Sunday's postlude will features French composer Jehan Alain's Litanies, a work dated 15 August 1937.  This work, especially appropriate for Passiontide, is introduced by the following statement by the composer:

When the Christian soul is in distress and can find no new words to implore God's mercy, it repeats the same invocation with vehement faith.  Reason has attained its limit.  Faith alone propels its ascent.

The invocation, the theme of the work, is stated at its beginning and undergoes various treatments as the work progresses.  Through the course of the Litanies, one may alternately hear the Christian soul pleading for God's mercy; attempting to strike a bargain with God; flatly demanding God's mercy; or screaming.  Litanies was written in a period of the young composer's life during which he was under strong influences of various origins:  in 1935 he had married Madeleine Payan over the objections of his family; he subsequently moved his family to Le Pecq, a neighboring town to St. Germain-en-Laye, a westerly suburb of Paris and his hometown; and, in order to secure a living for his family, he was simultaneously organist of Maison-Lafitte and Temple Israélite de la rue Notre Dame du Nazareth in Paris and taught students at the Ecole libre Saint-Erembert.  These appointments in Paris and his home in Le Pecq meant that Alain was often traveling by train, during which travel he composed.  One can hear train influences in the Litanies: in alternating triads which conjure the rhythm of a train car traveling over tracks, but most notably near the end of the piece where Alain writes a sustained a-minor chord which then slides down a half-step to an Ab-major chord, yielding a quasi-Doppler effect, as if a train were passing.  The work ends with an utterly Angst-ridden shriek, an eleven-note chord in the manuals with the pedal providing another two notes, played on the full resources of the instrument.  Jehan Alain died in defense of France at the Battle of Saumur on 20 June 1940, three days after Marshal Pétain declared the end of resistance to advancing National Socialist German forces.