In the Wind. . . .

John Bishop

Music in terrible times

 

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

—Leonard Bernstein

 

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia under the code name Operation Barbarossa, a plan that led to the Siege of Leningrad, the horrific isolation of a city of three million people. After systematically closing access routes to the city during the summer, the German army closed the last road into Leningrad on September 8, and during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Leningrad (then known as St. Petersburg) in 1906 and established himself as an outspoken, provocative artist. In 1936, Joseph Stalin stormed out of the Bolshoi Theater after the third act of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The next morning, the state newspaper, Pravda, wrote that Shostakovich was “playing a game” that “may end very badly.”¹

Shostakovich wrote the first two movements of his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as the siege began. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia in October 1941, after all roads were closed, during a period when 650,000 civilians were evacuated, mostly by boat across Lake Ladoga or by ice road across the lake as winter set in. There, he completed the symphony on December 27, 1941, dedicating it to the city of Leningrad. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater in Kuibyshev performed the premiere on March 5, 1942. Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere in a radio broadcast on July 19.

The people of Leningrad first heard “their” symphony on August 9, 1942. The score and parts were flown into the city by a pilot, skimming above the surface of Lake Ladoga to avoid detection. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, and there were only 15 players remaining in the orchestra of the city’s radio station, so the ensemble was filled out by musicians who were serving as active soldiers in the Russian army, released by their commanders for the occasion. 

I hadn’t thought much about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony until last week when Wendy and I heard it performed in Carnegie Hall by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Six minutes into the opening Allegretto, when the muffled snare drum started a relentless ostinato and pizzicato violins introduced the seductive melody, I was on the edge of my seat. The oboe repeated the melody, echoed phrase by phrase by the clarinet, and the haunting tune repeated with ever increasing orchestration, ever more complex harmonizations, and ever expanding, even maniacal intensity until the orchestra reached a towering climax with all the thundering guns of the percussion section, and an astonishing closing statement of the theme by the bass brass, as powerful in that mighty orchestra as all the diaphonic fog horns the Coast Guard could muster from Maine to North Carolina.

We were dressed for a night at the symphony and seated on red velvet chairs in a box in the first balcony. The heat was on, the hall was comfortable, the lighting was perfect, and the legendary acoustics of Carnegie Hall brought every nuance of the complex score to every ear in the house. Each musician on the stage was playing a first-class instrument in perfect condition, and each was supported by a comfortable salary and pension plan. You could just tell that they had all practiced earlier in the day. And by the way, that was the first time I heard the BSO’s new conductor, Andris Nelsons. Wow! They should keep him.

It takes about 75 minutes to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The program book listed a huge orchestra, with a phalanx of percussion, and almost as a footnote, “additional brass group (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones).” Those bad boys and girls were seated in a long row, stage right, with the traditional brass section (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba) seated stage left.

That first performance in Leningrad must have been a very different experience. If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

The performance was broadcast by radio, and over loudspeakers in public places. I bet that not one member of that audience was sitting on red velvet. I wonder if there’s a Syrian refugee at work on the score of the Aleppo Symphony.

 

A cathedral in ruins

On November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) dropped more than 36,000 bombs on the city of Coventry in Great Britain, killing more than 1,400 people. Hundreds of structures were destroyed, including St. Michael’s Cathedral. Besides the human loss and suffering, think of the cultural and historical loss. How many works of art, how many rare books, how many pipe organs were destroyed during that attack?

I was seven days old when Queen Elizabeth II laid the cornerstone for the new Coventry Cathedral on March 23, 1956, and the controversial contemporary structure was consecrated on May 25, 1962. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a choral work for that occasion, with freedom to choose topic and content. Britten’s War Requiem comprises a combination of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems of the British poet, Wilfred Owen, who at the age of 25 was killed in action in the British army during World War I, seven days before the Armistice of 1918.

War Requiem is dedicated to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerly, David Gill, and Michael Halliday, all close friends of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who were killed during World War II. Like Shostakovich’s Seventh, War Requiem is scored for a huge force of musicians, including full orchestra, chamber orchestra, four-part chorus, soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, a boy choir (at a distance) accompanied by a chamber organ or harmonium, and grand organ. It’s about five minutes longer than Shostakovich’s Seventh, and it rings with the deepest emotions.

Wilfred Owen became well known as a war poet posthumously. He was commander of a rifle brigade, and the poems that Britten chose to include in War Requiem were written in the field. Imagine the young man on a bedroll in a military camp, writing Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action:

 

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great Gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;

Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse

Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!

Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse.

Spend our resentment, cannon, yea disperse

Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison

Must wither innocent of enmity,

Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,

Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.

But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul.

I had to look up some of the words. In English, there are many words for curse.

 

He plays like a German.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) is one of the towering figures of the pipe organ. He was born into a family of organbuilders in Lyon, France, and his earliest studies were with his father François-Charles, a church organist. The great French organbuilder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, a friend of the Widor family, encouraged young Charles-Marie to go to Belgium to study with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens at the Royal Brussels Conservatoire.

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–1869) was a prominent French organist, known for his many compositions in “popular” style. I have enjoyed playing his music, especially programming the famous Sorties as rollicking larks, foils to more serious, meaty music. Cavaillé-Coll advocated Lefébure-Wély, arranging for him to play the dedication recitals of many of his prominent organs. It’s no accident that he was installed as organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in 1863, home to Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental magnum opus completed in 1860. But by that time, the young Widor was in Cavaillé-Coll’s sights as a young genius who represented the future of serious organ playing and composition, and Cavaillé-Coll apparently grew tired of Lefébure-Wély’s shallower antics, feeling that his huge and sophisticated organ was deserving of a more serious musician. Legend has it that Cavaillé-Coll made life miserable for Lefébure-Wély, even hinting that contributed to his death.

In the late 1860s, Paris was in a state of political tension as Prussia was on a tear toward German unification, and the French Empire of Napoleon III anticipated and feared that if the Prussians succeeded, the balance of power in Europe would be upset. Sure enough, on July 16, 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and three days later, the Germans invaded France.

With that political climate as background, Cavaillé-Coll championed the 26-year-old Widor to the rector at Saint-Sulpice, but Parisian organists, many of whom must have wanted a crack at the plum position, protested that Widor “plays like a German.”² That explains why the rector offered Widor a temporary position, feeling the weight of Cavaillé-Coll’s recommendation, but not making a full commitment. Widor started his legendary tenure in a France occupied by Germany. Marcel Dupré, in his memoir Recollections, shares Widor’s telling of presenting himself at the rectory when the year was up, hoping for an upgrade in his status. The rector simply wished him “Happy New Year,” so Widor assumed he should just keep playing—64 years as temporary organist!

Marcel Dupré succeeded Widor as organist at Saint-Sulpice in 1934. German troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, starting the occupation that lasted until 1944. In his memoir, Dupré wrote that as the occupation began, while many Parisians were fleeing the city, he and his wife Jeanne stayed at their home in Meudon, about 6½ miles from Paris. The city was deserted and transportation was stopped. For the first two Sundays, Marcel and Jeanne Dupré walked together back and forth to Saint-Sulpice: “Our fatigue was nothing compared to the joy we felt when we reached the organ, and I know that the parishioners still remaining in Paris found comfort when they heard it.”

A few days into the occupation, German officers visited Dupré’s home in Meudon, where there was a clear view of the entire city. The Germans intended to install anti-aircraft guns on the roof of Dupré’s salle d’orgue. When they saw the hall’s interior, they thought it was a chapel, but Jeanne Dupré told them that a musician worked in that room. The Germans reconsidered, and occupied the roof of the house next door, evicting the woman who lived there.³

 

A cold night at Stalag VIIIA

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a soldier in the French army during the German invasion of 1940 when he was captured and taken to a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, near the modern border between Germany and Poland. Fellow prisoners included the clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier, which explains the unusual instrumentation of Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which Messiaen wrote after his arrival at Stalag VIIIA. Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic guard, provided Messiaen with paper and pencil.

The premiere of the quartet was presented on January 15, 1941, in an unheated space in Barracks 27, using instruments that Brüll helped procure. The performance was announced with a flyer bearing an official stamp, “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft” (approved). There was an audience of about 400 prisoners, with German officers sitting in the front row.⁴

Messiaen’s deep Catholic faith was at the heart of the composition. In the preface to the score, he quoted from the Book of Revelations, Chapter 10:

 

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire . . . and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth. . . . And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. . . .

 

The opening movement is titled Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). In the preface, Messiaen described the movement:

 

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane, and you have the harmonious silence of heaven.

Imagine the mix of emotions of prisoners of war, playing that new music on beat-up instruments in a frigid prison room, with their captors in the audience shivering among the other prisoners, the throng listening to music expressing the sadness, the rage, the pathos of war.

 

Just another gig

Have you ever felt that a gig was a nuisance? “Do I really have to play that wedding on Saturday or grind out another Sunday in the heart of Pentecost?” Is your phone sitting on the console on “silent” while you’re playing a service? Have you ever sent a text from the bench during a sermon? When I receive a text from an organist at 10:42 on a Sunday morning, letting me know that the swell shutters are squeaking, I know that his eyes are not on the road, and that his heart is not in church. 

I keep two artifacts in the top drawer of my bureau in our bedroom in Maine. One is a note I received 25 years ago from a soon-to-be bride. I had met with her and her fiancé a few evenings earlier to help them choose the music for their wedding. It’s a simple drugstore thank-you card, and the handwriting is childish (the transcription is verbatim):

 

Mr. Bishop, we wanted to thank you for such a nice night, we had picking out our music. You were so very nice, the way you helped us, pick out what we wanted. I’am sure our wedding day will sound beautiful, thank you again for you kindness. Steve and Ruth.

Maybe Steve and Ruth’s wedding was another go-round of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Did I think it was just another gig I had to finish? Doesn’t matter. It was important to them.

Music matters. Music is important. A bride and groom and a war-torn city have something in common. They can express themselves through music. If you think you’re a vendor providing music, standing in line for a check with limo drivers, florists, and caterers, you’re missing something. Anyone can wrap bacon around a scallop. You know how to play the organ. You’re providing a sacred art. It matters to people. You’re their voice.

So pretty

The second artifact in that bureau drawer is my draft card, dated April 15, 1974. The draft had ended in 1973, but the Selective Service issued numbers to all American men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended. I had to report to Local Board No. 108 in the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (There’s a McDonald’s in that storefront now.)

In 1968, while war was raging in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Leonard Bernstein wrote the song, So Pretty, with lyrics by Comden and Green for a fundraiser for Broadway for Peace, where it was premiered by Barbra Streisand, with Bernstein at the piano. A child is learning in school about a far-away place, wondering why the pretty people are dying. The teacher replies, “. . . they must die for peace. . . .”⁵ ν

Notes

1. Book review: “Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,” The Washington Post, Peter Finn, October 3, 2014, quoting from the book by Brian Moynahan.

2. That story was told to me by Daniel Roth, current organist at St. Sulpice, as we walked together up Park Avenue in New York after he played a recital at the Church of the Resurrection. 

3. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, page 107, Belwin-Mills, 1972.

4. Alex Ross, “Revelations: The Story behind Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time,’” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.

5. You can read the lyrics of So Pretty here: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=7245&lang=en, and hear Deborah Voight singing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYlwwRmv8c.

John Bishop

The invincible da Vinci

The other night I was watching a documentary about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, a time when the arts and sciences were flourishing. His contemporary, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), was studying the motions of celestial bodies and developing his theory of heliocentric cosmology, displacing the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, and proving that a system of planets including the earth rotates around the sun. Physician Richard Bartlot (1471–1557) was working hard to understand the functions of the human body. Another contemporary was Michelangelo (1475–1564), whose genius with the visual arts in both painting and sculpture dazzles us more than 500 years later. 

Leonardo was fascinated by flight, and made hundreds of drawings of the wings of birds in various positions, theorizing about how a bird could alter the shape of its wings to affect the direction of its flight. He noticed that soaring birds used spiraling updrafts of air to ascend effortlessly, and how they braked to slow for landing. I’m in an airplane as I write, and can’t help but associate the wing flaps with the drawings I saw on television.

Leonardo wondered if it would be possible for humans to fly, and imagined and sketched numerous designs of flying machines. The documentary tells of a group of aeronautical scientists in England building a glider according to one of those designs. It was a single fixed wing about 30 feet across with fabric stretched over a wooden frame weighing about 90 pounds. When it was finished, they tested it first by mounting it on the back of a pickup truck and covering it with sensors. As the truck drove forward, a computer recorded everything that was going on, and the team deduced that the glider developed enough lift to fly in air that was moving around 20 miles per hour.  

A pilot skilled at parasailing was engaged to try to fly the thing. Because the glider had no controls for direction or altitude, the team attached ropes to front and back and to each wingtip, and on a windy hilltop off she went. The first two tries allowed the pilot to get a sense of how it handled, and on the third try she went up about ten feet and flew as far as her team could run before they lost control. She flew a little farther each time, eventually getting up as high as 30 feet and flying forward for a couple hundred yards. It was fascinating to see that a design conceived 500 years ago was so effective.

The film discussed Leonardo’s grasp of human anatomy. His drawings of muscles and tendons in human arms, hands, and faces bore direct relationships to the forms of those body parts in Leonardo’s most famous painting, Mona Lisa.  

Perhaps most impressive was Leonardo’s study of the human heart. He obviously did some very gruesome experimentation to inform his drawings, and he documented how he deduced the heart’s valves functioned, even determining that the valves cause blood to form vortexes or eddies that add to the quality of blood flow. A modern heart surgeon compared Leonardo’s studies with X-rays and scans that prove their accuracy. I was amazed to see how well those sixteenth-century studies stood up to modern scrutiny. 

 

From one organ to another

While Leonardo was quietly slicing up human hearts, the pipe organ was being developed into the most complex machine on the planet. Simple flutes had been made from grass and canes for centuries—the panpipe grew common in the sixth century BC. I wonder who was first to think of making a flute out of metal, and forming a tone-producing mouth using a horizontal languid at the connection between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator?

