Gigout's best-known creation, which turns up as a frequent encore at organ recitals.
Eugène Gigout (March 1844 – December 1925) was a French organist and a composer. Gigout was born in Nancy and died in Paris. A pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns, he served as the organist of the French capital's Saint-Augustin Church for 62 years. He became widely known as a teacher and his output as a composer was considerable. Renowned as an expert improviser, he also founded his own music school. Other notable pieces by Gigout are is Grand Choeur Dialogué (1881), and Marche Religieuse. When Gigout published his 6 Pièces d’Rogue in 1881, the Grand Choeur Dialogue served as a finale in the French Romantic style by dint of its sheer grandiosity. Originally written entirely with a G-major key signature, Grand Choeur Dialogué’s consistent monothematic development of a simple four-bar melody, moving in and out of a variety of key centres, lasts a little over 100 bars. Nonetheless, it breaks down into three fairly equal parts. The first maintains an antiphonal nature (back and forth from one “chorus” to another) with four-square regularity, while the second part develops more imitatively and canonically without the antiphonal effect. The final part brings back some of the regularity and antiphonal nature, but never quite establishes itself as a full recapitulation.
