Duruflé's success as a composer lies in the finesse with which he yoked objective craft and religious inspiration in a rarefied utterance unique in his day, in the process proving the consanguinity of ecclesiastical music and the French musical tradition. For a full understanding of the reception of his oeuvre, the two strains must be held in balance. Any effort to evaluate his work by drawing on one without the other does a disservice to the uniqueness that was his.

Decades of critics have described Duruflé's craft in countless ways. When Claude Chamfray told Duruflé in 1956, “We are accustomed to considering you as a symphoniste classique,” and asked him if the epithet was appropriate, Duruflé replied, “One cannot know himself. The critic is more capable of giving an opinion on this question than I am.” By 1980, however, he would agree with Norbert Dufourcq that the designation was appropriate, inasmuch as he had written preludes and fugues, variations, and toccatas, which nevertheless had romantic elements as well.

Strictly from the perspective of craft, Dufourcq wrote in 1977 that Duruflé's works are “considered and weighed with skill and conscientiousness; everything takes place with the supreme balance of one who possesses mastery; never anything too prominent, too harsh or too striking. Grandeur can know refinement, and refinement is always proof of taste.” A choir director at Notre-Dame put it this way in 1986: “[Duruflé] always knew how to retain something apollonian in his expression, a kind of relentless elegance without slackening or sloppiness, a dynamism, a rhythm that was striking but never over-excited.”

In 1957, the music historian Paul Huot-Pleuroux included Duruflé among the era's greatest symphonists and composers of opera, whose celebrated oratorios, masses, psalms, and motets were the glory of early twentieth-century French music. And like Honegger, Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt, and André Caplet, he wrote, Duruflé showed no disdain for the concert hall, despite his predilection for sacred music and music for the organ.