Forget the Pig; this is just glorious music!

Yeah, yeah, I know, whenever you hear the main theme of this movement you automatically think of the movie, Babe. But now it's time for you to get over the pig and just listen. Listen to the majestic, glorious sound of this magnificent Maestoso Finale of Camille Saint Saens' Symphony No. 3 in C minor. Picture the orchestra and the organ, and Saint Saens conducting it himself in London's St. James Hall in May of 1886. Close your eyes and put yourself there in the audience. You're one of the very first people on earth to hear it. Let the sound take you in, envelope you. Revel in it.

This is far from pig music.


The Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, was completed by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886 at what was probably the artistic zenith of his career. It is also popularly known as the "Organ Symphony", even though it is not a true symphony for organ, but simply an orchestral symphony where two sections out of four use the pipe organ. The French title of the work is more accurate: Symphonie No. 3 "avec orgue" (with organ).

Of composing the work Saint-Saëns said "I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again." The composer seemed to know it would be his last attempt at the symphonic form, and he wrote the work almost as a type of "history" of his own career: virtuoso piano passages, brilliant orchestral writing characteristic of the Romantic period, and the sound of a cathedral-sized pipe organ. The work was dedicated to the memory of Saint-Saëns's friend Franz Liszt, who died that year, on July 31, 1886.

This symphony was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society in England, and the first performance was given in London on 19 May 1886, at St James's Hall, conducted by the composer. He also conducted the French premiere in January 1887.

Information: Wikipedia

Read more...

Mozart Fantasie in F minor for Organ, K. 608

Commissioned in March of the last year of Mozart's life (1791), this piece has been described as "one of the most perfect works in Mozart's inexhaustible genius", and "with its triple trills and dense textures, is impossible for a single organist to play as notated. Its superhuman virtuosity is that of a machine..."

Read more...

J.S. Bach: Toccata & Fugue in E major, BWV 566

Jürgen Marcussen (1781–1860) founded the organ-building company in 1806. They used the name Marcussen & Reuter from 1826 to 1848, when the name became Marcussen & Søn after the founder's son, Jürgen Andreas Marcussen, joined the firm. The company has been based in a house in the small town of Åbenrå, in southern Jutland, since 1830. Several organs built in Scandinavia and North Germany in their first decades are still in use today, the oldest dating from 1820.

Johannes Lassen Zachariassen (1864–1922), a grandson of the founder's daughter, took over the firm from 1902 to 1922. The firm's work was still based at this stage on the Baroque organ-building tradition, but from about 1900, in common with nearly all other organ-builders, they began making use of pneumatics, electricity, and other innovations popular at the time, typified by the organs of Cavaillé-Coll.

This new development did not last long. They were one of the first organ builders, following the 1925 organ conference in Hamburg and Lübeck, to recognize the superiority of the sonic, structural, and technical principles of the North-European Baroque organ; they returned to these principles from about 1930.

The guiding figure behind the change was Sybrand Zachariassen (1900-1960), who took over management of the firm in 1922 at the age of 21. Within a few decades, Marcussen organs began to gain an international reputation, particularly as fine models of the mechanical organ, which again became the preeminent basis of organ-building practice in the second half of the twentieth century.

Sybrand Jürgen Zachariassen (b Flensburg, 22 Oct 1931) became director in 1960. In 1994/1995 the firm became a family-owned limited company, when Claudia Zachariassen (born 26 May 1969 in Sønderborg, the 7th generation of the Marcussen/Zachariassen family) joined the firm; she became president in 2002.

Marie-Claire Alain, Marcussen organ (Nicolai Kirke, Kolding, Denmark)

Read more...

The Washington Cathedral Pipe Organ: Grand Choeur Dialogué by Gigout

I apologize for failing to post this yesterday as I intended this to be in honor of Veteran's Day.  But better a day late than never!

Eugène Gigout (23 March 1844 – 9 December 1925) was a French organist and a composer of European late-romantic music for organ.

A pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns, he served as the organist of Saint-Augustin Church in Paris for 62 years. He became widely known as a teacher and his output as a composer was considerable. Renowned as an expert improviser, he also founded his own music school. (His nephew-by-marriage, Leon Boëllmann, became another fine organist and composer for the organ, whose death at the very young age of 35 was a severe loss to French music.)