In 256 BC, a Greek physicist named Ctesibius created a musical instrument called the Hydraulis, which had mounted flutes similar to organ pipes, a wind system that used the weight of water to create and regulate pressure, and a keyboard and mechanical action that operated valves to open those pipes. All this was 1,500 years before Leonardo was wondering about flight.

I was a young teenager when I was introduced to the unique and lovely organ in the Cathedral-Fortress in Sion, Switzerland through E. Power Biggs’s recording, The Historic Organs of Switzerland. At the time of that recording, it was widely thought that the organ was built in 1390. There is some modern research suggesting that it was more like 1430, but I wouldn’t argue about a 40-year difference—it’s a mighty old organ, and it’s perfectly recognizable and playable. There’s a nice video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiyy7AtMvis. It’s narrated in Dutch, but even if you don’t understand the language, you can see and hear this remarkable instrument.

I love recognizing the pipe organ as such an ancient art form, stopping to reflect on what life was like in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. Think of the state of public water supplies and sanitation, personal health and hygiene, transportation and commerce. If you’ve ever visited a modern organbuilding workshop, you have an idea of the complexity and precision necessary to make a monumental musical instrument function. Think of the effort and ingenuity involved in building a pipe organ in 1450, when there were no cordless drills, laser-sharpened blades, or electric lights. Those early organbuilders harvested trees and milled lumber by hand, hauled it to the workshop on oxcarts, cast metal and soldered seams, fashioned parts for mechanical actions, skinned animals and tanned leather, all to make music.

 

Anchors aweigh¹

We can compare that effort to shipbuilding. We all have pictures of Christopher Columbus’s little armada, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in our minds’ eyes. The names roll off our tongues like “I before E, except after C, or when sounding like ‘A’ as in neighbor or weigh.” The largest of those ships, Santa Maria, was about 60 feet long on deck with a 41-foot keel, about 18 feet wide, and weighed about 100 tons, smaller than many modern personal pleasure yachts. While we might sail in a 60-foot sailboat on a sunny afternoon with six or eight people on board, the Santa Maria had a documented crew of 40. The reason that a lavatory on a boat is called “The Head,” is because in those early sailing ships, the crew’s sanitation facility was to hang over the side at the head of the ship.

Mechanically, Santa Maria had three masts and a bowsprit, and five spars bearing five sails. Each sail would have had about eight control lines (halyard, sheets, downhauls, etc.) and many of the lines ran through blocks (multi-wheeled pulleys) for increased leverage. Complete the catalogue with a rudder for steering, a wheel with related lines and pulleys, and a capstan (winch) for mechanical advantage for hoisting sails and anchors, and we can estimate that Santa Maria had a couple hundred moving parts. The simplest two-manual organ of the same era, with 45- or 49-note keyboards, would have some four or five hundred moving parts, including keys, trackers, squares, rollers, and valves. It’s amazing to me that such a complex machine would be devised and built for the purpose of making music in a time when most machinery was so very primitive.

Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing, producing the Mazarin Bible about 40 years before Columbus’s great adventure. His printing press had only three or four moving parts—but that was one of the greatest advances in the history of communication. Without Gutenberg, we wouldn’t have e-mail. 

 

That ingenious business²

Let’s jump ahead 300 years. By the 1860s, science and technology had leapt forward exponentially. During that decade, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Transatlantic Cable were completed, and Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. And Aristide Cavaillé-Coll built the grand organ at Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris with 102 stops, five manuals, and a fantastic array of pneumatic registration devices.  

Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece at Saint-Sulpice must be one of, if not the most influential organs in existence. The bewildering array of levers and knobs gave those organists unprecedented control over the instrument, and the music written by Widor and Dupré, inspired by the sounds and mechanical assets of the Cavaillé-Coll organ, form a centerpiece of the long history of organ music. And like the ancient organ in Sion, the instrument at Saint-Sulpice is still in regular use, not as an antique curiosity, but as the church’s main instrument that is played every Sunday for Mass, and for countless concerts and recordings. 

Forty years later in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), Ernest Skinner was at work on a new revolution. Starting around 1890, a number of American organ companies were experimenting with pneumatic and then electric organ actions, but none was more creative or prolific than Mr. Skinner. As an employee and later factory superintendent of the Hutchings Organ Company, and later in the company that bore his name, Mr. Skinner invented and produced the Pitman windchest, the first electro-pneumatic organ action in which the stop action functioned as quickly as the keyboard action. That simple fact, which when combined with Skinner’s fabulous electro-pneumatic combination action, was as influential to organists as Cavaillé-Coll’s fantastic pneumatic and mechanical console appliances, because for the first time, dozens of stops could be turned on or off simultaneously as quickly as an organist could move from one key to the next. And those actions operated instantly; there was no mechanical noise.

 

A combination innovation

As I mention Mr. Skinner’s combination actions, I repeat a theory that I have proposed a number of times. Those machines, built in Boston around 1905, allowed the organist to select any combination of stops and set it in a binary memory, ready to be recalled at the touch of a button. Decades earlier there were water-powered looms that could be programmed to weave intricate patterns using blocks of wood with patterns of holes, the forerunners of the computer punch cards that people my age used to register for college classes. But it’s my theory that Mr. Skinner’s combination actions were the first industrially produced, commercially available, user-programmable binary computers—the first, ever.

I’ve had a number of opportunities to propose my theory to scientists outside the organ world, and have not heard any contradicting theories. If any of you out there in Diapason land know anyone who is expert in the history of computers, I’d be grateful if you’d pose this theory to them and let me know what you learn.

As electro-pneumatic actions allowed organists unprecedented control over their instruments, so they allowed instruments to be larger than ever before. In 1865, 40 or 50 stops made a very large organ. By 1920, such an organ had become commonplace. It was usual for a large church to commission an organ with four manuals, many dozens of ranks of pipes, and components of the organ in multiple locations around the church. Imagine yourself as the first to play an instrument with an Antiphonal division—how your mind would race with ideas of how to exploit it.

If we compare pipe organs that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Copernicus might have known, those that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Claude Monet heard, and those of the time of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, what milestones of development should we recognize? What innovations brought our instrument from the panpipe to Walt Disney Hall?

1. Ctesibius’s Hydraulis was the first huge leap, introducing mechanically produced wind pressure, mechanical action, and a keyboard for the first time, as far as we know.

2. Adding a second set of pipes foreshadowed the complexity of the modern organ. There would have been no stop action—two pipes played simultaneously with one key. I suppose they were pipes of similar character at different pitches, like today’s Principals eight-and-four.

3. In the early Renaissance, organ divisions called Blockwerk were developed.  These consisted of numerous voices, including the fractional pitches we know as mutations.

4. The stop action was the next obvious innovation, allowing the musician to select individual voices, or multiple voices in any combination.

5. The stop action would have led to the idea of contrasting voices. Instead of two or more similar voices, there would have been different timbres for each pitch, like our modern Principals and Flutes.

6. I’m not sure when the first reed stop was introduced or who made it, but I sure know that a wide variety of reeds were present in organs in the very early sixteenth century. The tones of all organ flue voices are produced by the splitting of a “sheet” of air that’s formed by the slot between the front edge of a pipe’s languid (horizontal piece at the joint between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator) and the lower lip, which is a portion of the circumference of the conical foot that’s made flat. The tone of a reed pipe is produced by a vibrating brass tongue, which creates a sharp contrast of timbre.

7. The addition of a second keyboard made it possible for a melody to be accompanied by a contrasting sound, or echo effects to be achieved without changing stops. I am not researching this as I write, but I guess this innovation dates from around 1475 or 1500.

8. The logical and magical extension of multiple keyboards was the invention of the pedal keyboard and development of the technique for mastering that most “organistic” of skills. Playing melodies or the individual lines of polyphonic music with one’s feet allowed organ music to develop deeper complexity. This level of sophistication was achieved late in the fifteenth century.

9. A wonderful example of a very early organ with two manuals and pedals was the first Große Orgel of the Marienkirche in Lübeck in Germany, the church later made famous in our history by organists Franz Tunder and his successor Dietrich Buxtehude (who married Bruhns’s daughter). That organ had 32 stops and was built between 1516 and 1518, just at the time of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and when Michelangelo was about 45 years old.

10. By the time Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663), Tunder (1614–1667), and Buxtehude (1637–1707) were composing their catalogues of organ music, the use of the pedalboard for independent voices was in full swing. More complex forms of composition, in those days especially the fugue, exploited the versatility of the organ. And of course, it was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) who brought pedal technique to a level of virtuosity that was the true forerunner of the near-maniacal feats of the feet of early twentieth-century virtuosi like Edwin Lemare and Lynnwood Farnam, that school of players who took organ playing to new heights in response to the innovations of Ernest Skinner in the same way that Widor and Dupré responded to the genius of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

11. The Expression Enclosure (Swell Box) was an invention that transformed organ playing. Its earliest forms were like the Brustwerk of Baroque and Neo-Baroque organs, with doors that the organist could open and close by reaching up from the bench, or (God forbid) standing on the pedal keys.

12. Pneumatic motors such as Barker Levers allowed huge organs with otherwise mechanical actions to be played with little effort.

13. The introduction of electric actions gave us the modern symphonic organ, the detached and remote console, and the possibility of dispersing various organ divisions throughout a large room.

14. I discussed combination actions earlier.

15. And more recently, solid-state control systems for pipe organs have given us multiple levels of memory, piston sequencers, transposers that are considered a crutch by some and a godsend by others, and playback sequencers that allow an organist to capture a performance as a digital file, then ask the organ to play it back, allowing critical listening to registration, balance, technique, and accuracy.

Today we anticipate wireless consoles, tap-screen music racks, and heaven knows what else. Just as Leonardo da Vinci could not possibly have imagined the automobile or the cellular telephone, Jan Sweelinck (1562–1621) would be astonished by our massive consoles and high-pressure reeds.

I wonder what the organ would be like today had Leonardo included it in his sketchbooks.

 

Notes

1. Nautical. While “anchors away” may seem the intuitive spelling, implying casting off dock lines or hoisting an anchor and setting a vessel “underway,” the correct spelling, aweigh, defines the moment when the anchor is lifted off the seabed and is “weighed” by the anchor line. Anchors Aweigh is the fight song of the United States Naval Academy. The text of the chorus:

Anchors Aweigh, my boys

Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to college joys

We sail at break of day, ’ay ’ay ’ay

Through our last night ashore

Drink to the foam

Until we meet once more

Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!

2. That Ingenious Business, Ray Brunner, The Pennsylvania German Society, 1991. In 1762, Benjamin Franklin referred to organbuilding in Eastern Pennsylvania as “that ingenious business.”

A century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively

John Bishop

As it was in the beginning

Every student of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach learns early how much more there is to it than meets the untrained ear. There’s no contesting that he was a genius of melody and harmony, but when you start digging into the mathematical structure of his music, you quickly get the sense that the depth is infinite. We might take for granted the seamless counterpoint between the obbligato and the chorale tune in the ubiquitous Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Cantata 147), Nun danket alle Gott (Cantata 79), or Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Cantata 140), but if we think it through even superficially, we’re baffled by how the harmonic progression of the obbligato anticipates the relative cadences at the end of each phrase of the chorale.

We learn about the Fibonacci series, a simple and infinite progression of equations that starts with zero and one, and continues so that each successive number in the series is the sum of the previous two (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3 . . . 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). Use that series to chart the entrances of a fugue subject.¹

Or use the formula of numbering the letters of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.). Add up BACH and you get 14. Add up
J. S. BACH and you get 41. Look for those two numbers recurring in Bach’s music—how many notes in a fugue subject, how many measures, etc.? Start digging and you’ll find you’re figuratively sweeping a beach. There’s no end. I haven’t tried it with Anna Magdalena, but I’ll bet it’s a gold mine. Maybe a good pick for the lottery.

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester with Bach’s Magnificat in D (BWV 243), writing a nicely researched paper and leading the church choir I directed through a performance. I was amazed to chart the sequence of movements and find the architectural symmetry, and the piece has been with me ever since. It includes some very nice examples of “word painting,” where the music illustrates the text. One of those beauties is the last chord of the alto aria. The text is Esurientes implevet bonis, et divites dimisit inanes (He hath filled the hungry with good things, the rich he hath sent away empty). The alto soloist is accompanied by basso continuo and two flutes in a beautiful duet with lots of parallel sixths. The figures repeat many times (maybe a Fibonacci number?) with a lovely cadence at the end of each, but at the closing cadence, the flutes leave out the last resolving note, sending the rich away hungry with a wafted dominant-seventh chord.

The opening movement is a rollicking jubilation with full orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani like only Bach could do—bouncing chords and driving rhythm. As the piece nears its end, there’s a boisterous reprise of the opening figure driving toward the final Amen. The text for the reprise is Sicut erat in principio (As it was in the beginning)—terrific.

 

Turn, turn, turn

Another part of my undergraduate days was the purity of the music we were focused on. The resurgence of interest in organs with mechanical action was in full swing— there were dozens of companies around the country digging in the history of the trade and creating wonderful new instruments with mechanical action and low wind pressures, and we as students of playing were in the thrall of the quest for authenticity in our performances. When we laid out a concert program, we were careful to consider the progression of keys, and the juxtaposition of historical styles and epochs. Including a transcription of a romantic orchestral piece was unthinkable. We considered them decadent. And the symphonic electro-pneumatic organs on which they were played were considered decadent. As I look back on those days, I see how easy it is to dismiss something about which you know nothing.

 

Chickens and eggs, smoke
and fire, and trees falling in
the woods

César Franck (1822–1890) is generally considered to be the first of the composers of Romantic French organ music, the father of the style. His melodic and harmonic languages exploited the resources of the organs of his day, and his use of tone color foreshadows the voluptuous orchestral intentions of the great masters who followed him. 

Consider this incomplete list of Franck’s successors:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937)

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971)

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939)

Louis Vierne (1870–1937)

Henri Mulet (1878–1967)

The span between Franck’s birth and Dupré’s death is nearly 150 years. The lives of all these revered composers were intertwined. Two of them were born in the same year, and three of them died in the same year. They were each other’s teachers and students. They lived near each other. They must have heard each other play. Think of the Sunday evening dinner after someone’s recital, a festive bistro table with cheese, wine, and cigars, and Pierné and Tournemire arguing about Widor’s registrations. I don’t know enough of the personal relationships between these men to certify such a possibility, but it’s fun to imagine. I’ve been at quite a few of those post-concert tables, at which no one is in doubt! 

