an extravagant wedding was emphatically not in order. No Westminster Abbey for those two. Instead, the ancient Château de Candé in Monts, France was the setting. The headlines read “Duke Weds Mrs. Warfield”: Wallis, who had divorced from her second husband Mr. Simpson shortly before a third attempt at matrimony, married Edward under her maiden name of Warfield.

The noted French organist Marcel Dupré played a wedding march of his own composition, as well as the hymn “Oh Perfect Love.” 

And speaking of weddings …

Belated wedding congratulations to my former organ student, Jordan McCreary, on his marriage to Eleanor last August 2020. He is now Dr. Jordan McCreary, having graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Portland, Oregon. Here he is with his wife, Eleanor, whom he married last August 2020. We also send our birthday wishes to Jordan today.