Trois Danses

On the 7th February 1940, Jehan wrote to his wife Madeleine from the front: "I am currently busy writing out the 'Trois Danses pour orchestre'. Since copying always bores me, particularly when there are forty pages (I have only a single exemplar), I am simultaneously making a version for concert organ. It will be a comfortable [sic] virtuoso piece."

The work required handwriting around 40 pages of orchestral score, a process which he found ‘tedious’. The organ transcription was a pleasant distraction and by-product of this process. We know that the organ manuscript was finished and posted off to Noëlie Pierront on May 1st but we will never know how far he had got with the orchestration.

Noëlie Pierront, played the premiere of the triptych in the year after the death of Alain on 23 March 1941 in the Parisian church of Saint-Germain des Prés at a memorial service given by a small group of friends. The composer never heard his most important work in its entirety...