Keeping in mind those organist-composers, consider the genius organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll who lived from 1811 until 1899. Monsieur Cavaillé-Coll was eleven years old when Franck was born, and Tournemire and Vierne were twenty-nine when he died. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cavaillé-Coll was putting magnificent organs under the hands of a bevy of marvelous composers. He was the constant among them, and his mechanical and tonal genius influenced that entire epoch of music. From one monumental organ to the next, he gave his colleague musicians new voices to try, new registration aids, and radical concepts like progressive wind pressures that increased as you went up the scale. The highest notes of Cavaillé-Coll’s Trumpets and Harmonic Flutes soared across the vast stone naves like little comets. What would Widor’s music have been without those heart-rending trebles?

Some of the more rewarding moments of my career have been those spent with clients brainstorming about the capabilities of an organ console as it relates to the tonal resources of the organ. What if the Solo French Horn could be played from the Great, and if so, what if there were divisional pistons under the Great keyboard that affected the Solo stops?

Imagine the conversation between organist and organbuilder involving “what-ifs” like that, before there had been a full century of whiz-bang electric and solid-state gizmos for organ consoles. If you had only ever drawn heavy mechanical stop actions by hand, how would you like an iron pedal that would throw on the principal chorus with one heave of the hips?

Or this: 

 

Cavaillé-Coll: “We could place the reeds and mixtures of the Swell on a separate windchest that you could turn on and off with a lever next to the pedalboard. Any stops you had drawn on that chest could be accessed at once. We could call it a Ventil² because it turns the air on and off.” 

Saint-Saëns: “Yes, please.”

 

There’s a famous portrait of Franck seated at the console of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ at Ste. Clotilde in Paris, his left hand poised with raised wrist on the (I assume) Positif manual, and right hand drawing a stopknob. Take a look: http://www.classicalarchives.com/composer/2536.html. Man, that knob travels far. It’s out about five inches and it looks like he’s still pulling. Franck’s face wears a thoughtful expression—maybe he’s wondering how far does this dagnabbit knob move, anyway? Reminds me of the Three Stooges pulling electrical conduits out of the wall.  

During his lifetime, Cavaillé-Coll introduced dozens of state-of-the-art gizmos. You can bet lunch on the fact that the drawknobs on the famous organ console at St. Sulpice (built in 1862) don’t move that far. For images of that spectacular console, take a look at
www.stsulpice.com.

Let’s skip forward 50 or 60 years. Ernest Skinner installed a new organ with four manuals and 77 voices at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City, the same year that T. Tertius Noble was appointed organist. New York’s Grand Central Station was opened that year ten blocks from St. Thomas (the centennial has just been celebrated), as was the Oyster Bar Restaurant, which is still located in the station. I imagine a power lunch at the brand new Oyster Bar during which Skinner and Noble argued about whether the 16-foot Swell reed should be available independently on the Pedal at 4-foot. They must have disagreed about something, and it must have been quite a show.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s widely understood that Cavaillé-Coll was the great innovator, creating marvelous new devices and watching what the musicians could do with them. I think that the early twentieth-century version was more a collaboration between organist and organbuilder—they took turns influencing each other. Americans were being introduced to new technological marvels every day. I can picture a client asking, “If J. P. Morgan can have electric lights in his mansion on Madison Avenue, why can’t I have one on my music rack?” Think of the lucky organist who was the first to have one!

From our twenty-first century perspective, one of the most remarkable but overlooked facts about the huge body of nineteenth-century French organ music is that it was all conceived, composed, practiced, and performed on hand-pumped organs. They may be hundred-stop jobs, but they were hand-pumped. It must be that the electric blower was the single most important innovation in the history of the organ. Widor started his work at St. Sulpice in 1870. I do not know precisely when the first electric blower was installed there, but let’s guess that Widor played that instrument for 35 years relying on human power to provide his wind-pressure. At five Masses a week—again, I’m just guessing—that would be 8,750 Masses. Kyrie eleison.

All the photos I’ve seen of Widor show him to be serious, even dour, and the little herd of pumpers in the next room must have been a distraction, snickering and shirking. But I imagine he cracked a smile the first time he turned on the new blower and sat down to play in that great church, alone with his thoughts and imagination. Having the luxury to sit at the console for hours in solitude must have been a revelation. Organists on both sides of the Atlantic were freed to exploit their imaginations and their instruments.

 

Step right up . . . 

Since the beginning of civilization, people have been flocking to share the latest in entertainment. In the fifth century B.C., a stadium was built at Delphi, high in the Greek mountains. It could seat 6,500 spectators, had a running track that was 177 meters long. There’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater on the same site, built in the fourth century, B.C. I doubt they would have gone to the trouble if people weren’t going to come. Today we crowd into IMAX theaters, elaborate cruise ships, and huge arenas. We’ve been celebrating the “latest thing” for hundreds of generations.

In 1920, a monumental antiphonal pipe organ was the latest thing. Today we joke about “cockpit syndrome”—teasing each other that our consoles look like the cockpits of airplanes. But there was no airplane to compare to the cockpit of a 1915 Skinner organ with four keyboards, a hundred stopknobs, and dozens of buttons, switches, and lights. Think of the impression it must have made to a parishioner, alighting from a horse-drawn carriage onto a cobblestone street, and encountering that gleaming organ console in the chancel. It could have been the most complicated and bewildering thing he had ever seen.

The organist must have been revered as a conjurer, a certified operator of one of the most complex devices in existence. They were the technical equivalents of today’s air traffic controllers, nuclear power engineers, and voodoo software writers, but they were musicians first. It’s no wonder that we read about thousands of people cramming huge municipal auditoriums to hear organ recitals. Attending concerts of a symphony orchestra was expensive, reserved for the elite. At City Hall, or in the church, one wizard could play an overture by Beethoven with grand effect, and no one was sent away empty.

And play them they did. With the electric blower grinding away for endless hours and an ever-increasing array of clever console controls, those organists could experiment with fingerings, and learn to access complicated registrations that were changing continuously, bringing complex orchestral scores alive single-handedly. And as a twenty-year-old I had the nerve to dismiss it as decadent. I hang my head.

Last Monday, the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists presented their annual President’s Day Conference. The subject was Transcriptions Alive! (Many thanks to my friends and colleagues who were involved in the planning.) On Sunday evening, theatre organist Jelani Eddington played a recital on a large Wurlitzer in Brooklyn. And on Monday, Michael Barone, Peter Conte, and Jonathan Ambrosino presented talks about various aspects of the art, hosted by the Riverside Church. The day concluded with a recital by Thomas Trotter played on the great Aeolian-Skinner organ of the Riverside Church, the home bench to Virgil Fox, Frederick Swann, John Walker, and so many others.

Michael Barone must be the best deejay the serious organ world has ever had.  Using a nicely chosen string of recorded examples, he made the point that organists have been playing transcriptions of other types of music for some 450 years. Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) played choral music on the keyboard, and Barone’s demonstration flicked cleverly back and forth between the sung and played versions. Tempo and pitch were consistent, the differing factor being the tempered scale of the organs’ keyboards. Good choirs sing in pure intervals.

J. S. Bach transcribed his own orchestral music for the organ, along with concertos by colleague/rival composers such as Vivaldi, Ernst, and Walther. I reflect that while I was ready to dismiss playing transcriptions of orchestral music on the organ, I surely was learning the sprightly stuff that Bach himself transcribed. It was good enough for Bach, but apparently not good enough for me. Point taken. I hang my head.

The terraced dynamics of Bach’s organs were perfect for the terraced dynamics of the Baroque concerto grosso. A couple centuries later, the marvelous expressive capabilities of the symphonic pipe organ were equal to the expressive demands of complex Romantic orchestral scores, chock full of contrasting simultaneous solos (which are not synonymous with duets), and crescendos and diminuendos of all speeds and scopes.

We as organists are blessed with the wealth of literature written especially for our instrument. It comes in all shapes and sizes. It has national inflections and accents that are instantly recognizable to us. You may never have heard the piece, but the instant you hear that Grand Jeu you smell soft ripe cheese and the taste of rich red wine wafts through your imagination. But that doesn’t have to keep us from playing any music on the organ. Any music that sounds good is fair game.

Transcribing orchestral and choral scores to organ keyboards is as old as the instrument itself. Technological advances in organ building between 1875 and 1925 allowed the art of transcription to reach new heights. Later, we spent some fifty years reflecting on the past—that which came before all that innovation, and went to great lengths to resurrect old ideas of instrument building and playing. Sicut erat in principio. And a century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively. Sicut erat in principio. Cue trumpets.

 

Notes

1. Fibonacci gave us the system of numerals we use today (0,1), finding them easier to use and more flexible for complex computation than the older Roman System (I, V, X, etc.). The Fibonacci series applies to many aspects of nature, from the breeding of rabbits to the structure of the Nautilus shell. A quick Google search will give the interested reader a lot to think about.

2. Ventil comes from the same root as vent—the French and Latin words
for “wind.”

John Bishop

It’s about time, it’s about space . . . 

Music is one of the most elegant ways we have to measure and control time. Time is about the generous breath an organist gives the congregation at the end of a line of a hymn and the beautifully paced pause between verses. Time is about never giving the listener or singer the sense that you’re in a hurry, even in a piece that is fast and furious.

Inspiration is a magical word that refers to innovation and new ideas and also to the intake of breath. One of the special moments in musical time is the sound of inspiration as a choir breathes in unison at the start of a piece. The music starts a full beat before the first note. All these examples are also about space, the breath between lines or verses, and the control and spacing of tempo. Thoughtful consideration of time and space are among the most important elements in a moving musical performance.

When I was a pup, just out of school in the late 1970s, I was working for Jan Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. One of our projects was the renovation of a Wicks organ in the cavernous and ornate St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio.¹ I don’t recall the exact date, but remember that the organ was built in the 1930s, comprising a big three-manual instrument in the rear gallery, and a modest two-manual organ behind the altar, all played from two identical consoles. The 1970s was the early dawn of solid-state controls for pipe organs, so our project was replacing the original stop-action switches with new analogue switches.

The job involved weeks of repetitive wiring, much of which I did alone, sitting inside the organ during daily Masses and the recitation of devotional rites. I heard “Hail, Mary” repeated hundreds, even thousands of times, led by the same faithful woman, so I not only memorized the text, but can still hear the quirky inflections of her voice, which I associate with the memory of the beeswax-and-incense smell of the church’s interior: “. . . and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, JEE-zus.”

The building is huge, and the acoustics endless, and there was a majesty about that repetitive chanting. It was even musical because the different tones of inflection lingered in the reverberation, turning the spoken word into song. Listening to that for countless hours allowed me insight into the origin of music. The later intonation of text as chant made the words easier to understand, and the natural succession of fauxbourdon embellishing the single line was the first step toward the rich complexity of today’s music.

A few weeks ago, Wendy and I attended a concert by Blue Heron, a polished vocal ensemble that specializes in Renaissance choral music. You can read about them, and hear clips from their recordings at www.blueheron.org. They are in the midst of a project titled “Ockeghem@600,” in which they are performing the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (1420–1497) over a span of about five years. The project includes performances of music by Ockeghem’s predecessors and contemporaries, providing a significant overview to the development of this ancient music.

That music roughly fills the gap between the origin of chant and the advent of tonal harmony, more than a hundred years before the birth of Sweelinck (1562–1621). Ockeghem and his peers were striving to take music in new directions, wondering what sounded good as chordal progressions, as counterpoint, and simply, as harmony. There is a sense of experimentation about it that reflects the genius of innovation. The performance we heard was at First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square, where the brilliant Peter Sykes is director of music. The building is a grand Victorian pile, and while it doesn’t have the endless acoustics of that stone interior in Lakewood, Ohio, it’s big enough to have spacious sound.

As we listened to the timeless sounds, my mind wandered to the devoted Hail, Mary women of Lakewood, drawing connections between the “spoken singing” I heard there and the explosion of innovation at the hands of the Renaissance composers. There were many homophonic passages, but also exploration into imitation (the forerunner of fugues) and melismatic polyphony. And along with the tonal innovations, those composers were learning to manage time.

Harvard University professor of music Thomas Forrest Kelly is an advisor to Blue Heron, and the ensemble recorded a CD of plainchant and early polyphony to accompany Kelly’s insightful book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,² in which he traces the invention and development of musical notation. In Chapter 3, “Guido the Monk and the Recording of Pitch,” Kelly examines how Guido of Arezzo, Italy, developed notation to indicate musical pitch around the year 1030, and in Chapter 4, we meet Leoninus, an official of the as yet unfinished twelfth-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, who is credited with developing notation for the recording of rhythm in music.

I recommend this book to anyone whose life revolves around reading music. Professor Kelly unveils countless mysteries about musical notation, including the origin of the names of the solfège scale. It is a compelling read.

§

There were some wonderful organs in the wood-frame-and-plaster New England buildings of my teenage life, but they certainly didn’t have much reverberation. I was around 25 years old when we did that work at St. James in Lakewood, Ohio, and it was one of the first places where I had freedom to play in such a huge acoustic. I was mesmerized by the sense of space. There was the obvious magic of releasing a chord and listening to the continuation of sound, but even more, I loved the way the building’s space gave the music grandeur. I had an epiphany as I played Widor’s ubiquitous Toccata. Suddenly, it wasn’t about 32 sixteenth notes in a measure, but four grand half-note beats. The harmonic motion was like clouds rolling across the sky, and the spaciousness of the room turned the sixteenth notes into chords. The music went from frantic to majestic. So that’s what Widor had in mind.

