These 79 chorales for organ, based on the melodies of 79 chorales used by J.S. Bach in his chorale preludes, were composed in 1931. Dupré wrote them (mostly on the beach during a family vacation) for a friend who owned a small household organ and wanted to learn to play Bach chorales, but wasn't yet up to the challenge. They range from simple harmonizations to works with more active (and more chromatic) accompanying voices that approach the complexities of their models, and for an aspiring organist they are one-of-a-kind teaching pieces. Most are in four parts, with the chorale in the soprano or tenor voice; in a few, it is in the bass and is played by the pedals. Several have simple canonic or fugal treatments. Each chorale fills one page of printed music, and some are burnished with chromatic touches that mark them as characteristic works of their composer. Dupré seemed ambivalent about the value of these works. Several times he stated he hadn't intended them for public performance, but he occasionally included them in concerts and even recorded three of them on a small organ of his own in 1934. They are attractive on their own and are of immense interest for the way they make manifest the suffusing presence of J.S. Bach in musical pedagogy. Anyone trying to become a self-taught organist, of course, would do well to lay hands on a copy of these. A complete performance of all 79 chorales will fit on a single CD.

© James Manheim, All Music Guide