Maurice Durufle Quotes

“The poignant words that Mme Duruflé addressed to one of her American students, saddened that his year's study with her had come to an end, were as apropos at the time of her death: 'Oh no, don't be sad. We have played the prelude to a friendship; we have all of life for the fugue.”
― James E. Frazier, Maurice Durufle: The Man and His Music

“The pursuit of the beautiful was, for [Duruflé], a gesture of the soul, not merely a function or an exercise of musical giftedness, or even of liturgical necessity. That is, perhaps, what Mme Duruflé meant in saying that he had ... a Gregorian soul.”
― James E. Frazier, Maurice Durufle: The Man and His Music

“One cannot deny that Duruflé's improvisations and compositions had their source and their summit in a climate of belief. And to that extent it may be said that his work as a liturgical organist 'becomes a real meditation. There is not merely a an auditory delight, as refined as it might be, and God knows that Maurice Duruflé was refined, but an interior elevation that disposes the heart and spirit of others to the the infinite encounter, to the radiance of divine contact.”
― James E. Frazier, Maurice Durufle: The Man and His Music

“The triumph of plainsong, of polyphony, and of truly liturgical organ playing, in the first half century of his life, represented for Duruflé the victory of a transcendent, hieratic worldview over the secular and popular aberrations ushered in by the nineteenth century. Their demise in the 1960s meant more than the loss of a well-regarded musical tradition; it was also an assault on the worldview that gave his life meaning.”
― James E. Frazier, Maurice Durufle: The Man and His Music