Maurice Duruflé

Maurice Duruflé was a church organist in Paris for most of the twentieth century, presiding at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont from 1929 until near the end of his life. Trained as a choirboy at Rouen cathedral, he absorbed Gregorian chant, the ancient flowing melodies of the Catholic liturgy, so deeply that nearly everything he wrote grows out of those lines.

He was a perfectionist to the point of paralysis, publishing barely more than a dozen works in a long life and revising them for decades. A serious car accident in 1975 left him largely confined to his apartment for his final years.

Almost everyone meets him through the Requiem, and that is the right door: chant melodies wrapped in warm colors, closer to consolation than to fear. It is one of the few pieces of its size he allowed into the world.