Ysaÿe & the Organ
Celebrating 100 years
The Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace Library holds a collection that once belonged to Jeanette Dincin Ysaÿe, the second wife of the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe. This collection includes a trove of unpublished arrangements for violin, piano, and organ.
On this page, learn about the history of these manuscripts, hear the first-ever recordings of these arrangements from the collection altogether, and explore the extended provenance of Ernest Chausson’s Poème, the centerpiece of the collection.
This page will be continually updated throughout April and May 2025. More details about the five versions of Chausson’s Poème and its philosophical implications will soon be included, as well as the information on the process of discovering, studying, and recording these arrangements.
Recording and hearing the arrangements together for the first time in 100 years.
This recording project, led by violinist Max Tan, brings to life the arrangements as a collection. No records exist of the arrangements being performed together in recent memory. The featured artists include pianist Marisa Gupta and organist Chris Yuejian Chen.
These recordings were made in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in upstate New York and was funded by a combination of private donations and a grant from the Richard French Fund awarded via The Juilliard School.
Released on Centaur Records, the recordings were produced and mastered by Marlan Barry with digital editing by Ian Streidter.
Unpublished Manuscripts
In 1925, Eugène Ysaÿe arranged three works for the violin repertoire for violin, piano, and organ.
This unusual instrumentation is almost unheard of in the chamber music literature. The manuscripts of these arrangements, which remain unpublished today, currently reside in the Special Collections of The Juilliard School.
Tomaso Antonio Vitali: Chaconne in G minor
Ysaÿe’s arrangement of this work for violin and organ reorganizes some variations in an adventurous and unfamiliar structure for this popular violin work.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major
Ysaÿe’s arrangement of this work for violin, piano, and organ features a romantic and robust re-orchestration of the piano part and an atmospheric and colorful approach to the organ part. Notably, the last movement features a unison amongst all three instruments in a delightful and charming reprise of the main themes.
Ernest Chausson: Poème, Op. 25
This work symbolizes a deep friendship and artistic collaboration between the French composer Ernest Chausson and Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Although Ysaÿe initially requested a violin concerto from Chausson, the idea was rejected in favor of a freer musical structure. This arrangement, dated 1925 in Ysaÿe’s hand, was conceived over a quarter-century after Chausson’s death. It is the fifth version in a linear evolutionary progression and is the clear centerpiece of this collection of arrangements.
Shown below are some of the source materials for the arrangements: the title of Chausson’s Poème and the first page of the score for Ysaÿe’s arrangement of Vitali’s Chaconne. The scores are marked in Ysaÿe’s hand.
Source materials for Ysaÿe’s music; The Jeannette Dincin Ysaÿe Papers at The Juilliard School
Called the “Tsar of the Violin” by Nathan Milstein, Eugène Ysaÿe left an immeasurable legacy on modern violin playing.
Ysaÿe’s influence continues to be felt to this day through the tenets of modern violin playing and the institutions that carry on his artistic ideals. These include the Queen Elisabeth competition and the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. Not only was Ysaÿe a consummate artist who was prolific as performer, conductor, pedagogue, Ysaÿe was the dedicatee of many important violin works.
“To have to one’s credit the dedication of works like the Chausson Poème and the César Franck Sonata – can there be greater proof of the impact of Ysaÿe’s interpretive genius on his creative contemporaries? And to have been entrusted by Debussy with the first performance of his Quartet is not a negligible episode in any interpreter’s life, even an Ysaÿe’s.”
Ysaÿe’s Op. 27, a collection of six solo violin sonatas inspired by the Six Sonatas and Partitas of solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, are amongst his most well-known works. The sources of these works, much like the distribution of his belongings after his death, were split between collections under the care of institutions in Belgium and in the United States.
Of note, The Royal Conservatory of Brussels houses the Lavergne manuscript, a notable source for the solo sonatas in which the French violinist Philippe Graffin discovered an unknown version of the sixth solo sonata recently published by Schott Edition. The largest collection of Ysaÿe papers in the United States currently belongs to The Juilliard School; most of its manuscripts were acquired via Louis Persinger, one of Ysaÿe’s pupils. A donation and acquisition in the 1990s of Jeannette Dincin Ysaÿe’s collection enriched Juilliard’s Ysaÿe holdings with a number of notable manuscripts of pedagogical and compositional value. Other items in this collection include telegrams, letters, postcards, photos, contact books, and more. Correspondences in this collection also feature many missives from Queen Elisabeth who was a violin pupil of Ysaÿe as well as notable musicians of the 20th century.
