4 - The Twilight of Widor's Compositional Career (1895–1909)

Summary

Vous avez le devoir de faire une chose si vous avez la certitude qu'elle est nécessaire à l'intérêt général!

You have the duty to do a thing if you are certain that it is necessary to the general interest!

—Ch.-M. Widor “En parlant de Ch.-M. Widor avec Marcel Dupré.”

“The music of the eternal”

As a result of numerous demanding engagements, the pace of Widor's compositional productivity necessarily lessened, and that trend continued ever more markedly with each passing year. He had barely passed the midpoint of his life's journey, yet in the remaining forty-two years he would compose only about two dozen more major works. 1895 marks the beginning of Widor's third and last creative period, as in that year he published his latest organ symphony, the Symphonie gothique, Op. 70. With this work, a new style and ideal in organ music was ushered in—one that turned to Gregorian plainsong and thereby exhaled a particularly spiritual aura. Some of the composer's most profound inspiration fills its pages.

During the plainsong restoration of the second half of the 1800s, there evolved a principle for contemporary liturgical music that eventually became codified in the Motu proprio of Pope Pius X (1835–1914; pope 1903–14) on November 22, 1903: “The more closely a composition for church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savor the Gregorian form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes; and the more out of harmony it is with that supreme model, the less worthy it is of the temple.” Widor sensed the correctness of this direction well before it was officially articulated, and the Symphonie gothique was born of his desire to create a work supremely worthy of the Church.

Albert Schweitzer, a long-time pupil, friend, and collaborator of Widor, outlined his view of the stylistic development, traced through the Op. 13 and Op. 42 Organ Symphonies, leading to the Symphonie gothique :

His ten symphonies reveal the development of the art of organ playing as he himself has experienced it. The first are creations perfect in form, permeated by a lyric, melodic, sometimes even a sentimental spirit, which show however in the wonderful structure of their themes the peculiar endowment of the creator.