Take a minute with me on YouTube. Type “Widor plays his toccata” in the search field. Voilà! There’s the 88-year-old master playing his famous piece on the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris. It takes him seven full minutes to play the piece. Scrolling down the right-hand side of the screen, there was a list of other recordings of the same piece. I saw one by Diane Bish with 5:47 as the timing. I gave it a try and found that Ms. Bish was speaking about the performance and the organ for nearly a full minute, and she played the piece in less than 5/7 of Widor’s time. There sure were a lot of performances to choose from. Most of them were around five-and-a-half minutes long, and only a few were over six minutes. No one but Widor himself made it last for seven. Have we learned anything today?

More than 800 years after Leoninus started writing down rhythms at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, on November 15, 2015, a special Mass was celebrated there in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris two days earlier. Olivier Latry was on the bench, and as the priest consecrated the bread and wine, Latry set sail with La Marseillaise like only a genius cathedral organist can. The vast church was full, and emotions must have been running high. Latry established a powerful rhythm and gave the music a harmonic structure worthy of the towering room. His improvisation was about time and space in the extreme. It’s just over four minutes long, but it seems eternal, perfectly paced, and exquisitely scaled for the occasion. If I had been in that church, I would have needed to be carried out. Sitting at my desk in Maine, I’m weeping as I write. Watch it with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbwJACUxXdo.

The other day I had a meal with David Briggs, the virtuoso organist who is dining out these days on his capacious transcriptions of symphonies by Mahler and Elgar. How appropriate that he has been appointed artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Church buildings don’t get bigger, and pipe organs don’t get grander. That iconic church is a perfect stage for solo music-making on such a grand scale.

Like Notre Dame, but for only about an eighth as long in time, St. John the Divine has been the site of immense pageantry and ceremony. Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have preached there. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic there. Philippe Petit walked across the nave on a tightrope there. John Lindsay, Alvin Ailey, and Duke Ellington were buried from there. Elephants have paraded down the center aisle for the blessing of the animals. To walk and breathe in any building of that scale is to experience the ages.

It is no wonder that David could be master of such a space. He was bred for it. As a boy chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, he watched the organist out of the corner of his eye, waiting for him to draw the Pedal Trombone. He was organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where the renowned choir sings in one of the world’s largest college chapels, with one of the trickiest organ console placements in Christendom. From that hidden console, twenty-something David had the bench for some of the most visible services in history, as the Festival of Lessons and Carols is broadcast to hundreds of millions of listeners around the world. He has held positions at the cathedrals in Hereford, Truro, and Gloucester. He was born and bred to make music in huge spaces, a far cry from the frame buildings of my musical childhood.

David’s performances and improvisations are informed by his innate understanding of space. While many musicians are baffled by long reverberation, he harvests it, molds it, and makes it serve the music. No building is too large for his concepts of interpretation. A great building joins the organ as vehicle for the flow of the music.

 

Bigger than the great outdoors

Bagpipes, yodeling, and hog-calling are all forms of outdoor communication with a couple things in common. Bagpipes were commonly used on battlefields for military communication. Yodeling traces back to the sixteenth century, when it was a means of communication between Alpine villages and by animal herders for calling their flocks. Hog-calling is for, well, calling hogs. The other thing they have in common is that they are all air-driven. Wind-blown acoustic tone is as powerful as musical tone gets. No one ever put a Plexiglas screen in front of a violin section.

Around 1900, Robert Hope-Jones, the father of the Wurlitzer organ, invented the Diaphone, a powerful organ voice with unusually powerful fundamental tone. The sound of the Diaphone carried so efficiently that the United States Coast Guard adopted the technology for foghorns, used to warn ships of coastal dangers. The pipe organ combines bagpipes, yodeling, hog-calling, and foghorns as the one instrument capable of filling a vast space with sound at the hands of a single musician.

Igor Stravinsky famously said of the organ, “The monster never breathes.” He was right. It doesn’t have to. It’s the responsibility of the organist to breathe. Playing that wonderful organ at Notre Dame, Latry has infinite air to use. That does not give him the mandate to play continuously, and he doesn’t. The recording I described shows him at the console in an inset screen. The space he leaves between chords is visually obvious—his hands are off the keys as much as they’re on. He uses every cubic foot of the huge space for his breathing. As Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.” A Zen proverb enhances that: “Music is the silence between the notes, and the spaces between the bars cage the tiger.”

Nowhere in music is the space between the notes more important than for the organist leading a hymn. You have an unfair advantage. According to Stravinsky, you can hold a huge chord until Monday afternoon without a break. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), the lung capacity of an adult human male averages about six liters. There’s a six-pack of liter bottles of seltzer in our pantry waiting to be introduced to whiskey, and it surprises me to think that my lungs would hold that much. It doesn’t feel that way when I’m walking uphill. But it’s a hiccup compared to the lungs of a pipe organ. With the privilege of leading a hymn comes the responsibility to allow singers to breathe.  

As you read, I imagine that you’re nodding sagely, thinking, “Oh yes, I always allow time to breathe.” Because of the amount of travel my work requires, I no longer lead hymns. I’m a follower. Frequently, as I gasp for breath, I wonder if my admittedly energetic hymn playing allowed those congregations time to breathe. I hope so.

I often write about my love for sailing. Friends seem surprised when I draw a parallel between a sailboat and a pipe organ, but for me, it’s simple. Both machines involve controlling the wind. You can describe the art of organ building as making air go where you want it, and keeping it from going where you don’t want it. When I’m at the helm, I harvest air, the same way David Briggs harvests space. I set the sail so it reaps maximum energy from the air. And to inform my organ playing, when I’m sailing, I use only a fraction of the air available. The huge volume of air above the surface of the ocean moves as a mass. Sometimes it’s moving slowly, and sometimes it’s flowing at great speed. I raise 400 square feet of canvas to capture thousands of cubic miles of moving air.³

Two weeks ago, we experienced a violent storm on mid-coast Maine. It blew over 60 miles per hour for 18 hours, and it rained hard. We were fortunate to avoid damage to our house, but friends and neighbors were not so lucky. Thousands of trees fell, there was no power, phone, or internet service for nine days, and it took emergency workers four days to open the road to town. I love wind. It’s my favorite part of weather. I love sitting on the deck with wind coming up the river. I love it when I’m sailing. But there’s such a thing as too much. That storm was too much. People in Houston and Puerto Rico know what too much wind can be.

When you’re playing a processional hymn, you’re Aeolus, god and ruler of the winds. You’re Zephyrus, god of the west wind. You have the wind at your fingertips. What a privilege, and what a responsibility. Use it wisely. Use it to create time and space. Use it to move a sailboat, not to knock down trees. Think of the spaces between the notes. Think of the clouds flowing across the sky. You’re the weather maker. You’re lucky.

 

Note: ‘It’s about time, it’s about space . . . .’ are the opening words of the theme song of a 1966 television sitcom by the creators of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ ‘Gilligan’ lasted three seasons while ‘It’s About Time’ lasted only one, a clear indication of the degree of artistic content. It has been an annoying earworm today as I try to conjure images far more grand.

 

Notes

1. There’s a slide show of photos of this church on the homepage of https://www.stjameslakewood.com/.

2. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

3. Ours is a 22-foot catboat with a single gaff-rigged sail.

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

A French-American organist and musicologist, Carolyn Shuster was organist at the American Cathedral in Paris. In 1989, she was appointed titular of the Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at the Trinité Church and founded their weekly concert series. She has performed over 500 concerts in Europe and in the United States. She has also contributed articles to Revue de musicologie, La Flûte Harmonique, L’Orgue, Orgues Nouvelles, The American Organist, and The Diapason. Her recordings have been published by EMA, Ligia Digital, Schott, and Fugue State Films. In 2007, the French Cultural Minister awarded her the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters.

On November 12, 2017, the liturgical and international concert organist Michel Chapuis died. Also an eminent professor, historian, and organ reformer impassioned by architecture, acoustics, and organbuilding, he immensely contributed to the renaissance, conservation, and restoration of early French organs. He delighted in supporting artistic beauty: his noble, graceful, and poetic interpretations vibrated with rhythmic pulsation, a natural flowing expression, and a spiritual elevation that was filled with mystery and joy.

 

His inspiration to become an
organist and initial training

Michel Chapuis was born January 15, 1930, in Dole, situated in the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region in eastern France. His father was a primary school teacher, and his mother worked as a telephone operator at the post office. In 1938, when his grandmother brought him to a Mass celebrating First Communion in Notre-Dame Collegiate Church,¹ he was overwhelmed by its historic organ by Karl Joseph Riepp (1754)/François Callinet (1788)/Joseph Stiehr (1830, 1855, 1858).² Its grandiose sonorities, which resonate beautifully in such marvelous acoustics, inspired him to become an organist. The organ possesses one of the finest examples of the French Grand Plein-Jeu. This characteristic combination of the Fourniture and Cymbale mixtures with the foundation stops is a full, brilliant, and noble sound that contains all its various inherent harmonics—with up to fifteen pipes that sound on a single note. For Michel Chapuis, this sonority symbolized God, eternity, and the entire color spectrum.

Noting their son was extremely talented, his parents purchased a piano for him at the music shop of Jacques Gardien, an ardent defender of the Dole organ.³ Michel Chapuis acquired a firm and supple piano technique with Miss Palluy, a disciple of Alfred Cortot. For six months, he took lessons with Father Barreau on the harmonium in the Collegiate Church and helped him accompany Masses there. He then began to study organ with Odette Vinard,⁴ who played at the Protestant Church in Dole, and continued with her professor, Émile Poillot,⁵ organist at the Dijon Cathedral.

In 1940, his family left Dole during the German occupation and went to Brive-Charensac, a village in the Haute-Loire, where he accompanied church services on the harmonium.⁶ When he returned to Dole in 1943, he accompanied vespers in the Dole Collegiate Church, even improvising verses between psalms. Delighted to discover a collection of Alexandre Guilmant’s Archives of Organ Masters in the personal library of the Marquis Bernard de Froissard⁷ in Azans, near Dole, he began to play the early French organ repertory, using registrations mentioned in these scores. His grandfather and the church janitor pumped the organ bellows for him! In 1945, he began to study organ with Jeanne Marguillard, organist at Saint-Louis Church in Monrapont, Besançon, where he accompanied two church services each Sunday for two years on a Jacquot-Lavergne organ.⁸

 

Musical training in Paris

After the Second World War, in 1946, Jeanne Marguillard came to Paris with Michel Chapuis, to introduce him to Édouard Souberbielle.⁹ At the age of sixteen, Chapuis began to study organ and improvisation with him at the César Franck School. This “true aristocrat of the organ” possessed a vast culture and an eminent spirituality that deeply influenced all his students. He encouraged them to expand their musical knowledge by listening to great classical works, and Chapuis appreciated his methodical spirit. This master enabled him to maintain a solid yet supple hand position and taught how to “touch” the organ by varying articulations, how to improvise fugues and trio sonatas, and used Marcel Dupré’s improvisation method books to prepare him to study at the Paris Conservatory. Michel Chapuis completed his solid musical formation there by taking piano lessons with Paule Piédelièvre,¹⁰ courses in harmony and counterpoint with Yves Margat,¹¹ and fugue with René Malherbe.¹² His fellow students there included Simone Michaud¹³ and her future husband, Jean-Albert Villard,¹⁴ Father Joseph Gelineau,¹⁵ and Denise Rouquette, who married Michel Chapuis in 1951.¹⁶ They lived on Clotaire Street, near the Panthéon.

To launch a career as an organist in France, it was indispensable to obtain a first prize organ in Marcel Dupré’s class at the Paris Conservatory. After auditioning with Dupré in 1950, playing J. S. Bach’s Sixth Trio Sonata and Louis Vierne’s Impromptu, thanks to his solid technique, Michel Chapuis enrolled in the Paris Conservatory the next October. Nine months later, in June 1951, he obtained his first prizes in organ and improvisation, as well as the Albert
Périlhou and Alexandre Guilmant prizes, awarded to the best student in the class.¹⁷ Gifted with mechanical ingenuity, he followed Gaston Litaize’s advice and apprenticed with the organbuilder Erwin Muller from 1952 to 1953, in Croisy, just west of Paris.¹⁸

 

First three church positions in Paris

From his youth, Michel Chapuis loved the ritual aspects of liturgical music. During his studies in Paris, he substituted for many organists. Highly respected for his fine accompaniments of congregational singing, his vast liturgical knowledge, and his repertory, he was appointed titular organist in several Parisian churches. From 1951 to 1953, he accompanied the liturgy on the Gutschenritter choir organ at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From 1953 to 1954, he played the 1771 Clicquot/1864 Merklin organ at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois Church, following in the footsteps of Alexandre Boëly.

In 1954, he succeeded Line Zilgien¹⁹  as titular of the 1777 Clicquot/1839 Daublaine & Callinet/1842 Ducroquet/1927 Gonzalez organ at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs and kept his title there until 1970. Nicolas Gigault played there from 1652 to 1707 and Louis Braille, the inventor of the language for the blind, served at the church from 1834 to 1839. This church, located near Arts and Métiers, was reconstructed in a flamboyant Gothic style in the twelfth century and attained its present form in the seventeenth century. Its historic Clicquot organ was the key that opened the doors to Michel Chapuis’ comprehension of the early French organ. He also learned a great deal there from two organbuilders, Claude Hermelin²⁰ and Gabriel d’Alençon.²¹

In 1954, Michel Chapuis succeeded Jean Dattas as titular of the two-manual, seventeen-stop Merklin choir organ in Notre-Dame Cathedral, in the heart of Paris. There, he accompanied the
Maîtrise choir, directed by the quick-tempered Canon Louis Merret until 1959; then by a marvelous musician, Abbot Jean Revert, who allowed the congregation to sing during alternated verses at vespers. Michel Chapuis accompanied all the daily Masses and nearly all the canonical offices in Gregorian chant: prime (on feast days), tierce, the grand Mass, sext, none, vespers, and compline. One day, a priest sang too high and reproached Michel Chapuis for playing a pitch that was too high, when, in fact, he had mistaken a tourist boat whistle on the Seine for an organ note! In spite of the hordes of tourists that invaded this church, this position brought great joy to Chapuis for nine years: it enabled him to unite his capacities to resonate universal beauty in such a breath-taking setting, with its traditional liturgy and its fantastic acoustics that enhance any musical note. Michel Chapuis strongly believed that music ought to pacify, console, and comfort humanity. Above all, he hoped that his musical offerings would illuminate other people’s lives.²²

Michel Chapuis collaborated closely with the two titulars of the grand organ: Pierre Cochereau²³ and Pierre Moreau.²⁴ Each Sunday the two organs dialogued, continuing a tradition established in 1402, when Frédéric Schaubantz installed the grand organ in its present location. This dialogue, issued from the Gallican ritual, had remained intact, except during the Revolution, from 1790 to 1798. A 1963 Philips record documented Pierre Cochereau playing his own Paraphrase de la Dédicace and Louis Vierne’s Triumphant March, with Michel Chapuis accompanying Jean Revert’s choir singing works by André Campra and Pierre Desvignes. In September 1984, when Pierre Cochereau decorated Michel Chapuis with the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, he recalled his improvisations at Notre-Dame and had wondered if J. S. Bach had composed a seventh trio sonata!