One of the boxes featuring correspondences in the Jeannette Dincin Ysaÿe collection.
Studies, articles and press about the manuscripts
These unpublished arrangements, particularly that of Chausson’s Poème, has long existed in the consciousness of academia related to Ysaÿe, Chausson, and the circle of Franco-Belgian musicians surrounding these two musicians.
The organ trio arrangement of Chausson’s Poème is often referenced, but it was not studied until 2020 when Max Tan engraved and produced the first set of performance parts to study the arrangements under the guidance of Michael Musgrave. Further engravings were produced and edited by Christian-Frederic Bloquert. The initial reading of the Chausson Poème arrangement involved Max Tan, pianist Jung-A Bang, and organist Chris Yuejian Chen.
In November 2020, Max Tan gave a presentation on Juilliard’s Doctoral Forum series, tracing a clear evolutionary progression through the five versions of Chausson’s Poème.
In May 2024, Max Tan submitted his dissertation on the subject, titled The Evolving Score of Chausson’s Poème: A Modern Expansion of the Musical Work Concept and Werktreue. Physical copies are available in Juilliard’s Reference Room and the Music Department of the Royal Library of Belgium.
In September 2024, Scala Arts Publishers released Juilliard School Library Manuscripts & Other Treasures by and for Performers. Two articles are dedicated to Ysaÿe scholarship. One article is by Ray Iwazumi. The other article, by Max Tan, describes the significance of these arrangements in how they expand our understanding of what musical notation can encode. Through the arrangement of Chausson’s Poème, Ysaÿe pays tribute to his dear friend and writes himself—his way of playing and his grand personality—into the music.
Watch the first reading and recording of Ysaÿe’s organ trio arrangement of Chausson’s Poème from June 2020.
The Five Versions of Chausson’s Poème : Sources
Discussions about the origins of Chausson’s Poème as a musical work are generally concerned with the long compositional gestation period prior to its premiere in 1896. However, the work evolves long after receiving its premiere performance. Furthermore, Ysaÿe’s influence affects the many subsequent versions of the work. Here’s a look at the difference sources. This is not an exhaustive list, but detail the most important sources of use in performances of the different versions.
Ysaÿe’s Arrangements as Notated Performance Instances
In his writings from 1897, Ysaÿe emphasizes the capacity of scores to encode how an artist would have played or approached an interpretive or technical problem, using the example of Paganini.
“Paganini left us a much better portrayal of himself in his Caprices than the finest painter on earth could have produced and that the nature of his work as an interpreter comes through to anyone reading his compositions, which, because of his curious and highly personal style of writing, intended entirely for his own use, throw a good deal of light on his genius and help to elucidate certain technical problems.”
Interpretation requires the discernment of the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of a composer’s notation. Notation can simultaneously prescribe a performer’s choreography and describe the audible result. For instance, a notated chord can simultaneously prescribe a performer to play all the notes at the same time and describe that a chord should be heard.
In the following example from Ysaÿe’s arrangement (referred to as Version V), it is clear that both the pianist and organist should each play the notes of their chords at the same time. However, if the pianist and organist truly pressed the keys at the same time, the sounds produced would not sound simultaneously as the organ sound would be slightly delayed. The notation of the score not only prescribes the choreography of each instrumentalist’s performance of the chords but suggests that the piano and organ should simultaneously; successful performance of this passage requires the pianist and organist to coordinate in an off-set way. This is a fairly straightforward example of interpretive decisions on the part of the performer.
All versions of Chausson’s Poème were undoubtedly influenced by Ysaÿe. Discrepancies in the solo violin part across the different versions illustrate the dichotomy of notation’s dual nature. The manuscripts in the Jeannette Dincin Ysaÿe Collection at Juilliard are also a marvelous study in the art of notation.
In the next update at the end of April, comparisons of changes in the violin part across different version sources will be discussed.
Timeline: Important events associated with the manuscripts and arrangements
The history of the manuscripts is closely related to the evolutionary progression of Chausson’s Poème.
Most provenance stories of musical works end with its first performance or publication. With Chausson’s Poème, there are five distinct versions of the work, the fifth of which is Ysaÿe’s arrangement for violin, piano, and organ.