10: A Musical Monument Lost to History

      History has been grievously neglectful of Tournemire’s music and obdurate to his Ideals, and understandably so: His music’s intimidating intellectual content, the chaos enveloping the world at that time, the ever-burgeoning myopic apostasy of the secular postwar period where Faith is held as a pejorative state of being, as well as the abnegation of the metaphysically transcendent Tridentine Liturgy, which came to be decried as a ritualistic shibboleth by a generation favouring puerile cosy informality—These all played a role in his modern obscurity. Indeed, the year after the completion of L’Orgue Mystique, the world, enveloped in the Great Depression, negligently acquiesced to the accession of Hitler to power as it slowly marched down the road to madness. L’Orgue Mystique and its creator came to be included among the many victims of this overwhelmingly tragic era. Yet, still, the man would become an iconic progenitor whose prophetic vision opened the burgeoning minds of a budding generation of future artists, his music embodying the Augustinian notion of ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab interioribus ad superiora. On the tenth anniversary of Tournemire’s death, Langlais, Tournemire’s eventual successor at Sainte-Clotilde, offered this panegyric:

On the fourth of November 1939, the news of Charles Tournemire’s death struck the musical world. It was then, the day of his feast, that this great master, whose message was so in advance of our conception of art, left us. But thanks to his work, he lives…. He erected a monument, a religious summation, in his L’Orgue Mystique, which makes him one of the greatest servants of Christian art and even of art in general. Such an anniversary must deeply grieve all who are attached to Sainte-Clotilde, which he served with passion and, with a feeling so common to many great men, that of not being understood except by a small number of devotées.

      Indeed, the man and his musical legacy are known but to a privileged few, yet his collected works constitute a supernal masterpiece—ne plus ultra—that need to be shared among this increasingly spiritually void and vacuous world with its heartbreaking evanescent cognisance of Divinity. A miraculous work of true art, L’Orgue Mystique, in a sense, exhibits potentia obœdientia in the Verities its euphonic allegory reveals, invokes, if not embodies. Truly, it is difficult to think upon Charles Tournemire and not utter the word genius—for Tournemire would discover that the search for the Soul of Music extolled by his Maître Franck was, in fact, a quest to know the Ultimate Soul.

Video: Jean Langlais’s reminiscences of his maître Charles Tournemire