Michel Chapuis
Organist at Versailles and great exponent of baroque music
MICHEL CHAPUIS, who has died aged 87, was chapel organist at the Palace of Versailles from 1995 to 2010; he performed at most of the major Parisian churches, thrilling audiences with his clarity of interpretation and his remarkable improvisation.
Widely regarded as the most significant French exponent of Bach’s organ music, Chapuis recorded the complete oeuvre between 1966 and 1970. “Lines of counterpoint stand out as I’ve never heard before, and I was intrigued to read one admirer describe the almost jazz-like quality of his playing,” enthused Damian Thompson in The Telegraph, having discovered the set in a second-hand record shop in 2010.
Chapuis stood aloof from the romantic period, focusing almost exclusively on baroque music. As he explained in 1978: “I decided 15 years ago that I couldn’t do everything and decided to go in greater depth into the organ music of the 17th and 18th centuries.” He did, however, make an exception for Max Reger (1873-1916), whom he described as “a sort of 19th-century Bach”.
When pressed about how he handled requests to play music by Olivier Messiaen, his near contemporary and another great Parisian organist, Chapuis replied diplomatically: “I give the inquirer the name and address of one of my colleagues.”
Michel Chapuis was born in Dôle, near the Swiss border between Dijon and Besançon, on January 15 1930. At the age of eight he was trying out the organ in the Collégiale Notre-dame, the cathedral in Dôle, and by 12 was playing for Mass. “During the war, when many organists were imprisoned in Germany, they asked me to accompany at church,” he explained.
While rummaging in the college library he came across a treatise on the golden age of French organ music. It contained accounts by 17th-century masters of the organ of how their music should be played. From now on Chapuis would dedicate his life to organ music of the baroque era.
He studied with Émile Poillot and Édouard Souberbielle and played at Besançon Cathedral before entering the Paris Conservatoire under Marcel Dupré, where he took first prizes for organ playing and improvisation in 1951. While a student he played at the Church of Saint-germaindes-prés and made regular visits to Müller, an organ builder in the western suburbs of Paris, to learn the mechanics of the instrument.
In 1951 he became organist at the church of Saint Germain l’auxerrois, near the Louvre, and three years later took over at the flamboyantly Gothic Saint-nicolas-des-champs, where he remained until 1972. Meanwhile, in 1964 he was appointed honorary organist at Saint Séverin, where he revived the pre-revolution practice of having several organists to share the playing while he concentrated on restoring the classical instrument to its original grandeur.
This led to opportunities with other endangered organs and in 1967 he was appointed to a national committee overseeing the preservation of historical instruments. He also taught at the conservatories of Strasbourg (1956-79), Besançon (1979-86) and Paris (1986-95).
In Britain he appeared at the Festival Hall in January 1969, and in July 1977 visited the St Albans Organ Festival, where he was described as “a kindly, gentle, unassuming man with humorous eyes, whose modest manner masks [his] wide-ranging learning and superlative technical powers”.
Chapuis, who never tamed his wispy, straggling hair, insisted that neither his performances nor his recordings were to be regarded as definitive interpretations. “It is what I thought at the time, and one’s views change,” he told Gramophone magazine in 1978. “I have played the [Bach] Passacaglia a thousand times and always found something new I missed before.”
Michel Chapuis, born January 15 1930, died November 12 2017