 

A pioneer in early French music
interpretation

Impassioned by early French Classical music, Michel Chapuis realized that most of the Parisian organs by such builders as Cavaillé-Coll, Merklin, and Gutschenritter were symphonic or neo-Classical in style, thus unsuitable for the early French repertory. While organists did regularly play the repertoire, however, they did not use notes inégales in their playing. For example, in 1956, when Michel Chapuis went to Marmoutier to meet the American Melville Smith, during his rehearsals for the first complete recording of Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’Orgue by Valois, he was surprised that he did not dare to use notes inégales there, even though he had been playing them for over thirty years, simply because he did not want to appear to be original (“Je ne veux pas paraître original”).²⁵ Chapuis concluded that he was a bit timid, probably since the great master organists in Paris at that time had not used them. Nonetheless, Melville Smith’s landmark recording highlighted Muhleisen and Alfred Kern’s 1955 restoration of this historic 1710 Silbermann and received the Grand Prix du Disque.

Curious by nature, Michel Chapuis carried out extensive research to understand the performance practice of notes inégales. His departure point was Eugène Borrel’s book on the interpretation of French music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [The Interpretation of French Music (from Lully to the Revolution)].²⁶ This book, well in advance of its time, remained the continual reference point that guided Chapuis’ interpretations. It emphasizes that to enchant auditors, one must play like a singer, with clear pronunciation, an appropriate emotion, expression, and character: serious, sad, happy, or
pleasant.

An organist in the seventeenth century knew how to bring out the main themes, such as plainchants, and could boldly improvise counterpoint on them. Like harpsichordists, they “touched” keyboards by holding their fingers as close to the keys as possible. They played vividly on the Positive Plein Jeu, interpreted Récits tenderly, and played Tierces en tailles with emotional melancholy. Their fingerings enabled them to play notes inégales naturally.

During his nine years at Notre-Dame, Michel Chapuis did not need much time to prepare his work there: this gave him lots of time to consult hundreds of early French organ and singing treatises and prefaces from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, beginning with Loys Bourgeois (1530), who had indicated that eighth notes should be sung in groups of two to render them more graceful. Thanks to his musical intuition, his solid supple technique, and his courageous spirit, he then incorporated notes inégales, appropriate ornaments, and registrations into his interpretations of early French music. Michel Chapuis acknowledged Jules Écorcheville’s research.²⁷ In 1958, Chapuis gave a conference with Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume²⁸ at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs Church, presenting musical illustrations of the application of notes inégales and dotted rhythms. The interpretation of the French national hymn, La Marseillaise, is an excellent example of the natural application of notes inégales: although notated with eighth notes, it is sung with dotted notes. Of course, when one uses early fingerings, one plays naturally with notes inégales. This landmark conference inspired organists such as Marie-Claire Alain²⁹ and marked the beginning of a new era in early French music interpretation.

Michel Chapuis brought early French repertory to life, expressing past rhetoric naturally, with nobleness, simplicity, and good taste. Guided continually by Eugène Borrel, his playing was “elegant, distinguished, and animated without excessiveness” [“élégant, distingué, chaleureux sans outrances”].³⁰ In fact, when he gave a concert on the Gonzalez organ at Saint-Merry Church in May 1963, interpreting works by Titelouze, D’Aquin, and Dandrieu Noëls, no one even noticed that he had played with notes inégales.³¹ Nicole Gravet’s book on registrations in French music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was a guide to him.³² His numerous recordings of early French music in the 1960s testify to his natural assimilation of notes inégales: Dandrieu, Guilain, and Raison on the Clicquot in Poitiers (by Lumen) and others by Harmonia Mundi: François Roberday at Manosque and Isle-sur-Sorgue, François Couperin’s two organ Masses on the Isnard at Saint-Maximin, François Couperin at Le Petit-Andely, Louis Marchand and Gaspard Corette on the Clicquot in Souvigny (Grand Prix), Nicolas Clérambault on the 1765 Bénigne Boillot at Saint-Jean de Losne, Gaspard Corette and D’Aquin in Marmoutier (the only restored organ),³³ and his improvisations on the 1746 J. A. Silbermann at Saint-Quirin Lettenbach.

 

Installation near Dole

During his military service at Mont-Valérien (near Paris) from 1954 to 1955, Michel Chapuis met many of his lifelong acquaintances, notably Jacques Béraza (the future organist at Dole, 1955–1998), Jean Saint-Arroman³⁴ (with whom he collaborated in future organ academies and publications of early French music), and the orchestra conductor Jean-Claude Malgloire. Shortly thereafter, he also met the ingenious organ visionary and voicer, Philippe Hartmann.³⁵ From 1955 to 1958, Hartmann lived with Pierre Cochereau’s family, on Boulevard Berthier in Paris. He babysat for his children, Jean-Marc and Marie-Pierre, and enlarged his house organ to seventy stops.³⁶ A few years later, when Michel Chapuis and Francis Chapelet came to visit Pierre Cochereau, they joyfully improvised a trio sonata on his organ, his Steinway piano, and his harpsichord, before savoring some champagne!³⁷

During this period, Chapuis visited Dole regularly. His appointment as organ professor at the Strasburg Conservatory in 1956 assured him a solid income. At Jacques Béraza’s advice, in 1958, he purchased a historic seventeenth-century home in Jouhe, a village near Dole, where he installed his pianos, harmoniums, and his personal library. During this same period, Philippe Hartmann moved to Rainans, a nearby village. Together, their overflowing energy, encyclopedic knowledge, and extraordinary imagination influenced an entire generation of organbuilders who apprenticed there from 1958 to 1969, notably Alain Anselm, Bernard Aubertin, Louis Benoist, Jean Bougarel, Didier Chanon, Jean Deloye, Barthélémy Formentelli, Gérald Guillemin, Claude Jaccard, Dominique Lalmand, Denis Londe, Marie Londe-Réveillac, Jean-François Muno, Pascal Quoirin, Alain Sals, and Pierre Sarelot.³⁸

 

From Saint-SОverin to the Royal Chapel in Versailles

In 1963, at the suggestion of Father Lucien Aumont,³⁹ Michel Chapuis crossed the Seine River to the Latin Quarter to succeed Michel Lambert-Mouchague as titular of the grand organ at Saint-Séverin Church.⁴⁰ Among some of the past organists who maintained a great classical tradition there were: Michel Forqueray (1681–1757), Nicolas Séjan (1783–1791), Albert Périlhou, composer and director of the Niedermeyer School (1889–1914), Camille Saint-Saëns, honorary organist (1897–1921), and Marcel-Samuel Rousseau (1919–1921).⁴¹ After his arrival, Michel Chapuis reinstated the classical system of rotating organists that existed before the Revolution in Parisian churches. Over the years, he shared this post with Jacques Marichal (1963–c. 1972)⁴² and Francis Chapelet (1964–1984),⁴³ then with André Isoir (1967–1973), Jean Boyer (1975–1988), Michel Bouvard (1984–1994), François Espinasse (1988), Michel Alabau (1986–2016), Christophe Mantoux (1994); and two substitute organists: Jean-Louis Vieille-Girardet (1973–1994), and François-Henri Houbart (1974–1979). In 2002, Chapuis was named honorary organist and Nicolas Bucher succeeded him as titular until 2013, when he in turn was succeded by Véronique Le Guen.⁴⁴

In 1963, the 1748 Claude Ferrard/1825 Pierre-François Dallery/1889 John Abbey⁴⁵ organ was in poor shape. In 1963 and 1964, the Alsatian builder Alfred Kern reconstructed the organ according to the plans of Michel Chapuis and Philippe Hartmann,⁴⁶ who decided upon the use of mechanical action. This exemplary reconstruction as a four-manual neo-Classical German-French organ with fifty-nine stops marked a turning point in French organ construction. It used all of the Abbey windchests and existing pipes, including Claude Ferrard’s Positif Cromorne, the Récit Hautbois, and several mutation stops, along with twenty-two new stops. The disposition of its newly constructed Plein-Jeu stops, with its Cymbale-Tierce stop, allowed the interpretation of both early French and German literature for the first time in Paris and enabled Michel Chapuis to accompany the congregational singing with vitality and variety. The third keyboard, Récit-Resonance, enabled him to couple the other two keyboards to it. The natural keys were made of ebony, and the sharps of white cow bone. The Positif de dos was placed mid-height in the church, enabling the organ to resonate fully. Chapuis inaugurated the instrument on March 8, 1964, with two different programs: the first consisting of works by Couperin, Buxtehude, and Bach; and the second, works by de Grigny, Marchand, Sweelinck, Böhm, and Bach.⁴⁷ After initial work by Daniel Kern in 1982 and Dominique Lalmand in 1988, the organ was restored again in 2011 by Dominique Thomas, Quentin Blumenroeder, and Jean-Michel Tricoteaux, respecting Alfred Kern’s work.

Michel Chapuis had arrived at Saint-Séverin during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This parish’s ecumenical approach mirrored that of the Community in Taizé. With that in mind, Michel Chapuis adapted Bach chorales to the Catholic liturgy with French texts. The organists collaborated with priests to prepare the liturgy in accordance with the texts and the different colors of the liturgical year. Instead of beginning the Mass with Asperges me and an appropriate Gregorian Introit, the chorale “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland” served as the opening hymn during the four Sundays in Advent. Before each Mass, Michel Chapuis softly accompanied a rehearsal of the liturgy. After improvising a prelude to the opening hymn on the Positif Plein-Jeu, he accompanied the congregation on the Grand Orgue Plein-Jeu. Father Alain Ponsard requested Michel Chapuis to compose a Sanctus, known as the Saint-Séverin Sanctus, sung throughout France. Later, his former student and substitute organist, François-Henri Houbart, composed a partita based on this Sanctus.⁴⁸

Two recordings by Cantoral⁴⁹ attest to Michel Chapuis’ fine accompaniments. Harmonia Mundi recorded his interpretations of Jehan Titelouze’s hymns and Magnificat at Saint-Séverin. His other recordings in the 1960s and 1970s echoed the repertory he played there: works by Louis Couperin (Deutsche Grammophon), Nicolas de Grigny (Astrée), French Noëls by Balbastre, Dandrieu, and D’Aquin, and the complete works of Nicolas Bruhns, Vincent Lübeck, J. S. Bach, and Dieterich Buxtehude (Valois).⁵⁰ Recording the complete organ works of Bach was extremely difficult: after learning all the scores, he recorded alone at night, set up the magnetic tapes, pushed the “record” button, and went up to the organ loft to play; if there was a noise or the slightest error, he started all over, until it was perfect.

In 1966, Édouard Souberbielle gave a concert at Saint-Séverin. In 1968 and 1969, Chapuis organized a concert series entitled “Renaissance of the Organ,” for the Association for the Protection of Early Organs, on the first Wednesday of each month at 9:00 p.m.: on October 9, Michel Chapuis opened this series with a Bach concert; on November 6, Marie-Claire Alain played Bach and early German masters; on December 4, Pierre Cochereau performed Bach, Mozart, Liszt, and improvised; on January 8, 1969, André Isoir gave an eclectic concert for the Christmas season; on February 5, Francis Chapelet played selections of Art of the Fugue and the Toccata in C Major by Bach; on March 5, Helmuth Walcha was scheduled to play Bach’s Clavierübung III, but, unable to perform, was replaced by Marie-Claire Alain; on May 7, Xavier Darasse performed Messiaen, Bach, and Ligeti; and on June 6, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini performed Frescobaldi, Muffat, and Bach. In the fall of 1969, concerts were given by Michel Chapuis, Heinz Wunderlich, Anton Heiller, and Helmut Walcha. From October 1970 to June 1971, Michel Chapuis performed the complete works of J. S. Bach there.

In 1995, Michel Chapuis was appointed titular of the prestigious historic Robert Clicquot organ,⁵¹ rebuilt by Jean-Loup Boisseau and Bertrand Cattiaux, at the Royal Chapel in Versailles. On November 18 and 19, 1995, he inaugurated this organ and was named honorary organist there in 2010. This position was the crowning summit of his concert career.⁵² At this exquisite historic royal palace, he was truly an ambassador for French culture, receiving artists from the entire world.

 

A. F. S. O. A.: The Association for the Protection of Early Organs

On December 21, 1967, a group of organists, organ historians, and builders, as well as amateur organ admirers, joined forces to protest against abusive transformations of historic French organs and founded the Association for the Protection of Early Organs
[A. F. S. O. A., Association pour la sauvegarde de l’orgue ancien]. Their first general meeting took place on March 1, 1968. Jean Fonteneau, a substitute organist at Saint-Séverin, was president for the first year; the organ historian Pierre Hardouin, its primary editor; Michel Bernstein, editorial secretary; and Michel Chapuis, artistic advisor. Among its honorary members were Jean-Albert Villard and Helmut Winter. Other members included Father Lucien Aumont, Michel Bernstein, Bernard Baërd, Dominique Chailley, Jacques Chailley, Francis Chapelet, Pierre Chéron, Pierre Cochereau, René Delosme, Christian Dutheuil, Robert Gronier (a future president), André Isoir, Henri Legros, Émile Leipp, the architect Alain Lequeux, the astronomer James Lequeux, Charles-Walter Lindow, Pierre-Paul Lacas, Dominique Proust, Jean Saint-Arroman, Gino Sandri, Marc Schaefer, Jean-Christophe Tosi (a future president), and Jean Ver Hasselt. They struggled to renew interest in the unforgotten historic early French organ and its music. In 1969,
A. F. S. O. A. organized an international François Couperin competition for organ and harpsichord at Saint-Séverin and on the François-Henri Clicquot organ (1772), restored by Alfred Kern, at the Royal Chapel in Fontainebleau. It also organized visits to organs, such as the Clicquot at the Poitiers Cathedral, and organs in Alsace.

