3 - The Years of Mastery (1880–94)

Summary

Ch.-M. Widor fait de l'art pour l'art, sans concessions coupables au public: il ne se rattache à aucune école ni à aucun groupe: il est luimême, et c'est le meilleur éloge qu'on puisse faire d'un artiste.

Ch.-M. Widor does art for the sake of art, without guilty concessions to the public; he is not attached to any school or group; he is himself, and that is the highest praise that one can make for an artist.

—H. Eymieu L'Art Musical 33 (February 1, 1894): 33–34.

La nuit de Walpurgis: “Can one render the grotesque in music?”

The two principal works of 1880 hurled Widor into the limelight of almost universal musical renown—the first work by dint of the arrant reaction that it drew from both critics and concert-going public alike, and the second work, in total contrast, by the manner in which it utterly captured their imaginations.

Hector Berlioz (1803–69) cut the way for programmatic revelry with his revolutionary Symphonie fantastique of 1830. Departing from his classical leanings, Widor continued down the same path when in 1880 he took part of Goethe's Faust epic as the literary basis for his vividly programmatic symphonic poem La nuit de Walpurgis (Nuit de Sabbat).

The first movement (Ouverture) depicts a raging, tempestuous storm, the wild reveling of Walpurgis Night—the witches’ Sabbath in full bent; in complete contrast, the calm second movement (Adagio) is a musical illustration of the meeting of Helen of Troy and Paris, and has no direct connection with the theme of the first and last movements; the final movement (Bacchanale) returns to the revelry of the Brocken—the drunken dance of the boisterous guests in the devil's lair.

There was certainly nothing new in recruiting the Faust theme or the Walpurgis Night scene for musical portrayal. As far back as 1833, Mendelssohn had taken the same poetic basis for his famous secular Cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60. Interestingly, Widor's work has more than the title and literary text in common with Mendelssohn's work; Widor's Nuit de Walpurgis is also his Opus 60.