Marcel Dupré

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) was a French organist, composer, and pedagogue. Born in Rouen into a wealthy musical family, Marcel Dupré was a child prodigy. Having already taken lessons from Alexandre Guilmant, he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1904, where he studied with Louis Diémer and Lazare Lévy (piano), Guilmant and Louis Vierne (organ), and Charles-Marie Widor (fugue and composition). In 1914, Dupré won the Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata, Psyché. Twelve years later, he was appointed professor of organ performance and improvisation at the Paris Conservatoire, a position he held until 1954. Dupré became famous for performing more than 2,000 organ recitals throughout Australia, the United States, Canada and Europe, which included a recital series of 10 concerts of the complete works of Bach in 1920 (Paris Conservatoire) and 1921 (Palais du Trocadéro), both performed entirely from memory. Succeeding Widor in 1934 as titular organist at St. Sulpice in Paris, Dupré retained this position for the rest of his life. From 1947 to 1954, Dupré was director of the American Conservatory, which occupies the Louis XV wing of the Château de Fontainebleau near Paris. In 1954, after the death of Claude Delvincourt in a traffic accident, Dupré became director of the Paris Conservatoire; he held this post for only two years before the prevailing national laws forced him to retire at the age of 70. He died after suffering cardiac arrest in 1971 in Meudon (near Paris) at the age of 85. As a composer, he produced a wide-ranging oeuvre of 65 opus numbers. Aside from a few fine works for aspiring organists (such as the 79 Chorales op. 28) most of Dupré's music for the organ ranges from moderately to extremely difficult, and some of it makes almost impossible technical demands on the performer (e.g., Évocation op. 37, Suite, op. 39, Deux Esquisses op. 41, Vision op. 44). He also taught two generations of well-known organists such as Jehan Alain and Marie-Claire Alain, Jean-Marie Beaudet, Pierre Cochereau, Françoise Renet, and, most famously, Olivier Messiaen, to name only a few.