JULIAN RHODES' DREAM ORGANS
THE ORGAN IN LITERATURE

The 1738 Müller organ in the Bavokerk at Haarlem acheived a considerable reputation almost from the time of its construction. Handel and Mozart played it; by the time Charles Burney wrote about it in 1773 its fame aroused the highest expectations. He reported that it was said to be "the best in Europe - that is, in the world". In Britain and America Haarlem was commonly regarded as the ultimate continental organ, representative of grand European instruments in general.

In 'Moby Dick' (1851), Herman Melville assumes that the reputation of Haarlem is familiar to his readers:

...standing in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey - the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth.

An account of a visit to Haarlem is featured in 'Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates' (1865) by Mary Mapes Dodge. The Bavokerk organ is heard in recital, and the organist plays up a musical storm:

What was that? Who screamed? What screamed - that terrible, musical scream? Was it man or demon? Or was it some monster shut up behind that carved brass frame - behind those great silver columns - some despairing monster begging, screaming for freedom? It was the Vox Humana!

Click here for a fuller extract. For more on the vox humana, see below.

There are many nineteenth-century descriptions of numinous, sublime organ performances. Washington Irving gives such an account in 'Westminster Abbey', from 'The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.' (1820):

Suddenly the notes of the deep-labouring organ burst upon the ear, falling with doubled and redoubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of sound. How well do their volume and grandeur accord with this mighty building! With what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe their awful harmony through these caves of death, and make the solemn sepulchre vocal! And now they rise in triumphant acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes, and piling sound on sound.

For a fuller extract, click here.

In George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (1872), the scholarly Mr. Casaubon speaks to his young fiancée, Dorothea:

"As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned."
"No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Dorothea. "When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob."

In 1837 Lowell Mason visited Fribourg (Freiberg, Switzerland) and wrote:

There was a motetto by Haydn, - a vocal piece... it seemed almost a pity that such a piece of music, requiring voices, should have been selected for the organ... But when, the prelude drawing to a close, the organist came to the vocal passage, what was my astonishment to hear a choir, as it appeared, commence and sing. It was distinct from the organ, which all the while played the accompaniment. The voices were heard, distinctly heard, and it seemed as if there could be no mistake...

Once more the vox humana. The example at Haarlem, so vividly described by Mary Mapes Dodge, had been mentioned by Burney:

As to the vox humana, which is so celebrated, it does not at all resemble a human voice, though a very good stop of its kind...

And Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, visiting Fribourg in 1844, wrote of its vox humana:

A very fine stop, of pleasing tone, better than that of the ordinary voix inhumaines; but vocal accentuation, choirs of cherubim and of angels, the articulation of words, and all the other qualities attributed to it are a good two thousand leagues from the truth.

The above extract was quoted by Andrew Freeman in 'The Organ', July 1943. Freeman paraphrased Hamel's 'Nouveau Manuel Complet du Factuer d'Orgues' (1849) as follows:

...much of its fame was due to hotel keepers who found it to their interests to circulate all sorts of marvellous tales! Travellers simply had to hear it and the tales about it, and their recapitualtions brought others to the town with the same object.

The fascination with the vox humana - that organ-stop which, in literature at least, gave voice to man's most heartfelt yearnings and most celestial reveries - was to endure well into the 20th-century. The following is from 'Brighton Rock' by Graham Greene (1938); the setting is a cafe:

The wireless droned a programme of dreary music, broadcast by a cinema organist - a great vox humana trembled across the crumby stained desert of used cloths: the world's wet mouth lamenting over life.

The organ's role as a producer of awe-inspiring, emotionally overwhelming sounds led naturally to its role as an instrument of terror, perhaps most familiar to the public consciousness in films of the novels '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' and 'The Phantom of the Opera'.

