LDV49.1

You then launched out on a career as a concert artist during which you tackled a very broad repertory: from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. Do you have a favourite period or composer? JohannSebastianBach, that goeswithout saying!Then Iwould like toanswer: the early seventeenth century. It’s a period that I find extraordinarily rich and fertile. But the question is a really tricky one because it depends on the angle you’re looking from. The nineteenth century also means a great deal to me – but not on the organ! Schubert’smusic, for example, has an enormous appeal for me. What a pity he didn’t write for our instrument! Of course Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt made use of the organ, but only peripherally. For them, it was much more the century of the piano. Incidentally, it seems to me that it’s from this moment that we can date the emergence of a ‘specialised’ repertory and the beginning of the divide between ‘organ music’ and just ‘music’! Organists concentrated on the sacred repertory, as if there could exist such a thing as a ‘sacred’ or ‘liturgical’ style independently of the music. By its nature, the organ has no particular affinity with the sacred, no more or less than any other instrument in any case! The twentieth century continued this trend and I sometimes find it frightening to compare certain ‘composer-organists’ with other musicians of the same period, especially figures like Stravinsky, Debussy or Bartók . . . 54 MESSIAEN_THE ORGAN WORKS