A. F. S. O. A. ardently defended a respectable restoration of the 1748 Dom Bédos organ in Bordeaux and protested against Gonzalez’s restoration of the historic Couperin organ at Saint-Gervais Church in Paris.⁵⁴ In 1954, this firm, under Norbert Dufourcq’s direction, had already considerably transformed Jean de Joyeuse’s 1694 Baroque 16′ organ in Auch Cathedral: out of the 3,060 pipes there, 620 were considerably altered and 2,240 had disappeared, notably the Grand Plein-Jeu.⁵⁵ Michel Chapuis felt that Victor Gonzalez’s neo-classical Plein-Jeu, although pitched too high, was remarkably well-voiced and suitable for a small instrument installed in a studio or a home, but not for a large organ in a church. When Norbert Dufourcq went to visit the historic eighteenth century Jean-Baptiste Micot organ in Saint-Pons-des-Thomières (in the Hérault), the organist, Jean Ribot, hid the keys so that he could not enter the organ loft to look at the organ.⁵⁶

Michel Chapuis strongly supported research on the French Classical organ Plein-Jeu, notably by his friends Jean Fellot⁵⁷ and Léon Souberbielle.⁵⁸ Thankfully, in 1954, Pierre Chéron and Rochas saved the splendid Grand Plein-Jeu in the 1774 Isnard organ at Sainte Marie-Madeleine Basilica in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.⁵⁹ In 1957, Robert Boisseau voiced a Roethinger organ in the French Classic style that included a Plein-Jeu as described by Dom Bédos, in Saint Louis du Temple Benedictine Abbey in Limon-Vauhallan (in the Essonne south of Paris). It was designed by Édouard and Léon Souberbielle. On November 7, 1959, Claude Philbée made a private recording of Michel Chapuis improvising to demonstrate the organ’s stops.⁶⁰

In 1967, Michel Chapuis pleaded with André Malraux, the minister for cultural affairs since 1959, for new policies concerning the restoration of early organs. He explained that past massacres of historic organs had given a bad name to organbuilding in France. He estimated that around seventy historic organs remained intact in France: thirty large instruments and forty smaller instruments. He suggested that, as in Austria or the Netherlands, a group of experts be appointed to form a new national commission of historic organs in addition to regional commissions. Before dismantling each organ for restoration, it should be completely evaluated and inventoried, with precise measurements, photos, and recordings. However, advocating for drastic changes in the French administration was not an easy task!

As A. F. S. O. A. encouraged, restorations were carried out that respected the past. As a member of the Commission for Historical Monuments, Michel Chapuis travelled in his Citroën van to visit organs and photographed them with his Rolleflex box camera. Here are some of the organs beautifully restored between 1968 and 1998: Perthuis, Malaucène, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Saint-Lizier, Forcalquier, and Sète by Alain Sals; Houdan by Robert and Jean-Loup Boisseau; three cuneiform bellows to activate the wind in the Clicquot in Souvigny by Philippe Hartmann;
Ebersmunster by Alfred Kern; Albi and Carcassonne by Barthélemy Formentelli;
Villiers-le-Bel, Juvigny, and the Dom Bédos in Bordeaux by Pascal Quoirin; Semur-en-Auxois by Jean Deloye with Philippe Hartmann; Seurre in Bourgogne, Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville in Normandy, and Saint-Antoine-L’Abbaye by Bernard Aubertin; the 1790
Clicquot in Poitiers by Boisseau-Cattiaux Society;⁶¹ Bolbec by Bertrand Cattiaux; and the reconstruction of the Jean de Joyeuse in Auch by Jean-François Muno. Between 1994 and 1997, the builders Claude Jaccard and Reinalt Klein built a replica of the Houdan organ (except the case) in the Kreuzekirche Church in Stapelmoor, Germany (in the North of Ostfriesland): Organeum Records recorded Michel Chapuis playing works by Böhm, Boyvin, Dandrieu, and Jullien on this organ on September 17, 1998.⁶²

In the 1980s, Michel Chapuis supported the Cavaillé-Coll Association, which advocated for quality restorations of Romantic organs. He kindly advised this author’s research on Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s secular organs. Among the Cavaillé-Coll organs restored between 1985 and 1997: the grand organs in Sacré-Coeur Basilica and in Saint-Sulpice in Paris, by Jean Renaud; Charles-Marie Widor’s 1893 house organ in Selongey, Côte d’Or (1986), and Édouard André’s 1874 house organ in Decize, by Claude Jaccard; the grand organ in Poligny, by Dominique Lalmand and Claude Jaccard, the grand organ in Saint-Sernin Basilica in Toulouse, by Boisseau-Cattiaux.

 

Organ professor

An eminent professor, Michel Chapuis acknowledged that the best way to learn music is to teach it. He loved to transmit his musical heritage and his practical knowledge. His intuition and his astute sense of observation and analysis enabled him to transmit elements of interpretation that cannot always be explained. He taught organ at the Strasburg Conservatory from 1956 to 1979, at the Schola Cantorum in Paris from 1977 to 1979, at the Besançon Conservatory from 1979 to 1986, and then succeeded Rolande Falcinelli at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Paris, from 1986 to 1995. He also gave masterclasses in numerous academies in France: early French music on the historic Isnard organ at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume Academy, founded in 1962; German and French early music on the 1752 Riepp/1833 Callinet organ in Semur-en-Auxois (in the Côte-d’Or) in the mid-1970s;⁶³ in the Pierrefonds Academy (in the Oise) with Jean Saint-Arroman in the 1980s; and in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges⁶⁴ (in the Haute-Garonne) from 1976 to 2008, notably with André Stricker and Jean Saint-Arroman. He also gave masterclasses in Stapelmoor, Germany (with André Stricker and Pierre Vidal), as well as in the United States and Japan.

At the Strasbourg Conservatory, Michel Chapuis taught in the Catholic organ class, alongside André Stricker,⁶⁵ who was in charge of the Protestant organ class. As the organ department grew, two more professors were added to balance the department: in 1962, Marc Schaefer,⁶⁶ a Protestant, and, in 1963, Pierre Vidal,⁶⁷  a Catholic. In June 1964, Helmut Walcha inaugurated the Kurt Schwenkedel organ (III/64) in the conservatory concert hall. Michel Chapuis helped to determine its stoplist, which he described as being both “classical and personal.”⁶⁸ Of note, the organ case included horizontal Montre pipes.

In 1986, when Michel Chapuis began to teach at the Paris Conservatory, it was still located on Madrid Street, before its transfer to la Villette in 1991. Instead of giving lessons on the dusty 1951 Jacquot-Lavergne organ there, he preferred to teach on beautiful church organs: at Saint-Séverin, in Dole, and in Poligny. Open-minded, he never imposed any particular interpretation on his students⁶⁹ but used his immense knowledge, his fantastic imagination, his humanistic approach, and his witty humor to guide them from the visible text to the invisible spirit of the music. He emphasized the importance of a calm, supple body, notably in hands and wrists, to give great lightness and liberty to fingers, which remain in contact with the keys. With his soft, sweet voice, he calmly encouraged students to go beyond the notes, to recreate the composer’s musical conception in a harmonious and sober manner. He abhorred inadequate and superficial ornaments and inappropriate expression. He enabled his students to understand the inherent marvels in each score, its underlying harmonies, rhythmic structures, and melodic expression, and helped them to incorporate these elements into their interpretations with an appropriate style, with spontaneity, good taste, and excellent registrations.

How fortunate I was to study with Michel Chapuis and Jean Saint-Arroman at the Academy in Pierrefonds in 1983 and 1984. Eugène Borrel’s book on the interpretation of early French music was truly indispensable to interpreting early French music expression in a well-balanced harmonious manner, with natural fluidity and ease. We accompanied singers to understand the underlying nature of a musical text, its pronunciation, its appropriate expression and style, its inherent harmonies. We studied the early French organ and its music: figured basses, dance rhythms, registrations, tempi, temperaments, ornamentations, and learned how to appropriately express and embellish the musical line. Its sweet, gentle expression⁷⁰ finds its summit in the Tierce taille and numerous Récits.

We presented recitals at Saint-Séverin and Saint-Gervais churches. While studying on early historic instruments does not guarantee a beautiful performance, it enables an interpreter to play ornaments, registrations, phrasing, etc., with greater ease. As Jean Saint-Arroman pointed out, it is impossible for early music to be heard as in former centuries because “life and sensibility have changed too much, and, at least for the listeners, the music which was ‘modern’ has become ‘ancient’” [“la vie et la sensibilité ont trop chargé, et, au moins pour les auditeurs, la musique qui était ‘moderne’ est devenue ‘ancienne’”].⁷¹

Michel Chapuis inspired an entire generation of organists, among them: Scott Ross (at Saint-Maximin); Robert Pfrimmer, Étienne Baillot, Antoine Bender, Lucien Braun, Henri Delorme, Alain Langré, François-Henri Houbart, Jean-Louis Vieille-Girardet, Hélène Hébrard, Chieko Mayazaki and Henri Paget (at Strasbourg Conservatory); Régis Allard, Michel Bouvard,⁷² Yasuko Uyama-Bouvard, Makiko Hayashima, Hisaé Hosokawa (at the Schola Cantorum); Marc Baumann, Sylvain Ciaravolo, Pierre Gerthoffer, Luc Bocquet, Éric Brottier, Bernard Coudurier, Roland Servais, Véronique Rougier, Vinciane Rouvroy, Marie-Christine Vermorel (at the Besançon Conservatory); Valéry Aubertin, Valérie Aujard-Catot, Franck Barbut, Philippe Brandeis, Yves
Castagnet, Slava Chevliakov, Denis Comtet, Françoise Dornier, Thierry Escaich, Pierre Farago, Jean-François Frémont, Mathieu Freyburger, Christophe Henry, Emmanuel Hocdé, Jean-Marc Leblanc, Marie-Ange Laurent-Lebrun, Éric Lebrun, Véronique Le Guen, Erwan Le Prado, Gabriel Marghieri, Pierre Mea, Nicolas Reboul-Salze, Marina Tchébourkina,⁷³ Vincent Warnier (at the National Superior Conservatory of Music), and Frédéric Munoz (in numerous academies).

 

International concert artist

Michel Chapuis was a great artist who consecrated his entire life to enriching other people’s lives with beautiful music. Although he often said that he never took vacations, in all truth, he worked too much, giving generously to others: as a teacher, as a member of the national organ commission for cultural affairs, as a church musician, and as a concert artist. He delighted in sharing his passions with others: photography, tramways, historic books, and architecture, among others. Fascinated with movement, he often invited visitors to his home to take a ride in his old train wagons, which he pushed on the train tracks he had installed in his yard: an unexpected experience! His listeners sensed such sparkling joy when listening to his captivating interpretations, from its kindling intense, fiery warmth to its gentle gracious sweetness. Conscious of the acoustical resonance of each room, he knew how to let silences speak fully, thus clarifying the musical narration and providing it with spiritual depth and elevation.

When I met Michel Chapuis in Saint-Séverin in 1984, I admired his noble yet gentle manner of playing. Although his hands were robust and gnarled, as if he had labored as an eighteenth-century tanner along the canals in Dole, once he began to play, they floated just above the keyboards, but his fingers were deeply enrooted in the keys,⁷⁴ like those of J. S. Bach! His vivid imagination and fantasy excelled in the interpretation of
Dieterich Buxtehude’s works. I remember the numerous interesting discussions in the church reception hall after Mass with artists from all over the world.

Michel Chapuis considered himself to be Catholic in the universal sense of the term.⁷⁵ On May 7–8, 1979, during the inauguration of Alfred Kern’s restoration of the 1741 Jean-André Silbermann organ at Saint-Thomas Lutheran Church in Strasburg, he illustrated the mission of the organ in the church by improvising in the French Classical style on themes from the old Parisian Ritual. Like the great humanist Albert Schweitzer, who had preached in this church, he believed that when music is felt deeply, either sacred or secular, it resonates in spiritual spheres where art and religion may meet.

Michel Chapuis played concerts in Europe, the United States, Russia, and Japan. He came to the United States at least on three occasions. On November 26 and 27, 1968, he gave a recital and masterclass at Northwestern University School of Music, Evanston, Illinois, and returned to play at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, University of Chicago, in 1978. During this same year, he inaugurated the Yves Koenig organ at Saint-Sulpice Church in Pierrefonds, performing Nicolas de Grigny’s entire Organ Mass. In Japan, he gave his first organ recital in the NKH Hall in Tokyo in 1976. He inaugurated three Aubertin organs there: his opus 48 (III/48), in the French Classical style at Shirane-Cho/Minami-Alps in 1993, where he returned at least ten times to give academies, concerts, and masterclasses, recorded by Plenum Vox in 1999; opus 13 (II/13) in the Lutheran Church in Tokyo in 1999; and opus 22 (II/22) in a home in Karuizawa in 2003. He gave concerts and masterclasses many times in Russia, notably on the Charles Mutin organ at the Tchaikovky Conservatory in Moscow beginning in 1993.

