JULIAN RHODES' DREAM ORGANS
THE ORGAN IN LITERATURE

'On the Statue of Theodoric' was written in about 850 by Walahfrid Strabo, a monk of Fulda. His poem praises the Frankish King Louis the Pious and contains the following lines, which include the first recorded instance of vandalism to an organ:

But elsewhere, shining with a brilliant light,
A gilded knight capers, surrounded by a band of foot-followers.
One plays the bells, another the organ.
A subtle melody sets their light hearts dancing
Until, losing consciousness, a woman
Breathes out her life under the music's spell...
The organ, once the pride and joy of Greece
Is now no marvel to our great king.
But if ours comes to no harm and continues to play as it has begun,
The bell-ringer will be idle.
But first he will cast off his cloak, spurning its warmth,
And, running mad, wielding an iron bar,
Will shatter the sounding trunks and the pipes with their unequal sounds.
It will not be in vain, for though he was unrewarded for his music,
The scattered gilding of the outer surface
Might clothe his dusky limbs, and thus reward him.

And from another poem by the same author:

If thousands of flutes washed me with waves of sound,
They could not compete with you.
I offer what praise I can to you from a fervent heart,
For you deserve to be praised in ringing tones.
Let the semitones sing for you in symphony, three by three,
Let all the glory of harmony ring out for you.
Let fourths be played on instruments with triple songs,
Let the octave and the fifth sing in turn for you.
Let an artist shout your praises on the loud hydraules...

From around the same date is a poem by Eugenius Vulgaris, in which Linus (the son of Apollo and the teacher of Orpheus) fills the cisterns of his hydraulus with water:

Sing, O ye peoples,
Sing his praises eveywhere
With cunning tongues and learned poems.
The group of musicians
And the whole assembly,
Even Orpheus himself
Setting his instruments quivering,
While Linus is carefully
Filling his hydraules;
Let them echo each other, saying:
Leo Caesar,
The one great emperor,
Resplendent on his throne,
Honoured as a god,
Made happy by Providence,
May he live for ever!

'Charlemagne' (c.885) by the Swiss monk known as Notker the Stammerer is a book of anecdotes about the famous Emperor. It describes an embassy from the Byzantine court:

These same Greek envoys brought with them every kind of organ, as well as all sorts of other instruments. These were all examined by the craftsmen of the most sagacious Charlemagne to see just what was new about them. Then the craftsmen reproduced them with the greatest possible accuracy. The chief of these was the remarkable musicians' organ which, when its bronze wind-chests were filled and its bellows of ox-hide blew through its bronze pipes, equalled with its deep note the roar of thunder, and yet which for very sweetness could resemble the soft tinkle of a lyre or cymbal. This is, however, neither the place nor time to tell of where it was set up, how long it lasted and they way in which it was destroyed in the general cataclysm which befell the state.

By this time, organs were beginning to be used in the church, to a mixed reception. St. Aelred, then abbot of Rievaulx, wrote these famous words in 1166:

Why, I ask you, do we see in church so many organs and bells? What use, pray, is this terrifying blast from the bellows, which sounds more like thunder than the sweet human voice? During all this, the people stand trembling and speechless, amazed by the throb of the bellows, the clashing of bells and the music of the organ pipes... It is as though a crowd had assembled not in a place of worship but in a theatre; not to pray, but to witness a spectacle.

St. Aldhelm (d. 709) had been more enthusiastic about the organ. He wrote:

Let us then sing hymns to Christ on the strings of the Cithara.
But if perchance this music is rejected,
If more is wanted than strings quivering under the plectrum,
...
If a man longs to sate his soul with ardent music,
And spurns the solace of a thin cantilena,
Let him listen to the mighty organs with their thousand breaths,
And lull his hearing with the windy bellows,
While the rest of it dazzles with its golden cases.
Who can truly fathom the mysteries of such things,
Or unravel the secrets of the all-knowing God?

In his thirteenth riddle, Aldhelm again took the organ as his subject:

The heralds may wind their horns of hollow bronze,
The citharists twang, the trumpeters blow their bright note;
My entrails breathe forth a hundred songs;
In my presence nothing sounds; nor voice, nor instrument of fibrous gut.

One of the most famous literary references to the organ is in a poem by the monk Wulstan, written shortly after 966, in which he describes the organ recently set up in Winchester Cathedral.