The 10 pièces pour orgue (composed 1890) are Gigout's most celebrated compositions. They include the Toccata in B minor, his best-known creation, which turns up as a frequent encore at organ recitals. Also fairly often played, and to be found in the same collection, is a Scherzo in E major. Other notable pieces by Gigout are Grand Choeur Dialogué and Marche Religieuse. Gigout's works are now available on several commercial recordings.


The Grand Choeur Dialogué was recorded in 1976, just after this magnificent instrument was enlarged to its present 189 ranks. Paul Callaway was organist/choirmaster at the cathedral from 1939 to 1976.  This LINK will take you to a 2008 Washington Post article that describes the organ.

Read more...

Dieterich Buxtehude - Ciacona in C minor

Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637 – 9 May 1707) was a German-Danish organist and a highly regarded composer of the Baroque period. His organ works comprise a central part of the standard organ repertoire and are frequently performed at recitals and church services. He wrote in a wide variety of vocal and instrumental idioms, and his style strongly influenced many composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach. Buxtehude, along with Heinrich Schütz, is considered today to be one the most important German composers of the mid-Baroque.

He is thought to have been born with the name Diderich Buxtehude. Scholars dispute both the year and country of his birth, although most now accept it taking place in 1637 in Helsingborg, Skåne, at the time part of Denmark (but now part of Sweden). His obituary stated that "he recognized Denmark as his native country, whence he came to our region; he lived about 70 years". Others, however, claim that he was born at Oldesloe in the Duchy of Holstein, which at that time was a part of the Danish Monarchy (but is now in Germany). Later in his life he Germanized his name and began signing documents Dieterich Buxtehude.

The bulk of Buxtehude's oeuvre consists of vocal music, which covers a wide variety of styles, and organ works, which concentrate mostly on chorale settings and large-scale sectional forms. Chamber music constitutes a minor part of the surviving output, although the only works Buxtehude published during his lifetime were fourteen chamber sonatas. Unfortunately, many of Buxtehude's compositions have been lost. The librettos for his oratorios, for example, survive; but none of the scores does, which is particularly unfortunate, because his German oratorios seem to be the model for later works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann. Further evidence of lost works by Buxtehude and his contemporaries can be found in the recently discovered catalogue of a 1695 music-auction in Lübeck.

Information Source: Wikipedia

Read more...

The Pipe Organ, Queen of Instruments!

The late Mozart biographer, Wolfgang Hildescheimer, claimed that Mozart hated the pipe organ, most likely due to the fact that when Mozart was young, one of his primary duties while he was in service to Salzburg's Archbishop Colloredo was that of Cahthedral Organist. This duty required that he be at the Cathedral several times a day for an hour or two each time to play for morning, noon, and evening services, cutting into the young composer's day and interrupting any and every activity in which he might be engaged. However it was Mozart himself who wrote to a friend that the pipe organ was "die Königin der Instrumente" (the Queen of instruments), indicating that it wasn't the organ that Mozart despised so much as the schedule that was imposed upon him to play it.

Today I begin a series of posts entitled, The Queen of Instruments, featuring the world's most famous composers for the organ from Bach & Buxtehude to Saint Saens & Durufle, starting off with the final movement from Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata from Symphony No 5 Op.42 on the Klais organ in Wurzburg Cathedral, played by German organist, Hans Musch.

The Klais organ was built in 1969 and was completely new, since the last Klais organ (built in 1937) was destroyed in 1945 when the cathedral sustained heavy damage. The choir and transcepts were rebuilt to their baroque splendour but the nave was rebuilt into a more Romanesque style with a flat wooden ceiling. As you can see from a few photos in the video, the console is a five manual beast modelled on Cavaille-Coll's great examples in Notre Dame and St Sulpice but totally finished in black, even to having black naturals on the keyboard with white sharps. It contains 6,654 pipes and 86 speaking stops. There is a small 'swallows nest' choir organ of 20 stops, but this is to be joined by another choir organ of 52 stops to be built by Steinmeyer in 2010! To me it has a characteristic Klais sound, although nowhere near as overbearing as its organ in Cologne Cathedral with its unusual mixtures and recent bombastic reeds.

Read more...