An early example of this genre is the short story 'Maese Pérez, the organist', by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870). The aged Maese Pérez plays one final time for the Midnight Christmas mass at Santa Inés, Seville. Bécquer's description of the music is perhaps the most romantic example encountered so far:

The multitudinous voices of the metal tubes gave forth a prolonged and majestic chord, which died away little by little, as if a gentle breeze had borne away its last echoes.
     To this opening burst, which seemed like a voice lifted up to heaven from earth, responded a sweet and distant note, which went on swelling and swelling in volume until it became a torrent of overpowering harmony. It was the voice of the angels, traversing space, and reaching the world.
     Then distant hymns began to be heard, intoned by the hierarchies of seraphim; a thousand hymns at once, mingling to form a single one, though this one was only an accompaniment to a strange melody which seemed to float above that ocean of mysterious echoes, as a strip of fog above the waves of the sea.
     One song after another died away. The movement grew simpler. Now only two voices were heard, whose echoes blended. Then but one remained, and alone sustained a note as brilliant as a thread of light. The priest bowed his face, and above his grey head appeared the host. At that moment the note which Maese Pérez was holding began to swell and swell, and an explosion of unspeakable joy filled the church.

Maese Pérez expires at the organ (shades of Louis Vierne), and all lament his passing; but his ghost returns each year to play the organ at the Midnight mass. Click here to read the complete story.

In '20,000 Leagues under the Sea' (1864) by Jules Verne, Captain Nemo of the submarine Nautilus is "a man who has broken all ties that bound him to humanity." He declares:

'I am not what is called a civilised man. I have done with society entirely, for reasons that seem to me good; therefore I do not obey its laws...'

His organ aboard the Nautilus is "fixed in one of the panels" of the impressive saloon. Music is his solace, and is also the means by which Verne reveals the dark emotions beneath Nemo's controlled surface:

I went to to salon, from whence I heard some chords. Captain Nemo was there, bending over his organ, and plunged into musical ecstasy.
"Captain," I said to him.
He did not hear me.
"Captain," I repeated, touching his hand.
He shuddered and turned.
. . .
The captain's fingers were then running over the keys of the instrument, and I noticed that he only struck the black keys, which gave to his melodies a Scottish character. He had soon forgotten my presence, and was plunged into a reverie that I did not seek to dissipate.

Nemo's emotions become increasingly unstable as his desire for revenge on humanity grows. His organ music becomes more melancholy:

At that moment I heard the distant strains of the organ, a sad harmony to an indefinable chaunt, the wail of a soul longing to break these earthly bonds. I listened with senses alert, scarcely breathing; plunged, like Captain Nemo, in that musical ecstasy which was drawing him, in spirit, to the end of life.
. . .
I reached the door to the saloon and opened it gently. It was plunged in profound darkness. The strains of the organ sounded faintly. Captain Nemo was there. He did not see me. Even in the full light I do not think he would have noticed me, so entirely was he absorbed in the ecstasy.
. . .
He came towards me silently, his arms crossed, gliding like a spectre. His breast was swelling with sobs, and I heard him murmur these words, his last which ever struck my ear - "Almighty God! enough! enough!"

At the end of he novel he Nautilus plunges to its doom in a killer whirlpool.

'The Phantom of the Opera' (1911) by Gaston Leroux is the apothosis of the nineteenth-century tradition. In the following passage the innocent Christine has met the 'phantom', Erik, who shows her his accommodation in a basement of the Paris Opera:

I felt as if I were entering a mortuary chamber. The walls were all hung with black but, instead of the white tears that usually relieve that funereal upholstery, there was an enormous stave of music with the notes of the Dies Irae, many times repeated... Then I saw the keyboard of an organ which filled one whole side of the wall. On the desk was a music-book covered with red notes. I asked leave to look at it, and, on the first page, read 'Don Juan Triumphant'. "Yes," he said, "I compose sometimes. I began that work twenty years ago..." "Will you play me something from your 'Don Juan Triumphant'?" I asked, thinking to please him. "You must never ask me that," he said in a gloomy voice. "I will play Mozart if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan burns, Christine; and yet he is not struck by fire from heaven."

Later Christine hears some of the 'Don Juan', which:

"seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable. It intoxicated me..."

In her re-working of the Phantom story ('Phantom', 1990), Susan Kay describes the same scene in vivid, explicitly erotic images. An extract is included in the suggestive organs page.

