The series of great pédalier and organ works constituting the major utterances of Alkan's creative sunset begin, in characteristic fashion, with the imposing Benedictus, Op. 54, and the eight exquisite Petits préludes, a mere page each, traversing the ancient modes of plainchant, both issued in 1859—the latter, without opus number, by Heugel as part of a series of religious pieces. Sketched with elegant simplicity—rudimentary imitation, unisons, thirds, triads, open sixths, no pedal parts—the Préludes nevertheless possess the pith of aphorisms, affording glimpses of another world. If it is not the world of early Christianity suggested by the title's reference to plainchant (for the Monks of Solesmes would not rescue the Gregorian corpus from corruption until nearly a quarter of a century later), Alkan nevertheless evokes a legendary timelessness akin to his "genre gothique," for instance, No. 15 of the Préludes (25), or the Laus Deo of the Esquisses. Music in the fashionable churches of Alkan's day was often an extension of the opera, Rossini's Stabat Mater furnishing a particularly egregious example. The latter's Petite Messe solenelle Alkan conceded to be "the work of a genius, but a genius called Rossini: from the religious point of view, Vulgo—Anti-Christ." Meanwhile, the taste for a less sanguine, more ethereal, religious expression in music was decidedly recherché and would remain so until the end of Alkan's life, long after his last creative phase had passed, when publication of the Solesmesians' first volume of restored chant in 1883, with its attendant controversy, propelled it into vogue, signaled by the piecemeal encomium to "the austere majesty of plainsong in its stark nudity" in J.-K. Huysmans' vastly influential novel À Rebours, issued the following year—"Compared with this magnificent chant, created by the genius of the Church, as impersonal and anonymous as the organ itself, whose inventor is unknown, all other religious music struck him as profane." It was not Alkan's intention, however, to write Gregorian pastiche, but to give unique voice to religious expression, and in that he succeeded superbly. The first of these tiny evocations is a prolonged sigh, the second a wistfully undulating prayer, the third a melodic oddment of mystical cast sparely harmonized. The fourth Prélude is a startlingly angry surging and knocking, the fifth a beguiling pastoral. The sixth essays a pastoral melancholy, the seventh a festive summons, and the eighth an oddly inconclusive joyousness. In these pieces Alkan is at his closest to the Franck of the late harmonium pieces of L'organiste.

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