Jehan Alain

His father, Albert Alain (1880–1971) was an organist, composer and amateur organ builder who had studied with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne.

Jehan-Aristide Paul Alain (3 February 1911 – 20 June 1940) was a French organist, composer, and soldier.

Born into a family of musicians, he learned the organ from his father and a host of other teachers, becoming a composer at 18, and composing until the outbreak of the Second World War 10 years later.

His compositional style was influenced by the musical language of the earlier Claude Debussy, as well as his interest in music, dance and philosophy of the far east.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Alain became a dispatch rider in the Eighth Motorised Armour Division of the French Army; he took part in the Battle of Saumur, in which he was killed.

His younger brother was composer-organist-pianist-musicologist Olivier Alain and his younger sister was renowned organist Marie-Claire Alain who was also responsible for popularising his works.

Alain was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the western suburbs of Paris, into a family of musicians.

His younger brother was the composer, organist and pianist Olivier Alain (1918–1994), and his youngest sister the organist Marie-Claire Alain (1926–2013).

Jehan received his initial training in the piano from Augustin Pierson, the organist of Saint-Louis at Versailles, and in the organ from his father, who had built a four-manual instrument in the family sitting room.

By the age of 11, Jehan was substituting at St. Germain-en-Laye.

Between 1927 and 1939, he attended the Paris Conservatoire and achieved First Prize in Harmony under André Bloch and First Prize in Fugue with Georges Caussade.

His short career as a composer began in 1929, when Alain was 18, and lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War 10 years later.

His music was influenced not only by the musical language of the earlier Claude Debussy and his own contemporary Olivier Messiaen (seen in Le jardin suspendu, 1934), but also by an interest in the music, dance and philosophies of the far east (acquired at the Exposition coloniale internationale of 1931 and seen in Deux danses à Agni Yavishta, 1932, and Deuxième fantaisie, 1936), a renaissance of baroque music (seen in Variations sur un thème de Clément Janequin, 1937), and in jazz (seen in Trois danses of 1939).

Alain described Le jardin suspendu ("The Hanging Garden") as a portrayal of "the ideal, perpetual pursuit and escape of the artist, an inaccessible and inviolable refuge".

He wrote choral music, including a Requiem Mass, chamber music, songs and three volumes of piano music.

But it is his organ music for which he is best known.

He was appointed organist of Eglise Saint-Nicolas de Maisons-Laffitte in Paris in 1935, and remained there for four years.

He also played regularly at the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth synagogue.

He left behind his wife, Madeleine Payan, whom he had married in 1935, his three children Denis, Agnès, and Lise, and a body of compositions viewed by many to have been amongst the most original of the 20th century.

Henri Dutilleux's Les citations contains a quotation from Jehan Alain's music.

Maurice Duruflé wrote a musical tribute to Jehan Alain with his Prélude et fugue sur le nom d'A.L.A.I.N, Op. 7 for organ.

His studies in composition with Paul Dukas and Jean Roger-Ducasse won him the Prix des amis de l'orgue in 1936 for his Suite for Organ, Op. 48: Introduction, Variations, Scherzo and Choral.

His most famous work is Litanies, composed in 1937.

That work is prefaced with the text: "Quand l’âme chrétienne ne trouve plus de mots nouveaux dans la détresse pour implorer la miséricorde de Dieu, elle répète sans cesse la même invocation avec une foi véhémente. La raison atteint sa limite. Seule, la foi poursuit son ascension."

("When the Christian soul no longer finds new words in its distress to implore God's mercy, it repeats incessantly the same invocation with a vehement faith. Reason has reached its limits. Alone, faith pursues its ascension").

Deuils ("mourning"), the second of the Trois danses, is dedicated to Odile (Alain's deceased sister) as a "Funeral Dance to an Heroic Memory".

Always interested in mechanics, Alain was a skilled motorcyclist and became a dispatch rider in the Eighth Motorised Armour Division of the French Army.

The only known recording of his playing—a six-minute improvisation—was made in 1938 at that synagogue.

He studied the organ with Marcel Dupré, under whose direction he took first prize for Organ and Improvisation in 1939.

On 20 June 1940, he was assigned to reconnoiter the German advance on the eastern side of Saumur, and encountered a group of German soldiers at Le Petit-Puy.

Coming around a curve, and hearing the approaching tread of the Germans, he abandoned his motorcycle and engaged the adversary.

After using his machine gun to shoot several infantry soldiers who had ordered him to surrender, he fell mortally wounded.

He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery, and was provisionally buried at the place where he had died.

The JA Catalogue, drawn by Marie-Claire Alain in 2001, uses partially numbers which Jehan Alain had formerly used to better classify his manuscripts.

As the numbering of this catalogue is arbitrary, it is not a Catalogue of his works and the numbers shouldn't be used to designate the work titles.

In actual fact, during his lifetime, Jehan Alain had used some opus numbers.

Helga Schauerte-Maubouet: Jehan Alain, Mourir à trente ans, Sampzon, Delatour France, 2020; translated into English by Carolyn Shuster Fournier and Connie Glessner: Jehan Alain, Understanding His Musical Genius, Sampzon, Delatour France, 2022.