Day 116: Maurice Clerc - Suite gothique, Op. 25

Happy holidays to all (both) of my readers! It’s Christmas day today so I’ll be doing something very short but very good so that I can go back to my yuletide activities, which at the moment is online shopping for pens. As I’m sure you can imagine due to me dorking out on a blog every day, I’m very into good-quality writing utensils, but I’ll spare you the details on that.

I’ve been getting unusually into organ music recently. I was perusing the Apple Music editor’s picks for the organ in their classical music app the other day and came across something that was so gorgeous that it actually stopped me in my tracks. It sounded ethereal and distant, kind of like something you’d hear coming from the next room in a dream or fantasy or some sort of hallucination. It was a part of Léon Boëllmann’s Suite gothique, played by Maurice Clerc at Dijon Cathedral.

Suite gothique is Boëllmann’s most famous composition. It was composed in 1895 and has since become a bit of a classic organ piece, especially the fourth and final movement.  Boëllmann was a French composer and principal organist at the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. Maurice Clerc whose performance I am listening to is also French, and he was the titular organist at Dijon Cathedral until 2018. He is a specialist in French music of the 19th-20th centuries.

I don’t know what it is about the organ, I’ve recently just been going mad for it. To some extent, I think I’ve always been into it without really realising it. I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock and some of the things I’ve always loved, like Zeppelin’s Your Time Is Gonna Come or pretty much any song by the Doors, feature organ heavily. When I was doing my Master’s, I also had a little break that was at the perfect time for me to walk into a nearby place that had daily free organ recitals and I could enjoy that and walk back in time for another seminar. But the obsession with it is semi-recent.

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s sort of spooky-sounding, or that it’s the instrument that’s played in churches, or that it’s such a big and imposing sound that you can’t help but to marvel at it, but something about it is just so special. To me, Suite gothique is a beautiful example of just how impressive this instrument can be.

The first two parts of it are what I’d almost expect from an organ composition, and while they’re gorgeous, the thing I heard that I was so blown away by was the third movement, "Prière à Notre-Dame." It’s just as impressive listening to it now. It’s slow, soft and quiet, and almost a little bit haunting, but still light and incredibly beautiful. It couldn’t be more different to what comes after it, the more well-known Toccata. If the third movement sounds like something you’d hear in a dream, the fourth could easily accompany you being stuck in a haunted house. But I still love it, it has the spookiness that makes the organ so stunning to me.

Apparently this is a fairly entry-level piece to learn for intermediate organ players, but to my untrained ear, it sounds so intricate. It’s bonkers to think that if I started to play now I could possibly learn to play this in a few years. I genuinely think I’ll start playing the piano so that I have some sort of a skillset to build on when the time comes for me to learn to play the organ, because that time will come. Once the classic rock revival begins and the organ inevitably circles back into being cool, I’ll be ready.

This is a very strong 8.5/10 and I’m sure I’ll look back at this some day and think that this was my gateway drug to entering the world of organ compositions.