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Part of the reason, too, was the difficulty of her compositions, some of which were unpublished until recently and were promoted mostly by students like Pierre Labric. Part of the reason for Demessieux’s ebbing fortunes can be traced to the rise of neoclassical and period performance practices, which made her impulsive, lyrical, heartfelt style - one that brought a singular lightness of touch to a grand symphonic tradition - seem outdated, especially in the Bach and Handel with which she often opened her concerts. The Eloquence set gives her Decca tapes their first release on a major label in the CD era. She prospered at a Cavaillé-Coll instrument with which she had a rare bond, having recorded a transcendent Franck cycle on it in 1959, the high point of an invaluable eight-disc set from Eloquence that came out earlier this year, amply documented with notes by the organist D’Arcy Trinkwon.Īlthough Demessieux was a star in the 1940s and ’50s, when she kept up a punishing concert schedule alongside her liturgical work and her teaching in Liège, Belgium, her status faltered after her death from cancer in 1968, at just 47. Instead, Demessieux stayed with her family’s parish church, where she had been organist since she was 12, until she succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré as titulaire, or chief organist, at the church of the Madeleine in 1962. But shortly after her debut, Dupré, who appears to have been fed unfounded rumors that Demessieux had been disloyal, cut off contact with his pupil and resolved to sabotage her career. “You like her interpretations, you don’t like her interpretations - but the amount of skill, focus, intelligence it took to play programs of that stature at the Salle Pleyel, in her 20s, and to compose, to improvise, in the way and at the level that she could, was really without equal.”ĭemessieux seemed destined to take a top liturgical position, at Dupré’s St.-Sulpice or even at Notre-Dame.

Thomas concerts, who released a recording of Demessieux’s complete organ compositions in 2008, said in an interview. “She certainly earned her place,” Stephen Tharp, the organist for the St. Dupré waxed “of a phenomenon equal to the youth of Bach or Mozart.” Maurice Duruflé, then finishing his Requiem, declared that “next to Jeanne Demessieux, the rest of us play the pedals like elephants.” Le Figaro wrote that she was a fairy tale that could be believed in, for she had been “irresistible absolute perfection.” Yet Demessieux, who was born in Montpellier, France, in 1921 and whose centenary is being celebrated with performances of her complete organ works at St.