Hommage à Frescobaldi, III. Élévation

Jean Langlais (1907–1991) – Hommage à Frescobaldi, III. Élévation

In the Élévation, Langlais continues his liturgical journey through the Mass with a movement of profound stillness, shaped by the same principles that guided Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali. The homage once again rests not on stylistic imitation, but on liturgical function and the ancient materials that accompany it.

This movement is built around the Gregorian responsory Homo quidam fecit cenam magnam, a chant associated with the Eucharistic feast. Langlais surrounds this melody with an extended, suspended introduction—quiet, hovering, and nearly timeless. The harmony shifts in subtle, glowing colors, creating a meditative space in which the chant’s eventual entrance feels inevitable, as though emerging from centuries of prayer.

The chant first appears in the manuals, woven into the texture with gentle deliberation. After another section of Langlais’s original writing—descending chromaticism in the upper registers of an ethereal nature above luxurious, suspended extended tertian harmonies—the chant returns at the close of the piece, now in the pedal on a 4′ flute. This is the same registration that carried the Kyrie cunctipotens in the opening movement, creating a quiet structural resonance across the cycle.

In this Élévation, Langlais offers a moment of luminous contemplation: a modern voice shaped by ancient melody, a ritual fragment carried forward across generations. The tribute to Frescobaldi lies in this union of source and function, an act of devotion rendered in the language of the 20th-century French organ.

Recorded here on the coming-soon Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Rieger (this is still a beta version) as sampled by Evensong. This is the third installment of the cycle, which I plan to perform in its entirety. (I used ChatGPT to help compile and write this introductory material.)