Throughout his entire career, Michel Chapuis collaborated with singers, choirs, and orchestras, as illustrated in several recordings: the 1967 Harmonia Mundi record of François Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres with Alfred
Deller, countertenor; Philip Todd, tenor; and Raphael Perulli, viola da gamba, at Augustins Chapel in Brignolles
(Var); in 1997: Quantin CD of four Handel concertos, opus 4, with the Marais Chamber Orchestra directed by Pascal Vigneron; and an Astrée CD of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Port Royal Mass in Houdan, directed by Emmanuel Mandrin; a 1998 CD of his inauguration of Laurent Plet’s restoration of the 1847 Callinet organ at Saint-Pierre Church in Liverdun captured his accompaniments of three local choirs, with works by Scheidt, Rinck, Boëly, Mendelssohn, Ritter, Herbeck, and Berthier.⁷⁶ In 1999, Glossa Records recorded his improvised verses in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Monsieur de Mauroy at Saint-Michel-en-Thiérache with Hervé Niquet’s Le Concert spirituel. In 2000, Plenum Vox recorded his inauguration of Bernard Hurvy’s twenty-six-stop early nineteenth century transitional-style organ in Charbonnières-les-Bains (near Lyon), with the Saint-Roch Choir directed by J. M. Blanchon, with works by Bach, Buxtehude, Mendelssohn, Guilmant, Bruckner, and improvisations on Salve Regina. Ekaterina Fedorova, soprano, the founder of Plenum Vox Records, gave many concerts and recorded with him: Magnificats by Guilain, Dandrieu, Beauvarlet-Charpentier, and improvisations on the Dom Bédos organ at Saint-Croix Abbey Church in Bordeaux in 2002, and Burgundian Christmas carols, vocal works by Clérambault, and improvisations on the 1768 Bénigne Boillot organ in Saint-Jean-de-Losne in 2003.

At the end of each concert, Michel Chapuis improvised in a style that valorized the organ with a wide variety of registrations. In 2004, when he improvised at the end of his concert on Jean-François Muno’s exemplary reconstruction (1992–1998) of the 1694 Jean de Joyeuse organ at Auch Cathedral, he received a standing ovation that lasted for over ten minutes! During the last ten years of his life, even as his vision deteriorated, his luminous and graceful improvisations continued to enlighten his audiences. Many of them were recorded live by Plenum Vox: a 2003 DVD in the Royal Chapel in Versailles and in Souvigny, a 2004 CD in the Romantic style on the Cavaillé-Coll organs at Saint-Ouen and Poligny, and a 2005 DVD in the German Baroque style on Bernard Aubertin’s organ at Saint-Louis-en-l’Île Church in Paris. He had assimilated the early French repertory so well that he was capable of improvising in the style of each composer and each period. He knew how to discern the tonalities that resonated well on each organ: for example, C Major and D Major in Dole, and G Major at Saint-Séverin.

Michel Chapuis’ 2001 Plenum Vox recordings in Dole remind us that this organ remained the star that inspired him throughout his entire career. These three CDs illustrate his eclectic repertory on this versatile instrument with three faces: the German face (Buxtehude, Kellner, Rinck, with improvisations), the French face (Boyvin, Tapray, d’Aquin, Balbastre and improvisations on Ave Maris Stella), and the Romantic face (Mendelssohn, Czerny, Guilmant, Brosig, Boëllmann, and Franck).

In addition to being a pioneer who revolutionized the French organ world in the second half of the twentieth century, this great concert and liturgical organist and professor generously shared his time, knowledge, and documents with his colleagues, students, and friends. His conception of French good taste goes beyond time and space: it encourages us to memorialize the past, far beyond an idea of comfort and superficial rapidity, by embracing beauty with simplicity, constant research, meditation, and spiritual depth. In addition to his beautiful music, his humanistic and fraternal approach to life, his conviviality, his humble simplicity, as well as his liberty of spirit, will continue to inspire us.

 

A French-American organist and musicologist, Carolyn Shuster was organist at the American Cathedral in Paris. In 1989, she was appointed titular of the Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at the Trinité Church and founded their weekly concert series. She has performed over 500 concerts in Europe and in the United States. She has also contributed articles to Revue de musicologie, La Flûte Harmonique, L’Orgue, Orgues Nouvelles, The American Organist, and The Diapason. Her recordings have been published by EMA, Ligia Digital, Schott, and Fugue State Films. In 2007, the French Cultural Minister awarded her the distinction of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters. 

 

Notes

1. Cf. Marc Baumann, “Interview with Michel Chapuis in Marienthal,” transcribed by Hubert Heller, February, 2003, and in www.union-sainte-cecile.org.

2. Cf. Pierre M. Guéritey, Karl Joseph
Riepp et l’Orgue de Dole, 2 vol. (Lyon, FERREOL, 1985).

3. Cf. Jacques Gardien, “Les Grandes Orgues de la Collégiale de Dole,” L’Orgue, no. 25, March 1936, pp. 6–14.

4. Odette Goulon, her married name, was appointed organist at Temple du Luxembourg in Paris in 1991. The dates of organists in this article are mostly those found in Pierre Guillot, Dictionnaire des organistes français des XIX^e et XX^e siècles, Sprimont, Belgium, 2003.

5. Émile Poillot (1886–1948) was organist of Saint-Bénigne Cathedral, Dijon, 1912–1948.

6. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, Plein Jeu, Interviews with Michel Chapuis (Vendôme: Le Centurion, 1979), p. 34. The Germans occupied Dole from June 17, 1940, to September 9, 1944.

7. Marquis Bernard de Froissard (1884–1962) was an administrator of Société Cavaillé-Coll, Mutin, Convers, & Cie. 

8. Jeanne Marguillard was organist at Sainte-Madeleine Church, Besançon, 1947–1993.

9. Édouard Souberbielle (1899–1989) also taught at Schola Cantorum and at Institut Grégorien.

10. Paule Piédelièvre (1902–1964) studied piano with Blanche Selva and was organist at Étrangers Church.

11. Yves Margat contributed articles to Guide du Concert. 

12. René Malherbe (1898–1969) was organist and choir director at Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou Church.

13. Simone Villard (b. 1927) was appointed organist at Sainte-Radegonde Church in Poitiers in 1952.

14. Jean-Albert Villard (1920–2000) was organist at Poitiers Cathedral, 1949–2000.

15. Joseph Gélineau, SJ (1920–2000), was a Jesuit priest, composer, and French liturgist. 

16. Denise Chapuis (b. 1928). They had seven children: Jean-Marie (†), Claude (†), Bruno, Laurent (who worked with the harpsichord builder Anselm and the organbuilder Alain Sals), François, Claire (†) Christophe, ten grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

17. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 58.

18. Jean-Marc Cicchero, Hommage à une Passion, Éd. O. V., 2018, p. 126. Erwin Muller had apprenticed with Schwenkedel, then as a voicer with Gonzalez. His shop was active in Croissy from 1950–1986.

19. Line Zilgien (1906–1954), organist there from 1940–1954, was close to Claire Delbos, Olivier Messiaen’s wife.

20. Claude Hermelin (1901–1986), began to study voicing in 1923 with Charles Mutin (cf. J.-M. Cicchero, op. cit., p. 64) and wrote articles under the alias Jean Mas.

21. Gabriel d’Alençon (1881–1956) restored the 17th-century organ in Rozay-en-Brie and was interested in temperaments. From 1936 to 1939, Claude Hermelin collaborated with him in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, and they gave courses in organbuilding at Schola Cantorum, Paris.

22. Cf. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., pp. 212–213.

23. Pierre Cochereau (1924–1984) was titular of the grand organ at Notre-Dame Cathedral, 1955–1984.

24. Pierre Moreau (1907–1991) played there, 1946–1986. Michel Chapuis wrote the preface to his Livre d’Orgue (Europart Music, 1990).

25. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 96.

26. Eugène Borrel (1876–1962), violinist and musicologist, L’Interprétation de la musique française (de Lully à la Révolution), Paris, Librairie Félix Alcan, 1934, p. 150.

27. Jules Écorcheville (1872–1915), musicologist, wrote De Lulli à Rameau—L’esthétique musicale (Paris, 1906). 

28. Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume (1905–2000), Les secrets de la musique ancienne, recherches sur l’interprétation (Fasquelle, 1964).

29. Cf. Jesse Eschbach, “Marie-Claire Alain, pédagogue internationale,” Marie-Claire Alain, L’Orgue, Cahiers et Mémoires, no. 56, 1996—II, p. 59. She mentions that this concert took place in 1958, but this date needs to be verified.

30. Eugène Borrel, op cit., p. 150. 

31. Claude Duchesneau, op. cit., p. 98.

32. Nicole Gravet, L’orgue et l’art de la registration en France du XVI^e siècle au début du XIX^e siècle, originally published in 1960, it was reedited with a preface by Michel Chapuis, Chatenay Malabry, Ars Musicae, 1996.

33. In 1996, the European Organ Center in Marmoutier reedited Michel Chapuis’ interpretations of Böhm, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach, de Grigny, and Dandrieu on this organ.

34. Cf. his publications on French Classical music, 1661–1789: Dictionnaire d’interprétation (Initiation), (Honoré Champion, 1983) and L’Interprétation de la musique pour orgue (Honoré Champion, 1988); his early music facsimiles are edited by Anne Fuzeau. He teaches in the early music department at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Paris.

35. Philippe Hartmann (1928–2014) had apprenticed with Gutschenritter, worked three months for Gonzalez, for Émile Bourdon in Dijon, eight years for Pierre Chéron, collaborated with Georges Lhôte, with Jean Deloye from 1969–1975, worked independently at Le Havre in 1982, and as a voicer for Haerpfer.

36. In 1993, Daniel Birouste incorporated it into the organ at the Saint-Vincent Church in Roquevaire (Bouches-du-Rhône).

37. Cf. Yvette Carbou, Pierre Cochereau Témoignages (Zurfluh, 1999), p. 38.

38. Cf. Jean-Marc Cicchero, op. cit., pp. 104–105.

39. Father Lucien Aumont (1920–2014) lived in a tower of Saint-Séverin Church. From 1947 until 1987, he recorded concerts there and broadcast them in programs at Radio-France-INA.

40. He had been organist there from 1921 until 1960.

41. Cf. Félix Raugel, Les Grandes Orgues des Églises de Paris et du Département de la Seine, Paris, Fischbacher, pp. 100–102.

42. Jacques Marichal (1934–1987) was also choir organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral from 1964 to 1987.

43. Francis Chapelet (1934), a well-known specialist in Spanish organ music, is honorary organist at Saint-Séverin. 

44. The three actual titulars at Saint-Séverin are François Espinasse, Christophe Mantoux, and Véronique Le Guen.

45. John Abbey II (1843–1930).

46. In 1966, Philippe Hartmann built a choir organ (I/7) for Saint-Séverin. Roger Chapelet, Francis Chapelet’s father, painted its organ case.

47. L’Orgue, no. 112, Oct.–Dec.1964, p. 110.

48. François-Henri Houbart, Partita sur un choral dit Sanctus de Saint-Séverin (Delatour France, 2010).

49. Cantoral: UD 30 1299 and 5, UD 30 1385.

50. For a complete list of Michel Chapuis’ recordings, cf. Alain Cartayrade, www.france-orgue.fr/disque.

51. Cf. M. Tchebourkina. L’orgue de la Chapelle royale de Versailles: À la recherche d’une composition perdue // L’Orgue. Lyon, 2007. 2007–IV no. 280. She was organist at the Royal Chapel in Versailles 1996–2010.

52. Plenum Vox (PV 004) recorded a CD of Nivers, Lebègue, Couperin, Dandrieu, Marchand, and Lully there in 1999 and a DVD in 2003.

53. Bärenreiter published the first eight issues of their periodical, Renaissance de L’Orgue, from 1968 to 1970, followed by Connoissance de l’orgue, until 2000. At the end of the 1960s, Jean Fonteneau taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in the Boston area, he promoted A. F. S. O. A. by organizing concerts and lectures at Saint Thomas in New York City and at Harvard University.

54. In May and June 1967, several articles appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde and L’Art Sacré. This restoration by Gonzalez was highly supervised by the A. F. S. O. A.
55. Cf. Michel Chapuis, notes in the Plenum Vox CD of the complete works of Jacques Boyvin in Auch, PV 011, 2004.

56. XCP Montpellier, recorded Michel Chapuis’ concert there on September 5, 1993: cf. www.france-orgue.fr/disque.

57. Jean Fellot (1905–1967) wrote À la recherche de l’orgue classique (reedited by Édisud in 1993).

58. This book was written by hand and printed by the author at Montoire-sur-le-Loir in 1977.

59. Cf. Pierre Chéron’s inventory in L’Orgue de Jean-Esprit et Joseph Isnard à la Basilique de la Madeleine à Saint-Maximin, 1774, prefaced by Michel Chapuis (Réalisation Art et Culture des Alpes-Maritimes, Nice, 1991).

60. According to Sister Marie-Emmanuelle, this organ had 31 manual stops and its pedal stops were borrowed. Curiously, its action was electro-pneumatic. One can hear Michel Chapuis’ improvisations on https://youtu.be/5u-0eR3BYko. This organ was integrated into a new 42-stop neo-classical organ by Olivier Chevron, inaugurated in the Abbey at Celles-sur-Belle (Charente-Maritime) on May 5, 2018.

61. Cf. Cathédral de Poitiers, 1787 à 1790, L’Orgue de François-Henri Clicquot (Direction of Cultural Affaires in Poitou-Charentes, 1994).

62. This CD also includes Harald Vogel in the Georgskirche.

63. He taught in Semur-en-Auxois with Odile Bayeux (organ), Blandine Verlet (harpsichord), Alain Anselm (harpsichord building), Philippe Hartmann (organbuilding) and Jean Saint-Arroman (French performance practice).

64. This festival was founded by Pierre Lacroix in 1974 under the musical direction of Jean-Patrice Brosse.

65. André Stricker (1931–2003) taught there, 1954–1996. He had studied with Helmut Walcha.

66. Marc Schaefer (b. 1934), a former André Stricker student, taught there until 2000.

67. Pierre Vidal (1927–2010), composer and musicographer, remained there until 1991.

68. Cf. Jean-Louis Coignet, “L’Orgue du Conservatoire de Strasbourg,” L’Orgue, no. 117, January–March 1966, p. 39.

69. Cf. Éric Lebrun article blog SNAPE: www.snape.fr/index.php/2017/11/13.

70. Cf. Eugène Borrel, op. cit., p. 148. 

71. Jean Saint-Arroman, “Authenticity,” in Dictionnaire d’interprétation (Initiation), Paris, Honoré Champion, 1983, p. 13.