Later in Susan Kay's novel we read:

I was appalled by the scene of devastation which met my eyes. The room had been wrecked almost beyond all recognition; the black tapestries torn down and cut to shreds, the magnificent pipe organ ripped from the wall and smashed to pieces, the dark red carpet littered with shredded sheets of musical score."

Which reveals the danger in mistaking the pasteboard-organs of film sets for the genuine article.

Modern writers continues to mine the vein of awe. Leslie Kenton's 'Ludwig' (1993) is a fictionalised alternative biography of Beethoven. A modern-day search for lost manuscripts is threatened by aliens dressed in black; conspiracy theories and the quest for man's spiritual redemption play their parts in this intriguing novel.

The young Beethoven is taken to the Abbey at Heisterbach to play the organ:

The abbot ordered Brother Sacristan to call all the brethren into the church. When they had arrived and were seated, Ludwig took his place despite grumbles from the deposed organist who continued to issue mistrustful glances in his direction. Without hesitation, he struck a few preliminary chords on the organ. acquainting himself with its power. Then he started to play.

The music began very slowly with simplicity in a halting rhythm. At first it gave me worry that my young friend would fail through his playing to affirm the praise I had lavishly poured upon him in my most learned Latin. I glanced around me. The abbot looked quizzical, the organist smug. Then the melody deepened and darkened so that the notes twisted strangely together in a rich fabric of sound that drew us into it, soft as velvet, demanding we enter body and soul into the depths of its pile. What Ludwig played that afternoon was far more than an exquisite melody embellished by delicate harmonisation. It had a kind of daemon to it - something neither angelic nor demonic, both human and divine... While his fingers touched the keyboard, not a monk stirred on his wooden pew. Ludwig's face, previously so sullen, turned frightening in its mein, quite different to anything I had seen before. When the music finished the church lay silent with a quietude that seemed to echo resonances within the body of each man, so that none of us was willing yet to surrender to the ordinariness of what was left of the day.

In Thomas Mann's 'Doktor Faustus' (1947), the composer Adrian Leverkühn's biographer is discussing a secular work which he describes as

... monumental, the high-pitched, sounding pathos of the religious hymn... with its invocations and depictions of majesty and mildness...
... the opressively slow movement of the black cloud; the twice-repeated thundering 'Jehovah!' when 'the shattered wood steams' (a powerful passage); the so-new and enlightened concord of the high register of the organ with the strings at the end, when the Deity comes, no longer in storm, but in hushed murmurings and beneath it 'arches the bow of peace'...

As in the 'Phantom' novels and 'Doctor Faustus', spiritual awe has been transferred to the secular arena, leaving the role of the church organ more marginalised, less relevant to the perceived needs of twentieth-century man. What remains verges on pastiche, such as the following amusing extract from 'The Priest' (1994) by Thomas M. Disch. Father Mabbley recounts a recent nightmare:

'Well,' Father Mabbley said, easing into story-telling mode, 'it started with me delivering a sermon in this really creepy Gothic chapel. It was a Hammer horror film's idea of the High Middle Ages, with a gigantic polychrome crucifix over the altar with a Christ all ripped to pieces and writhing in agony. I'm in the pulpit at the top of a windy staircase, and I'm preaching to this congregation that looks like the Living Dead, and the subject of my homily is the unspeakable sufferings Hell has in store for anyone who masturbates. And then, this is so ridiculous, someone starts playing the organ -'
'Oh, Mab, come on, you're making this up.'
'No, I swear to God. The organist was a cross between Lon Chaney in 'The Phantom of the Opera' and the evil monk in 'Alexander Nevsky'. I became petrified. Then out of the darkness at the back of the church there is this very solemn procession of figures in pointy hoods, like Klansmen, but also like heretics being led to an auto da fe. Some have whips, and others have torches, and as they come down the center aisle, the zombies in the congregation get up out of their seats - which is a terible anachronism - since medieval churches didn't cater to creature comfort with furniture... Well, the dream starts to blur at this point, and the Klansmen start using their whips and torches on the Christ up on the crucifix, but it's not a crucifix any more. It's like a suspension harness in some very kinky after-hours club...'

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