The organs you have built here are unlike any others;
Solidly set on a double plinth.
Above, twelve bellows are laid out,
Beneath, fourteen more in a row.
With alternating blasts they give the powerful wind
Worked by seventy strong men.
Labouring with their arms, covered in sweat,
Each urging the others to work up the wind
That the instrument may sing out with all its strength.
Four hundred pipes are there, set in rows,
Governed by the organist's skilful hand.
Listen! He brings some on, he shuts some off
As the musical notes require.
Two like-minded brothers sit there together,
Each the master of his own musical alphabet.
In the forty tongues are hidden holes,
Ten pipes to each.
Some slide in, others move out,
In proper measure for each note.
The seven-note scale shouts aloud,
Mingled with the lyrical semitones.
Like thunder the iron tones batter the ear,
Drowning out all other sound.
Such are its echoes, everywhere,
That hands cover ears
And no-one dares draw near to approach
This roaring mass of tone.
The noise rings out about the town,
And its fame throughout the land.

From this poem it appears that 400 pipes were arranged in ten ranks, played from two keyboards. Given the presence of certain semitones, there was probably a compass of three or four octaves.

The following poem comes from the 12th century. It celebrates the organ at Engelberg Abbey, Switzerland, and strikes a didactic note:

Hear now the organ chorus!
It is the musical instrument
Of today's artists.
A honey-sweet witness,
You play it and it sings
In a praiseworthy manner,
And teaches you to play
Delightfully,
In a short time,
Gently, sweetly, easily.
I'm telling you: I know. Understand me,
I direct you and advise you to take heed
And fix this in your memory.
Serve music, so that you may know it well,
Practise assidulously, and apply yourself to the Art.
Show a receptive spirit
And an active body.
Take bellows
And fill them full of air.
Don't forget that!
Thus equipped,
Make melody with skilled fingers,
The sound of music with pleasing tones.
Let the sound sing in the bass,
Let it shout forth its brassy sound,
And let choir sing with choir
In diaphony
And organum.
Then move to the trebles,
And return to the bass
With a lyrical fall.
Then to the middle notes
With a swift run
And a noble spring;
With a supple, seductive hand
Deserving praise.
In such joyous music,
Honey-sweet,
The crowd will delight,
And will wonder and rejoice
During the music
And their faithful worship of God,
Who reigns in eternity.

The trouvère poet Wace wrote of the organ in about 1155:

When mass had begun,
Which was sung exultantly,
Organs played loudly,
Clerics sang in unison and harmony,
Raising and lowering their voices,
The song rising and falling.

The better known Chrétien de Troyes wrote, in 'Lancelot':

Just as people are accustomed
To go to church to hear the organ
On the annual feast-days
Of Pentecost or Christmas.

A Middle High German Poem from the same period shows the organ in a secular setting:

They began to sing sweetly
And dance with swift steps,
With harps and fiddles,
With organs and lyres.

The following is a contemporary account of a festival at Mainz in 1184:

There was playing and shouting,
Pushing and shoving,
Piping and singing,
Fiddles and dancing,
Organs and strings,
And many other joyful things.

Such organs were presumably the small Portatives mentioned in Gottfried von Strasbourg's 'Tristan' and Heinrich von Türlin's 'Krone'.

The following is from a 13th-century text:

The people of Bohemia delight in the performance of a dance troupe. Everyone rejoices; singing and happiness resound. There is a beating of drums and a scraping of citharas, and all the while loud blasts of the trumpet ring out. The lyre twangs, and now the dancers twirl round; the chorus proclaims its joy, the organs peal, and the king arrives, laughing with everyone gathered there.

The earliest manuscript of 'The Little Flowers of St. Francis' ('I Fiortetti del glorioso messere Santo Francesco') is dated 1396. It includes an account of Francis's life, and of the miraculous occurences which happened to him and his colleagues. In chapter 34 we read how, one Christmas Eve, Saint Clare was so ill that she could not go to midnight Mass in church with the other nuns, but Jesus caused her to be transported by angels to St. Francis's church where she witnessed the services. She said later:

My sisters and dearest daughters, praise and thanks be to my Lord Jesus Christ the Blessed! For I was present at all the solemnities of this most holy night, with great comfort to my soul... At the intercession of my father Saint Francis and by God's grace I was myself present in the church of our Father Saint Francis, and I heard all the singing and the music of the organ with my bodily eyes as well as with my spiritual senses. So for this great favour granted me I praise and thank our Lord Jesus Christ.

To end this account of the organ in western medieval literature, here are two extracts from well-known English texts. First, from 'Piers Ploughman' (c.1375) by William Langland:

So I drowsed away until it was Lent, and slept for a long time, and lay there snoring heavily until Palm Sunday. I dreamt a long dream about children - I could hear them chanting 'Gloria, laus,' and the old people singing 'Hosanna in excelsis' to the sound of the organ...

And in the 'Nun's Priest's Tale' (c.1388), Chaucer wrote:

His voys was murier than the murie organ
On Messedays that in the church gon.
(His voice was merrier than the merry organ,
that played on Sundays in the church.)

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