72. Michel Bouvard was an auditor and studied with Chapuis at Saint-Séverin.

73. In 1999, Natives recorded the organ works of Claude Balbastre interpreted by Michel Chapuis and his student Marina Tchebourkina on the historic grand organ at Saint-Roch Church, Paris.

74. Cf. Roland Servais, “Ses mains étaient comme des racines,” Chronique des Moniales, Abbaye Notre-Dame du Pesquié, March 2018, pp. 25–27.

75. Cf. Pastor Claude Rémy Muess, “L’église luthérienne Saint-Thomas de Strasbourg retrouve son orgue Silbermann,” L’Orgue, no. 173, January–March 1980, pp. 5–11. 

76. Available at: Association Amis de l’orgue de Liverdun, 1, place des Armes, 54460 Liverdun, France.

Ennis Fruhauf

Ennis Fruhauf holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Michigan (1967, 1968), and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California (1973). He has held occasional church music positions, college and university teaching appointments, and is currently publisher, editor, music copyist, arranger, and composer for Fruhauf Music Publications (since 2004).

Ricercare (Ital.), “. . . ricercare is a verb, meaning to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence . . . testing the tuning, probing the key . . . .” (Johann Gottfried Walther, Musikalisches Lexikon, Leipzig, 1732);¹ and as a noun: “. . . Thus in Bach’s time it served almost exclusively for the title of a strict and, in its polyphonic texture, highly elaborate fugue.”²

 

Introduction

Ah, well, it is perhaps a tale to be retold yet once more, an instructive yarn well worth spinning anew, offered up here as an autumn fantasy, one with an exceedingly wry afterglow. The occasions and events in question took place some 300 years ago. And in spite of unexpected setbacks that overshadowed the final outcome, the adventure might after all be credited with having led to the creation of an unusual composition for organ, one that might otherwise have never come to light in the same context. 

The tale is of Johann Sebastian Bach’s trip to Dresden in the autumn of 1717, undertaken at the urging of the royal Saxon court chapel’s violinist-concertmaster, Jean-Baptiste Volumier. Bach was charged, in essence, with the mission of upholding the honor of his homeland’s keyboard music tradition against a figurative incursion launched by one of France’s eminent composers, Louis Marchand (1669–1732), Organiste du Roi. Marchand was on an extended leave from Paris at the time, touring Germany with a display of his keyboard and compositional talents, and currently seeking favor from the royal Dresden court. Bach also hoped to win favor and a remunerative purse, while at the same time pitting his skills against Marchand in an international venue. 

The composition in question is Bach’s legendary Pièce d’orgue (thus titled in more than one manuscript source), a three-section work, at the heart of which is a finely crafted extended fantasy for keyboard, presumably for pipe organ with pedals. It is a living time capsule—one of few words and many notes—that offers up a vibrant slice-of-life drawn from the travels of an adventurous composer in his early thirties, who was hard-pressed by circumstances on his home front, while also on a quest for recognition and honor abroad.

Bach’s arrival coincided with the day of Marchand’s tests, trials, and demonstrations. Concertmaster Volumier took the initiative of arranging for Bach to overhear portions of these recitals from a concealed vantage point. It has been recorded that by the end of his contest, Marchand had indeed won the day and would continue his sojourn victoriously, having received meritorious and remunerative recognitions.

What might have taken place in the course of the evening that followed is a subject for speculation, perhaps even for imagination. Is it possible that these two notable exemplars of Germanic and French keyboard artistry might have been able to escape the rigors of international diplomacy, that they might have found time to meet in one of the city’s spacious church sanctuaries, one where they might also find a pipe organ installation that would provide a viable proving ground for their dueling skills? Just imagine what could have been . . . .

 

A Fantasy  

(Extract from an anonymous personal diary, Journals, dated October/November, 1717)

. . . It was already past dusk when the two principal parties of the contest arrived at the door leading up to the organ loft. There were three of us surveying the scene from a distance, gathered together in a tight knot and hidden from view in the shadows of the front chapel. We recognized Concertmaster Wolumyer of Dresden as he entered, followed by Concertmaster Bach, who was accompanied by two of his Weimar students. The French King’s Organist-Composer, Louis Marchand, arrived soon after, in company with two attachés assigned to his visit. Apparently Bach was to launch the evening’s music-makings, and indeed, as we watched he turned to M. Marchand, greeted him cordially, withdrew a vellum music manuscript from his folio and held it out to his elder colleague. M. Marchand graciously received the score, opened it, and proceeded to peruse the contents. Although their conversing tones were lost in the acoustical ambiance of a lofty nave, it was apparent that Bach was to begin the evening’s music-making with his recrafted Pièce d’orgue, written and ornamented in the French manner. We would hear it now with the addition of two outer movements. 

As we watched, the trio from Weimar separated from the others, making their way up to the dimly candle-lit organ loft and taking their places at the console. Bach had been allowed time to familiarize himself with the instrument earlier in the day, and his two flanking assistants were well coached in advance. Soon enough the first notes of an arpeggiated tonic chord broke the silence, ever so light in touch and sounding out on clear stops: we heard a single line of dancing arpeggios and passaggios in a compound triple meter, falling and rising, rippling through the gamut of the keyboard. This was the newly added Très vitement, a sparkling warm-up exercise for the fingers, leading up to the five-voice Gravement. Contrary to the French tradition of a Grand plein jeu registration, tonight the Gravement began on one of the instrument’s gentlest registers. We heard a low tonic pedal note, then a G-major chord in the manuals, with the soprano tonic pitch suspended over to the first quarter-note of the next beat, and four descending scale notes in succession. This motivic pattern migrated from one voice to another, delicately ornamented internally, and at each successive cadential gesture. Also of note, at major cadences a new stop or set of stops would be added by the two flanking registrants. By shifting from one manual to another and progressively engaging manual and pedal couplers, a tightly imitative ricercar with a brief compound motif for a subject was being transformed into a majestic paean, echoing gloriously through the nave’s acoustical environment. This was Bach in his native setting, ‘testing the lungs’ of a church’s instrument as he had done from year to year in the course of his many investigative journeys. In the final line of the Gravement, we heard a new voice enter in the manuals, further intensifying the texture and leading up to an abruptly dramatic pause on an unresolved deceptive cadence. After a momentary silence, the Lentement resumed on foundation stops, beginning with arpeggiations of the Gravement’s closing chord, sounded over a bass line that descended step by chromatic step to an extended dominant pedalpoint and final closing cadence in G Major.

There was a stillness and silence that followed the last chords as they faded into the upper reaches of the nave. We sat quietly, awed and deeply moved by the music we had just heard and calmed by its lingering aura. Within moments it became evident that Bach was preparing registrations for his next selection. Even though we had been advised in advance that he would likely play one of his newest keyboard compositions, a single-movement fantasy in D minor for clavier, nothing could have prepared us for the intense drama that was to follow . . . . 

[End of Journals extract.]

Who could fathom what might or might not have transpired in the course of such an evening? If it had even taken place, who might possibly divine what Bach would have played, or what selections Marchand could have chosen from his repertoire. There is no indication that the two of them resorted to swordplay—whether improvising with epées, or instead on keyboards, each of them with assistants in alert attendance. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Marchand carried an inked copy of Bach’s Fantasy with him back to Paris and the royal library. And if fate had denied Bach an opportunity to perform his recently penned chromatic Fantasy in D Minor³ for Marchand at an organ console, it could well have been included in his harpsichord recitations on the following day.

Varied accounts of Bach’s letter of invitation addressed to Marchand in which he proposed a public contest indicate that the two of them were to meet at the private mansion of Count Joachim Friedrich Flemming for a public display of their musical prowess. Alas for Bach, his competitor—perhaps wisely—chose to bow out of the tentative commitment, traveling on to his next port of call in the early hours of the designated morning. In spite of Marchand’s unanticipated absence, the public hearing was to take place after all: Bach’s impressive solo performance on that day won him royal recognition as hoped, and his meeting with Count Flemming would prove invaluable in the coming years. Alas, his prize purse of 500 talers was waylaid in the course of its delivery. And in the event Bach had traveled to Dresden with a hand-copied score of the Fantasy in G in his possession, it rode back with its composer on the return trip. More importantly though, a doorway had been opened that would offer future return visits, valuable musical associations, activities, and honors.

 

Discussion

Could it be that the middle movement of the Fantasy, as we know it today, might have evolved from on-the-spot improvisations performed on some of the various church organs Bach visited in his many travels? Could the music of an earlier version of the mid-section have offered an idealized means of “testing the lungs of an instrument”—a ricercare, or a seeking-out—by starting with quiet stops and gradually adding registers at subsequent cadential breaks and convenient moments? It is easy enough to imagine that a far more sophisticated end product, impeccably written in five- and six-voice tightly imitative counterpoint in the manner of a classic ricercata, was eventually honed for solemn occasions and processionals and found its way to ink and paper. An earlier manuscript of the central movement, one with French markings and an abbreviated ending, is cited as a possible compositional byproduct of Bach’s exposure to French keyboard music studied and copied in Weimar’s music library.⁴ Could Bach have added the improvisatorial framing introduction and closing sections (with their French titles) at a later date, in anticipation of his supposed meeting with Marchand? 

The Gravement is written in common meter with alla breve note values (i.e., two half-notes per measure). The quasi-motivic subject that serves to generate 157 measures of tightly knit counterpoint is generically no more or less than a suspended quarter- or half-note, followed by four descending pitches, the two units serving interchangeably as a head and a tail. It is freely imitated in tight succession, as well as in multiple paired overlapping entries. A secondary structural event can be found in the fantasy’s numerous staircase-like scalar progressions of whole-note pitches in the pedal line, employed with dramatically telling effect.⁵ Overall, the Gravement is neither fugue nor fancy, rather it is a one-of-a-kind ricercar-like construction, albeit perhaps an imitative fantasy, but one that is uniquely imbued with un esprit français.

There are additional elements throughout all three movements that hint strongly at Bach’s emulation of a classical hexachord fantasy, a formalized contrapuntal structure emanating from sixteenth-century practices. Hexachordal elements are present freely in the six-note groupings of the Très vitement’s compound meter,⁶ in the six diatonically related keys traversed in the course of the Gravement’s tonal excursions, and finally in the hexachordal arpeggiations of the Lentement.⁷ It is worth noting that the title, Fantasy, would appear to have been applied by cataloguers of subsequent generations, but not by the composer. Above and beyond formalized or traditional concepts, and viewed as a single entity, Bach’s storied BWV 572 is in essence a grand tone poem, a broadly proportioned triptych of three contrasting sections—two linear outer panels framing an impeccably woven central tapestry. 

 

Coda

In support of a progressive registrational plan for the Gravement, there are numerous authentic and half cadences throughout the contrapuntally textured movement that facilitate the addition of stops and couplers, or shifts from one manual to another.⁸

There is the anomalous presence of a low pedal B-natural (measure 66), a note not normally found on Germanic pedalboards but occasionally present in French manual and/or pedal dispositions. While such an insignificant deviation could easily be glossed over, it is cited here in support of a Francophile leaning and interpretation, one that is already abundantly apparent in the French titles of the opus and its individual movements. 

There is also the matter of a quasi-legendary pedagogical lineage to be considered in the course of these closing words. A multi-generational succession of teachers—one of many that can be traced from Bach into the 20th century—extends from a late Leipzig organ student, Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809, Erfurt), through Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846, Darmstadt), to Adolph Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863, Breslau); and from Hesse continuing through Jacques Nicolas Lemmens (1823–1881, Belgium, Paris), to Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911, Paris), and to Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937, Paris); passed on in turn by Guilmant and Widor to Marcel Dupré (1886–1971, Paris). Notable from Dupré—and relevant to this discussion—is his recorded version of the Fantasy, registered and performed in an accumulative and glorious manner on the Cavaillé-Coll instrument of St. Sulpice, Paris, during his tenure as titular organist.⁹

And now, to end this autumn reverie of what-ifs—much in the same manner as it began—on an inquisitive note: Is it possble that the tradition of a broadly romantic and accumulative interpretation could have been passed on and survived intact in its passage through such a fragile and tenuous teaching tradition, spanning over six generations from 1750 to the latter twentieth century, and onward?

 

Notes

1. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 330. 

2. Ibid., p. 329.

3. Eventually Fantasy in D Minor, S. 903 (without Fugue).

4. Notably Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’orgue (1699, Paris, reissued 1711), Bach’s hand copy dating from ca. 1713.

5. See Example 2.

6. See Example 1.

7. See Example 5.

8. See  Examples 3 and 4.

9. See http://www.marceldupre.com/ CD: Mercury Living Presence recording of Marcel Dupré: Bach (Six Schübler Chorales, Fantasy in C Minor, Fantasy in G Major) Saint-Sulpice, 1959, available in CD reissues.

 

A Selected Bibliography

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, ed. The Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1945, 1966.

_____________. The New Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Gaines, James R. Evening in the Palace of Reason. New York: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins Publishers, 2005.

Gardiner, John Eliot. Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Geiringer, Karl. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Culmination of an Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Griepenkerl, Friedrich Conrad, and Ferdinand Roitzsch, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Orgelwerke, Vol. IV. New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1950.

Widor, Charles-Marie, and Albert Schweitzer, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Complete Organ Works, Vol. III. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1913.

Wolff, Christoph. Bach, Essays on His Life and Music. Cambridge (MA) & London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

____________. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

 

An apologia and acknowledgements

In order to provide a degree of continuity and to avoid undue interruptions in the flow of the text, end notes have been kept to a minimum. All details and factual accountings have been extracted from the sources cited above; they are often repeated in more than one source, sometimes with degrees of variation that have required editorial pruning. The Journal entry is a fictitious creation, a work of imagination. In his Evening in the Palace of Reason, James R. Gaines offers an exemplary format for overlapping multiple perspectives and layers of narration, and for combining recorded facts with speculative premises and intuitions to produce an animated account of historical events. His model has provided a structural guidepost for the essay featured here, offered informally as an example of speculative musicology. There are sure to be lacunae great and small in these words, for which all due apologies are offered.