Louis Vierne Organ Symphony No. 1

As Notre-Dame re-opens, Terry Blain names the finest recordings of a spectacular showcase by one of the cathedral’s famous former organists

- Terry Blain

The work

‘I could not hold back my tears. I knew nothing, I understood nothing. But my natural instinct was violently shaken by this expressive music echoing through my every pore’. The writer is Louis Vierne, and the ‘expressive music’ he describes was conjured by César Franck, playing on the Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris.

The year was 1881, and Vierne was just eleven at the time. He was, he later wrote, a child of ‘almost unhealthy sensitivity’, severely sight-impaired from birth and subjected to a ‘continual tenderness’ from his parents. Small wonder, then, that the mystic swirl of sound he heard at Sainte Clotilde that day affected Vierne so deeply. ‘I was bowled over,’ he recorded, ‘and became almost ecstatic.’

What exactly triggered this life defining moment? No doubt Franck’s own, broodingly evocative playing was a factor. But the instrument Franck was playing was a potent ingredient too. It was one of an entirely new breed of organ designed by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, dramatically expanding the tonal palette of the instrument and its ability to create nuanced dynamics. ‘My organ, it’s like an orchestra!’, Franck declared of the Cavaillé-Coll new-build he had played in his previous church position.

By 1898, when he turned 28, Vierne had extensive experience at the organ himself, as assistant to Charles-Marie Widor at the Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris. He was intimately familiar with the innovative, multi-movement ‘organ symphonies’ Widor had been writing, utilising the power and grandeur of Saint-Sulpice’s mighty Cavaillé-Coll instrument. It was Widor’s symphonies which particularly fuelled Vierne’s imagination as he embarked on writing an organ symphony of his own.