“Build on Those Immutable Foundations”

In 1930, Albert Roussel forecasted a bright future for d'Indy's Second Symphony, composed in 1902–3. A successful symphonist in his own right, he predicted it would join the “few rare works whose value will only benefit from the patina of time.” Roussel had good reason to be optimistic. The Lamoureux Orchestra had premiered the symphony in 1904 to resounding success, and it immediately entered the Parisian repertory. Although it never attained the popularity of the Mountain Symphony, it continued to appear regularly on concert programs in Roussel's day in France and abroad. Superlatives swirled in period writing. Early on, the insightful and exacting Paul Dukas proclaimed the work a crown jewel of contemporary music. Dukas's friendship with d'Indy—and the fact that the composer had dedicated the symphony to him—likely colored his appraisal, but other, less personally invested writers reached similar judgments. Pierre Lalo, the son of Édouard Lalo and the well-established and authoritative critic for Le Temps, considered the finale “one of the finest symphonic movements written since Beethoven, perhaps the finest.” The much younger and more progressive musicologist-critic Michel Dimitry Calvocoressi, an advocate for Russian music and an emerging champion of Ravel, deemed the symphony the height of d'Indy's achievements. In a memorial appearing in the Mercure de France, René Dumesnil ventured that “even if d'Indy had written nothing but these symphonies [the Mountain and the Second], he would remain in the front rank of the French school”.