Jean Guillou

Jean Guillou ranked among Europe's foremost and most admired organists, yet only the surge in compact disc production during the late 1980s elevated him to the status of a widely recognized recording artist. He enrolled at the Paris Conservatory in 1945, where his studies in keyboard and composition included instruction from Marcel Dupré, Olivier Messiaen, and Maurice Duruflé. At twenty-three he joined the faculty of the Intituto de Alta Cultura in Lisbon in 1953. Five years later Guillou relocated to West Berlin, building a reputation as a recitalist while issuing his earliest original scores for solo organ and chamber groups. Appointed organist at the Church of St. Eustache in Paris in 1963, he remained in that post until 2015 and subsequently presented concerts throughout Eastern Europe, Japan, and the United States. His programs earned acclaim for their inventiveness and humor as he freely juxtaposed interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach and César Franck with his transcriptions of non-keyboard pieces by composers such as Franz Josef Haydn and with his own compositions. Critics highlighted the theatricality and virtuosic display of these appearances, which cast him as a flamboyant figure on the instrument.

In his creative work Guillou produced many scores that investigate the timbres of the organ combined with other forces, among them the cello in Fantasie Concertante and the soprano in Andromeda, which draws on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also composed piano concertos—an instrument he mastered though it brought him less renown—along with the oratorio The Last Judgment (1965), the symphonic Judith-Symphonie (1971) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, and Hypérion (1987) for organ and orchestra. In addition he championed the principal keyboard compositions of Julius Reubke, the short-lived pupil of Franz Liszt. Guillou published studies on organ technique and on the instrument’s history and construction, and he gained recognition throughout the profession as an authoritative scholar who led international master classes in Zurich beginning in 1970.

His extensive discography garnered praise on several continents. For Philips he captured Alice au pays de l'orgue, a sonic voyage prompted by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the Fantaisie Concertante. He further recorded extensively for the audiophile Dorian label, releasing accounts of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as his own organ transcriptions of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; the last of these achieved particular success amid the compact disc expansion of the late 1980s, owing both to the piece’s inherent appeal and to its stature as a serious counterpart to rock organist Keith Emerson’s Moog-synthesizer version issued two decades earlier. That period coincided with Guillou’s traversal of Bach’s complete solo organ works, presented in observance of the composer’s tercentenary. Although he stepped down from teaching in 2005, he maintained an active schedule of composition, performance, and recording for another ten years until his death in Paris in early 2019.